The Politics and Aesthetics of Haunting in 1950S Japan

Home , Fumio Hayasaka, Henri Colpi, Hikaru Hayashi, Hiroshi Teshigahara

The Politics and Aesthetics of Haunting in 1950s Japan

Darcy Gauthier

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto

The Politics and Aesthetics of Haunting

Darcy Gauthier

Doctor of Philosophy

Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto

2020 Abstract

This thesis examines the politics and aesthetics of haunting in 1950s Japan. A distinct historical conjuncture separate from the social upheaval of the immediate postwar as well as the overt politicization of the 1960s, the 1950s is characterized by a narrative of national rebuilding and return that marginalized discrepant experiences of the present—producing a disjointedness that I articulate as a form of ‘haunting.’ In order to develop this, I turn to two triptychs of creators (two writers, two filmmakers, two composers) who collaborated to document the ‘haunted’ reality of

1950s Japan: Marguerite Duras, Alain Resnais, and Giovanni Fusco; and Abe Kōbō, Teshigahara

Hiroshi, and Takemitsu Tōru. Collectively, these artists articulate a crisis where concrete lived experiences did not correspond with national narratives of recovery and the economic, social, and political modes of structuring that regulated people’s lives. Their fiction and theory attempted to bring this crisis into focus by representing the ghostly estrangement of modern subjects and also by theorizing alternative methods of historicization following a logic of

‘haunting,’ one that challenged the accepted reality—the taken-for-grantedness—of celebratory narratives of postwar life.

Acknowledgments

Without the support and inspiration from various individuals and institutions I would not have been able to complete this dissertation. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor,

Atsuko Sakaki, for her inexhaustible supply of knowledge and expertise, her care and enthusiasm for my work, her meticulous and insightful feedback, and her infinite patience—all of which went well beyond what anyone could expect from a thesis supervisor.

I also express my many thanks to the other members of my supervisory committee. In the early stages of my PhD, Antje Budde supervised my independent research project on Abe Kōbō’s experimental theatre projects in the 1970s, which was in many ways the impetus for what eventually became my thesis. Since then, her knowledge of the theatre world and her comments on my work have always led to surprising and unexpected discoveries and avenues of research.

Eric Cazdyn has also been a very strong inspiration and has influenced my own thinking in many ways throughout the years. His guidance opened many new horizons of thought and inspired me to always rigorously interrogate (and sometimes accept) the ‘blind spots’ inherent to any intellectual problem. I also need to thank Eva-Lynn Jagoe and Rebecca Comay, who served on my committee during an earlier, somewhat different version of my dissertation, and who helped me tremendously in finding its direction.

The Department of Comparative Literature has always been supportive during my studies, and my thanks go to John Paul Ricco, Ann Komaromi, Barbara Havercroft, Jill Ross, Neil ten

Kortenaar, Bao Nguyen, and Aphrodite Gardner. I have also depended heavily on the support of my other home, the Department of East Asian Studies. Many thanks go to Thomas Keirstead and

Andre Schmid, who served as Chairs during my degree, and to the ever-supportive administrative staff, Norma Escobar, Natasja VanderBerg, and Paul Chin. I also thank the Cheng

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Yu Tung East Asian Library, especially Fabiano Takashi Rocha and Helen Bixia Tang, who always endeavored to help me track down hard-to-find materials.

I am thankful to the University of British Columbia, where I completed some of my PhD coursework as a graduate exchange student. In particular, I would like to thank Sharalyn

Orbaugh in the Department of Asian Studies, and Rhea Tregebov, whose literary translation workshop served as a venue for me to work on translations of several of Abe Kōbō’s works.

I am grateful for the generous support provided by the Japan Foundation Fellowship Program, whose funding enabled me to do one year of research in Japan. Thanks go to Suzanne Pragg,

Program Officer for The Japan Foundation office in Toronto during my fellowship, as well as

Shūji Fujimura and Sachiko Igushi from the Japan Foundation office in Tokyo. Thanks also go to

Shion Kono, who served as my supervisor in Japan during my fellowship, and to the Institute of

Comparative Culture (ICC) at Sophia (Jōchi) University, which hosted me as a visiting researcher during my stay.

I am also privileged to have many brilliant academic friends, colleagues, and senpai, whose conversation, camaraderie, and mentorship have motivated me throughout the years. I would like to give a special thanks to Baryon Posadas, Sara Osenton, Wang Jing, Jennifer Lau, Lauren

Beard, Antonio Viselli, James Poborsa, Alexandre Paquet, Alexandra Jocic, Brenton Buchanan,

James Welker, and Ben Whaley. They took the time to listen to my ideas, share their knowledge, critique my chapters during various stages of the writing process, or provide venues in which to share and develop my work, for which I am especially grateful.

Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Nicole Go, upon whom I constantly rely for all things, as well as my parents, Marsha and Marcel Gauthier, and Nicole’s parents, Cynthia and Joseph

Go.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments...... iii

Table of Contents ...... vi

List of Figures ...... viii

Introduction: The Politics and Aesthetics of Haunting in 1950s Japan ...... 1

Historical Context: Contradiction and Crisis in 1950s Japan ...... 1

Theory and Method: “Haunting” as Knowledge System and as Practice ...... 9

Organization: Realism, Return, Relation ...... 28

Realism ...... 29

Return ...... 35

Relation ...... 40

Learning to Listen to Ghosts ...... 47

Three Ghosts, Three Transparencies, Three Limits in Pitfall and Hiroshima mon amour ...... 52

Labour, Archive, Film ...... 56

First Ghost: Labour ...... 60

Second Ghost: Archive ...... 83

Third Ghost: Film ...... 97

Interrogating the Limits of Capital, History, and Representation ...... 109

The Ghost is “Here”? Return and Displacement in 1950s Japan ...... 111

The Early Postwar Avant-Garde (1945–1950) ...... 114

1950s Japan: The Emergence of Mass Culture and The Rationalization of Everyday Life ...117

Interwar Japan: Tosaka Jun and Re-historicizing the Everyday ...... 122

Abe Kōbō’s Theory and Practice: A Spectral Materialism ...... 129

Song of a Dead Girl: The Forgetting of Female Textile Workers in Postwar Japan ...... 135

Return ‘To’ and Return ‘From’ War in 1950s Japan ...... 146

Conclusion ...... 163

Learning to Listen to Ghosts: A Politics and Aesthetics of Counterpoint ...... 164

1950s Avant-Garde: Totality (Sōgō) and Counterpoint ...... 167

Abe, Takemitsu, and Teshigahara ...... 173

Resnais, Duras, and Fusco ...... 190

Deprivileging the Visual Register in Hiroshima mon amour ...... 192

Listening Vertically: A Contrapuntal History ...... 198

Counterpoint and Colonialism ...... 206

A Reflection on the Discipline of Comparative Literature: Counterpoint and Comparativity ...... 213

Conclusion: 1950s Politics of Haunting ...... 221

Realism ...... 225

Return ...... 231

Relation ...... 234

Conclusion ...... 246

References ...... 249

Figures...... 274

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List of Figures

Figure 1: Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959. Three stills showing the transition from footage of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum to footage from Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima (1953).

Figure 2: Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959. Three stills showing examples of glass and acrylic surfaces at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

Figure 3: Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959. Closeup on a framed photograph in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

Figure 4: Teshigahara Hiroshi, Pitfall, 1962. Newsreel footage of a mining accident.

Figure 5: Teshigahara Hiroshi, Pitfall, 1962. Newsreel footage of a mining accident.

Figure 6: Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959. Footage of a May Day protest in 1952.

Figure 7: Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959. Footage from the documentary The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1946), directed by Itō Sueo.

Figure 8: Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 1952

Figure 9: Teshigahara Hiroshi, Pitfall, 1962

Figure 10: Teshigahara Hiroshi, Pitfall, 1962

Figure 11: Teshigahara Hiroshi, Pitfall, 1962

Figure 12: Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959. Two stills.

Figure 13: Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959. Six stills.

Figure 14: Charlotte Zwerin, Music for the Movies: Toru Takemitsu, 1995. Takemitsu Tōru with an unnamed assistant preparing a piano for Pitfall.

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Introduction: The Politics and Aesthetics of Haunting in 1950s Japan

Historical Context: Contradiction and Crisis in 1950s Japan

Ronald P. Dore’s sociological study entitled City Life in Japan begins with several

“sketches” of everyday life in the Shitayama ward of Tokyo in 1951 that depict a stark contrast between the wealthy and the poor in 1950s Japan (Dore 1958: 26–37). A person called “A,” for example, has lost his home and business to bombing during the war, and lives with his wife and three children (one of whom has “open sores of a skin disease”) in a small apartment without electricity or water (1958: 32–34). By contrast, “T,” the “wealthiest man in the ward,” made his fortune off war-time profiteering and postwar contracts with American forces in Korea, and lives in a well-appointed house untouched by fire-bombing (complete with a grand piano, a dance floor, air-conditioned bedrooms, and a host of expensive electric appliances), owns two cars, and has live-in servants, secretaries, and chauffeurs (1958: 29–32). In between these extremes, people like the “O family” and “Mrs. A” manage to get by “with nothing much to spare” by living frugally on the barest necessities (1958: 29). While better-off than the poorest residents, this majority, Dore explains, remained impoverished, and subject to the “general depression of urban living levels since the war” in which the average income of Tokyoites was estimated to be roughly 15% less than before the war (1958: 55).

Dore’s study of the Shitayama ward—a ward he chose precisely for its average character, its similarity to “many other wards” in Tokyo (1958: 3)—draws attention to the drastically divergent conditions in which people lived in the early 1950s, even within the same neighborhood. While some lived in comfort, relatively unaffected by—or even profiting from—

the war, others continued to live in poverty and in constant reminder of the war’s disastrous effects on their lives. Indeed, Dore’s study draws attention to the different degrees of closure with which people could move on from the war, as the lingering effects of personal and economic loss as well as postwar institutional inadequacy continued to exist alongside wealth and prosperity, much of it gained from continued profiteering from a military economy.

The 1950s were in a crucial sense defined by these seemingly incompatible processes of

‘post’ war closure and continuation. By the middle of the 1950s, discrepant postwar experiences of the present had concentrated into an acute contradiction. The official rhetoric of the mid-50s had declared that the recovery process was officially over. The unevenness of the early postwar was replaced by a narrative of national recuperation that emphasized closure, new beginnings, and economic prosperity for all. The growth of mass consumer culture and the myth of a universal middle-class (embodied in the ubiquitous figure of the sararii man or ‘salary man’) appeared to have overcome many of the economic and social inequalities that were evident in the early postwar years.1 To be sure, Japan’s GNP surpassed its prewar peak in 1955, a year that became known as “the best year of the postwar economy (sengo keizai saiyrō no toshi)” (Dower

2014: 205). A year later in 1956, Japan’s Economic Planning Agency (Keizai Kikakuchō), under the direction of Takasaki Tatsunosuke, published an “economic white paper” (keizai hakusho) that cited the completion of Japan’s postwar recovery process as a sign that the postwar was officially over: “it is no longer the ‘postwar.’ We are now trying to do something different.

Growth through recovery is over. Future growth is supported by modernization, and the progress

1 For a detailed description of the salary man see Ezra F. Vogel’s Japan’s New Middle Class (1971). For a discussion of the middle-class myth or ideology in postwar Japan see Carol Gluck’s “The ‘End’ of the Postwar” (1997: 8–9).

of modernization is only possible with rapid and stable economic growth” (Keizai Kikakuchō,

1956, translation my own2). The merger of conservative political factions into the Liberal

Democratic Party (LDP) in November 1955 facilitated centralized control and planning of this

“stable economic growth” and enabled the production of a status quo establishment consensus on the reality of 1950s Japan as one of economic and social recovery and an ‘end’ to the postwar.

The 1950s also appeared to have firmly marked an end to the shameful remnants of wartime guilt and a recovery of international stature. In the postwar, democracy began to reassert itself after roughly 20 years of aggressive militarism and censorship, and, with the signing of the peace and mutual cooperation treaties in San Francisco in 1951 (ratified in 1952), Japan was casting off its disgraced postwar status to become a part of the international community, mainly represented by the United States and its capitalist allies. For all of these reasons, the trajectory of the 1950s is often described as a process of social and economic recovery from the anomaly that was Japanese wartime fascism, and a return to a state of socioeconomic ‘normalcy,’ one based both on western capitalist economic success as well as continuity with the prewar process of

‘modernization.’

Nevertheless, this positive trajectory of postwar Japan—the so-called ‘akarui seikatsu’ or

‘bright life’ of economic, social, and political stability—concealed a fundamental contradiction.

It is important to acknowledge that the narrative of an increasingly improved ‘standard of living’ or seikatsu suijun celebrated in the official narratives of postwar life existed alongside—and indeed depended upon—persistent conditions of economic and social insecurity. Economist

2 All subsequent translations in this thesis are my own unless otherwise noted.

Tsuru Shigeto, for one, challenged the impression that postwar Japan had uniformly recovered its pre-war standard of living in the 50s. In his 1952 article in the journal Fuijn Kōron entitled

“Watashitachi no seikatsu suijun” (Our Standard of Living), he argues that this apparent recovery—which he says is written about in newspapers, displayed in affluent urban districts such as Ginza, or emphasized in speeches such as one by Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru stating that “the life of the people [kokumin seikatsu] is stable and that ‘the standard of living is gradually recovering” (Tsuru 1952: 79)—ignores the persistent poverty of the working class:

In recent opinion polls, some people have stated that their standard of living has improved, while others have said that it has become worse. In fact, the level of recovery of the standard of living varies greatly depending on which class you belong to. While some people are currently living in extreme luxury, it is quite evident that a great number of others still struggle in their daily lives. (Tsuru 1952: 80)

Tsuru illustrates his point with the example of a coal mining family in Kyūshū:

I recently read in the New Year’s issue of a women’s magazine where a coal miner’s wife in Kyūshū reported on her daily budget in detail. In this family of four, she lives with two children and her husband who is 51, however the total monthly expenses are 6600 yen. Money spent on staple foods is 2600 yen. On food staples alone, this family spends about 40 percent of their income. (1952: 81)

Tsuru goes on to explain that this his meagre standard of living stands in stark contrast the affluent excesses of those living in urban centres such as Tokyo: “I hear that a small banquet

[enkai] in Tokyo can cost more than 10,000 yen per person, but when I think that for less than that 10,000 yen a whole family of four lives for a month, I cannot help but wonder if this is in the same country” (1952: 81). In this way, he points to a vast discrepancy in the standard of living in postwar Japan between rich and poor that contradicted the narrative universal middle-class postwar prosperity. 4

Indeed, despite the official rhetoric to the contrary, the gap between the rich and the poor continued to increase from the mid-50s onwards (Halliday 1978: 222). Hence, while Ezra Vogel describes in his sociological study of the mid-1950s a general diffusion of a “new middle class” consumer-oriented lifestyle, he concedes nonetheless that this class identity was not homogeneously achieved and functioned more as a “model affecting the life of others” (Vogel

1971: 268). As a “model,” it established a norm, yet its universality was more ‘myth’ than reality, and it did not correspond to the experiences of many, including returnees from former colonies, immigrants, women, and the working class.

In Carol Gluck’s words, the myth of a universal middle-class was “a new postwar way to efface difference, whether of class, region, or ethnicity” (1997: 9). Returnees from Japan’s overseas empire—from colonies such as Taiwan, Korea, or the puppet state of Manchukuo

(Manchuria)—were repatriated back to a ‘homeland’ that was largely alien and unwelcoming, and experienced dislocation both from the ‘motherland’ as well as from the personal histories of wartime that were now disavowed within the narrative of national rebuilding. Moreover, many precarious low-wage working positions were occupied in the 1950s by undocumented (often

Korean) migrants who were never included in official population records —a fact that contradicts the frequently-held assumption that Japan ceased relying on forced immigrant labour after the war and did not depend on immigration for its early economic success (Morris-Suzuki

2006: 120–24). The downturn in many ‘sunset’ industries in Japan such as coal mining led to the creation of a surplus of precarious and easily exploited transient labour for whom a middle-class lifestyle would never be an achievable possibility. Conservative social norms limited women’s financial and social independence, and those who worked outside the home, often as factory workers, were paid meagre wages far below the average national income as well as the income

of their male counterparts. None of these experiences corresponded to the imagined reality of ubiquitous middle-class prosperity that dominated the official narrative of national recovery in postwar Japan. Put differently, various collectivities organizing around location, gender, race, or class were replaced by a largely illusory middle-class identity, a collectivity that, moreover, defined itself through an individualist ideology that disavowed collective belonging.

The second (related) point to acknowledge is that this myth of the 1950s as a peaceful period of economic growth and middle-class prosperity relied on a logic of separation—between past and present, between economic and political spheres, between Japan and the rest of Asia— that effectively disavowed the connections between liberal democracy, capitalism, and imperialism. For this reason, many Communist Party leaders and other left-wing intellectuals at first celebrated the US Occupation of Japan as an end to the militarism and authoritarianism of

Japan’s ‘fascist’ or ‘feudal’ emperor system (Miyoshi 2010a: 87; Motoyama 1995: 307). Leftist intellectuals who were active in the 1920s and who had been suppressed during the war saw the postwar as a restoration of “true modernity” and a “democratic revolution” (Gluck 1993: 67). For them, it appeared as though the oppressive military and imperial structure of wartime Japan, as well as its fascist collectivism, had been replaced by a society that respected individual freedom of choice, human rights, labour rights, peace, and international cooperation. The postwar was positioned in this way as an absolute negation of the past—a notion that Gluck has described as the postwar “inversion of the prewar”: “all that was fascist, imperialist, militarist, oligopolist, land-lord exploitative—the entire ‘emperor system’ (tennōsei)—in short, all that had brought

Japan to war was declared the negative model for the postwar reforms” (1997: 4).

However, what this celebratory narrative of Japan’s postwar recovery, in its ellipsis of wartime, elided was the sense in which economic recovery was not merely a democratic reversal

of wartime imperialism but also a continuation of imperialism through capitalist networks.

Indeed, though the literal colonial-imperialist installation of settlements in foreign territories largely (though not entirely) disappeared in the postwar, Edward Saïd has explained that imperialism still “lingers where it has always been […] as a shared memory and as a highly conflictual texture of culture, ideology, and policy” (Saïd 1993: 9–12). Postwar Japan, of course, was made compliant by force in the general decolonizing process that occurred after the Second

World War, and re-positioning as the victim of nuclear holocaust also worked to displace Japan’s identity as an imperial aggressor, relegating it to past. Nevertheless, imperialism ‘lingered.’

Many of the social, cultural, economic, and political changes that occurred in postwar Japan were not radically different from wartime Japan on a structural level. As Jon Halliday argues, they simply involved a “transition from seeking autonomous imperialism to accepting subordinate imperialism” in which the United States provided the conditions for Japan’s capitalist success (Halliday 1978: 162). Economic recovery in Japan needs to be understood therefore in the context of American Cold War imperialist politics.

For this reason, Gluck argues that the reformist “postwar as inversion” clashed in the

1950s with the “cold-war postwar,” a postwar of “Japan in the American imperium” (1997: 6–7).

Japan aligned itself militarily and economically in the 1950s with the United States in their anti- communist Cold War agenda, undoing many of the original promises of demilitarizing Japan and rebuilding it along democratic ‘New Deal’ economic principles, shattering the hopes held by many progressives in the early postwar for Japanese demilitarization. The victory of Chinese communist forces over Kuomintang nationalists in 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War in

1950 unveiled the real priorities of Japan's occupation government, which were not demilitarization or democratization per se, but the consolidation of Japan into American

capitalist empire.3 Wanting to integrate Japan into their Cold War anti-communist containment policy as a bulwark of capitalism in Asia, Japan’s occupation government attempted to re- evaluate the postwar constitution to permit a degree of rearmament, and curtailed labour rights to prioritize rapid economic regrowth. Domestically, the 1950s marked the rise of a right-wing conservative political hegemony intent on revising the anti-militarism of the postwar constitution and strengthening the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. Halliday thus explains that it became clear in the 1950s that the goal of Japanese occupation was not democratization but “the restoration of

Japanese capitalism via an induced ‘cleansing’ operation, which provided attempts at both the subordination and the integration of Japan into the American empire” (1975: 170).4

This consolidation into the US Cold War capitalist imperium also reconfigured Japanese geopolitics in a way that displaced Japan’s colonial relationship with the rest of Asia during the war. In what Yoshikuni Igarashi refers to as the “foundational narrative” of postwar Japanese society, the war was reframed as a bilateral conflict between the United States and Japan in a way that erased the history of Japan’s colonization of Asia (2000: 20–21). The crimes Japan committed during the war were redirected exclusively towards the United States (the bombing of

Pearl Harbor), and the ‘retaliatory’ bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in this new calculus of

US-Japan relations, thus exculpated Japan of its war responsibility. This narrative neatly resolved

Japan’s problems of wartime guilt, provided closure, established a nuclear victimology that re-

3 Jon Halliday also argues that although American “policy did evolve and change significantly” during the period of American occupation, “from a structural point of view, these changes can be seen as stages in a single process: from destruction to restriction, to stabilization, to promotion […] There was no basic change in the nature of the U.S. Occupation regime, which reflected and mediated the interests of U.S. imperialism and its overall strategy” (Halliday 1978: 164–5).

4 For more on the domestic and international historicizations of postwar Japan, see Dower (1993). For more on efforts to remilitarize Japan, see McCormack (2004).

cast Japan as a victim of war and champion of peace and democracy rather than an aggressor towards the rest of Asia (Yoneyama 1999: 15; Seaton 2007: 39; Ivy 2008: 172), and provided the foundation for Japan’s economic and military cooperation with the United States in the postwar as allies.

In this way, contrary to the linear trajectory and positivist absolutism of economic and social progress that characterized the dominant narrative of postwar recovery, the 1950s was a contradictory and disjointed period in which experiences that were discrepant with the universal myth of middle-class prosperity were marginalized, lingering wartime culpability was disavowed, and the power dynamics of capitalism and empire were obscured by the optimistic celebration of postwar democratic reforms.

Theory and Method: “Haunting” as Knowledge System and as Practice

In this thesis I characterize 1950s Japan as a period of contradiction and crisis, one in which a dominant narrative of postwar recovery and return conflicted with the realities of economic exploitation, lingering wartime effects, and the continuation of empire. These unacknowledged realities haunted the sparkling present—like shadows cast by the ‘akarui seikatsu’ of postwar Japan. I approach this contradiction and crisis through a language of

‘haunting.’ Generally speaking, 'haunting’ often signifies a rupture in the process of meaning making, due to the persistence of something that has not been fully integrated into reality, something that has been improperly ‘buried.’ My understanding of haunting mobilizes this understanding to examine the presence of alternative, discrepant subjective and historical realities that were marginalized within the hegemonic narrative of postwar Japan—the return of displaced people haunting the narrative of the 1950s as a return to normal.

Moreover, haunting is also an alternative system of knowledge production, an anti- system of knowledge that challenges consensus approaches to reality. Haunting is an epistemology that emerges out of a ‘crisis in realism,’ one that was produced by the normalization of capitalist reality in 1950s Japan. This period was a crucial conjuncture in the development of capitalism’s consolidation of social and political life—what Ernest Mandel has called the “functional rationality” and “de-ideologization” of late capitalism following the end of the Second World War (Mandel 1976: 501)—which relied on a suppression of difference, and a displacement of the continuing complicity between democratic reform, capitalism, and empire. I describe this process in my thesis as the realpolitikal, pragmatic realism of ‘capitalist realism,’ a term I take from Mark Fisher, who defines it as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Fisher 2009: 2). The 1950s of course predated the fall of the Berlin

Wall and what Francis Fukuyama notoriously claimed was the ‘end of history,’ yet there was in

1950s Japan a similar sense or a ‘pre-echo’ of the kind of dehistoricization that became ubiquitously defined in the 1970s onwards as ‘late capitalism’ (Mandel). Indeed, the Miike miner’s strike of 1959–60, discussed in detail in Chapter 1 in relation to the film Otoshiana

(Pitfall, 1962) parallels in significant ways the British miners’ strike of 1984–85, a strike that

Fisher identifies as being an “important moment in the development of capitalist realism” (2009:

7). The logic of rationalization (gōrika) that framed the Miike strike as a futile battle against common sense to preserve a “sunset industry” at the end of its natural life cycle (Gordon 1993:

382) bears haunting similarity to the closure of pits in Britain in ’85, which were “defended precisely on the grounds that keeping them open was not ‘economically realistic’” (Fisher 2009:

7–8).

Yet with ‘Actually Existing Socialism’ looming as a nuclear threat in the 1950s, the precise contours of ‘capitalist realism’ were different: what was ‘unimaginable’ in the 1950s was the possibility of a relation between capitalism and communism, which were considered mutually incompatible ideologies. ‘Capitalist realism,’ as such, manifested as the necessity of war, combined with the necessity for Japan to ally with the United States in its capitalist- imperialist program in Asia. Therefore, those who challenged Japan’s postwar capitalist rebuilding also challenged its acceptance as natural or necessary. As I will explore in my conclusion, political theorist Maruyama Masao therefore argued that the main problem with the

Cold War was that it was framed as “self-evident [jimei]”: the reality of the Cold War was “very easily accepted as such and [did] not serve as a living criterion for judging real international issues” (Heiwa Mondai Danwakai 1985: 121). Indeed, ‘realism’ was central to the acceptance and reification of postwar life as something ‘natural’ rather than a product of material, historical processes that were both contingent and subject to intervention. I mobilize haunting in a conceptual and practical way in order to complicate this ‘realist’ or ‘common sense’ acceptance of the present ‘as such.’

This signification of haunting as a disruption of ‘realism’ or ‘common sense’ in some ways parallels the concept of ‘hauntology’ that Jacques Derrida introduced in Specters of Marx

(1994). In particular, it parallels hauntology’s quality of being that which, as Fredric Jameson succinctly puts it, “makes the present waver”:

like the vibrations of a heat wave through which the massiveness of the object world— indeed of matter itself—now shimmers like a mirage […] these moments in which the present—and above all our current present, the wealthy, sunny, gleaming world of the postmodern and the end of history, of the new world system of late capitalism— unexpectedly betrays us. (Jameson 2008: 38)

In a general sense, this description encapsulates much of what haunting means in the context of

1950s Japan—as a disruption of the sparkling, unchallenged ubiquitous reality of postwar

Japan’s capitalist present.

However, it is important to qualify this comparison to ‘hauntology’ in several ways. First of all, various expressions of haunting, and in particular ghost narratives that were produced in

Japan in the 1950s were not by any means universally equivalent or even all working in ways that were disruptive of contemporary capitalist realism. Ghost films were wildly popular in the

1950s, yet many, such as Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953) and Matsuda Sadatsugu’s Yūrei sen

(Ghost Ship, 1956), set events in the past (the Sengoku period, 1467–1615) in a way that worked to displace present-day politics. These types of films could be said to belong to a genre of popular historical fiction that Carol Gluck describes as a mass-mediated “vernacular” construction of Japanese history—one that replicated the bourgeois individualist view that history is shaped by the heroic exploits of individuals (jinbutsushi, which Gluck translates as

“man-makes-history” and which is more literally translated as ‘personal history’ or a ‘history of famous men’) rather than collective historical processes (Gluck 1993: 74). Rather than attempting to address contemporary realities of social upheaval, this genre referred to other times of unrest. Therefore, the point of this form of fantastic historical dramatization was to displace critique, to “be different from the present” rather than to engage with it (Gluck 1993: 74–78).

In this way, narratives of haunting can also operate as extensions of state power, reinforcing current regimes of knowledge—they can, in other words, be expressions of both

“pandemonium” and “parade,” to quote Michael Dylan Foster’s analysis of Japanese yōkai

culture.5 The bourgeois individualist vernacular history of Japan in mass consumer films was highly dependent on the commercial market for success, which was no doubt an influence in how conceptually or historically rigorous those films could be. Indeed, the emergence of mass culture and the broader availability of film was an extension of the capitalist hold on culture that was intensifying in 1950s Japan. The signification of ‘haunting’ that I use in this thesis is mostly reserved instead for the sense in which it was being mobilized by avant-garde artists during this period as an alternative to the popular historical vernacular.

The second, related point is that ‘hauntology’ is troubled by its indiscriminacy towards this multiplicity of different hauntings. Indeed, since the publication of Specters, spectrality has extended its reach into many different disciplines and has become a near-universally applicable analytical tool for conceptualizing phenomena as diverse as historical repetition, psychological trauma, technological and discursive mediation, literary adaptation and influence, affective modernity, urban space, and subjective alienation and dispossession, to name just a few. As

Jonathan Gill Harris writes, “in published work from the last ten years, specters are haunting the right and the left, Europe and America, China and even Texas, and they range from capitalism, intellectual fascism, and deflation to specific individuals” (Harris 2011: 618). It has been retroactively applied to examine the ‘hauntological’ aspects of almost all western intellectual discourse, from Marx’s fascination with supernatural figures to Freud’s ‘daemonic’ death drive

5 Michael Dylan Foster’s analysis of pre-Edo period “tsukumogami,” or objects that have become possessed by spirits and have acquired a life of their own, as represented in sixteenth-century picture scrolls as a “parade of fantastic creatures and animated objects” (Foster 2009: 8), becomes for Foster a “metaphor that transcends historical contexts and serves as a useful optic through which to interpret” the various discourses of yōkai discussed in his book Pandemonium and Parade (Foster 2009: 8). As the title suggests, yōkai, as represented by the march of spiritually-possessed household objects, function both as a disturbing form of pandemonium as well as a playful parade of the ‘everyday,’ moving “between a frightening, chaotic pandemonium and a light-hearted, well-ordered parade” (Foster 2009: 9).

to Bloom’s ‘apophrades.’ Derrida goes so far as to make the bold claim that the ghost is not just

“one figure among others” but “is perhaps the hidden figure of all figures” (Derrida 1994: 150).

The very ubiquity of the ghost’s insertion into discursive spaces threatens to overshadow particular historicizations of haunting—or, put differently, threatens to overshadow the very particularity, historicity, or literalness of haunting itself. Hélène Cixous writes that the “ghost is the fiction of our relation to death made concrete” (Cixous 1973: 213, my italics)—which is to say that haunting is not merely a concept but a concept that is narrativized, embodied in space and embedded in time. This ‘literalization’ is crucial to haunting, and is often referenced in the theory of fantastic narratives more generally—as established by Tzvetan Todorov who argues that the supernatural appears when “we take a figurative sense literally” (Todorov 1975: 77), re- affirmed by Rosemary Jackson who writes that fantasy writing takes its “metaphorical constructions literally” (Jackson 1981: 41), and corroborated by contemporary fantasy authors such as China Miéville, who also claims fantastic narratives should try to “literalize their metaphors” (Shapiro and Miéville 2008: 65)—that is, treat their unrealistic aspects realistically, normalize their paranormality, acknowledge the role of the imaginary or fantasy in the construction of reality, and generally imagine a world in which the impossible is possible.

Nevertheless, haunting has largely been appropriated as a conceptual tool at the expense of literal ghosts, transcending the particularity—the materially-conditioned circumstances—of what is being haunted. This abstraction of haunting has dovetailed with various long-standing prejudices against actual ghost stories, which, along with fantasy literature in general, are often denigrated as ahistorical, escapist, commercial, conformist, and unrealistic ‘popular’ literature. In other words, ghosts are considered ahistorical, yet haunting has become a common method of historicization. This dismissal of ‘actual’ ghost stories elides fantasy writing’s ability to literalize

the impossible. Instead of being reflections of an actually existing reality, there is, on the one hand, the radical impossibility of the ghost (for Derrida, the ghost is fundamentally “without ...”, a being whose existence is always in excess of every determinate event), and, on the other hand, the non-radical impossibility of the ghost (the pragmatico-empirical Marxist historicist critique, such as Darko Suvin’s, which privileges realistic modes of representation that are not entirely

“impossible in our empirical world” and thus not “historically unanchored” [Suvin 2000: 222]6).

In both cases, it is assumed that reality is real and fantasy is fantasy; there is no room for a fantastic reality and a realistic fantasy. The ‘impossible’ is in both views an act that cannot happen, rather than (to borrow Slavoj Žižek’s important Lacanian distinction) an impossible act that did happen (Žižek 2005: 80): neither a future (possibility) without “anticipation” (Derrida in

Sprinker 1999: 251) nor an anticipation without future, but a radical rupturing of the very framework in which possibility and impossibility, reality and fantasy, are framed. Žižek thus formulates a radical kind of impossibility that is only impossible in the sense of “what appears as impossible within the co-ordinates of the existing socio-symbolic order” (Žižek 2005: 80).

Derrida’s conceptualization of hauntology—or at least its reception post-Specters— is to an extent complicit in the abstraction and dehistoricization of haunting. His hauntology is by definition a disruption of the drive to ontologize/localize found in mourning: hauntology

6 Darko Suvin criticizes fantastic narratives, including ghost stories, for transcending the actual aporias of history: “to the empirical world out of joint there are opposed inverse worlds ‘in joint,’ though as a rule in a simplified joint (plaster cast?) [...] Bessière notes, ‘the fracture of history is resolved in a kind of narcissism of the imaginary’” (Suvin 2000: 238). Though Suvin implicitly counters Lukács privileging of literature addressing the totality of social relations (Lukács 2001: 1033–1058) by arguing instead for a literature that reflect the out-of-jointness of historical reality, he echoes Lukács in his attachment to a (scientific) form of objective ‘realism.’ His critique, despite its flirtation with hauntological terms (both Derrida and Suvin channel Hamlet’s “the time is out of joint,”) implicitly privileges realistic modes of representation: fiction that is not entirely “impossible in our empirical world” and thus not “historically unanchored” (Suvin 2000: 222).

delineates a “virtual space of spectrality” (Derrida 1994: 12) that displaces the need to

“ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead” (Derrida 1994: 9). Yet hauntology as a de-localized “virtual space” threatens to produce what Roger Luckhurst has described as a “generalized economy of haunting” (Luckhurst 2002: 534). In Luckhurst’s essay “The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the ‘Spectral Turn’” he cautions against the ubiquitous applicability and generalized exchangeability of the “spectral” implied in Derrida’s concept of the hauntological, a concept that (in Derrida’s own words) signifies the introduction of “haunting into the very construction […] of every concept” (Derrida 1994: 202), and the introduction of ghosts into every discourse, not just as “one figure among others” but as “the hidden figure of all figures”

(Derrida 1994: 150). Luckhurst thus approaches the general appeal and applicability of

‘hauntology’ with suspicion, warning that if haunting as a concept becomes universally exchangeable, then what threatens to become primary is the structure of spectral return as such, overshadowing the particular circumstances of each act of haunting: hauntology risks becoming

“unable to discriminate between instances and largely uninterested in historicity (beyond its ghostly disruption)” (Luckhurst 2002: 535). A historicization of the ghost, on the contrary, would require a sensitivity to the particular ‘haunts’ of each ghost, and an attention to that of which they are a symptom.

Without diminishing the importance of Derrida’s many insights into the hauntological, and without going into his own responses to these critiques,7 it is important to acknowledge this problem: that an abstract ‘hauntology’ runs the risk of dehistoricizing, colonizing, and

7 For more on this see Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s ‘Specters of Marx’ (Sprinker 1999)

homogenizing diverse experiences of haunting. Along these lines, Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak critiques the limitations of Derrida’s Specters of Marx for obfuscating the “particular corporeality” of the spectral, such as the absent-present subaltern women who are “now to a rather large extent the [disavowed] support of production” (Spivak 1995: 67). Specters, she argues, “cannot bring in women” (Spivak 1995: 68): it is a “how-to-mourn-your-father book,” one in which “Derrida plays Hamlet to Marx’s ghost” and “there are no takers for Gertrude or

Ophelia” (Spivak 1995: 66). Conceptualizing spectrality as the “hidden figure of all figures”

(Derrida 1994: 150) threatens to occlude such singular, empirical, concrete ghosts—their unique

“signature[s]” (Spivak 1995: 65) and their “particular corporeality” (1995: 7).

My own theorization of haunting positions itself against the ubiquitous acceptance of the

‘hauntological’ into contemporary intellectual discourse. While acknowledging the unavoidable reality that my own analysis will have its limitations, privileging biases, distortional framings, and particular blind-spots, I attempt to respond to the problematic erasure of particularity or locality brought on by the dematerialization of the ghost by localizing haunting in the ghost narratives of 1950s Japan: ‘haunting’ is process, yet one that is shaped by the actions and characteristics its agents, its particular ‘ghosts.’ Understanding these ghosts means thinking through their process of haunting, as well as acknowledging that our own perspective will always be haunted by something and is never perfectly solid, self-contained, or free of blind spots.

The methodological and theoretical inspiration for this kind of analysis, with its attention to the particular and material circumstances in which ghosts ‘haunt,’ is the conceptualization and practice of haunting developed in Abe Kōbō’s fiction and non-fiction works written during the

1950s. Essential to Abe’s conceptualization of haunting was that it be inseparable from concrete, literal expression. He was attuned to the very problem of abstraction inherent to haunting and

addressed it in his own critique of ‘theory,’ which, as we shall see, is grounded in the necessary interplay between prescriptive theory and inscriptive practice. Ghost stories were for Abe a means of challenging the givenness of capitalist reality in postwar Japan as well as the ‘realism’ of conventional literary discourse—both of which, he claimed, were beholden to a false doctrine of ‘realism.’

Throughout the 1950s, Abe was preoccupied both with developing a ‘new realism’ or

‘counter-realism’ and with writing narratives that revolved around ghosts. These ghosts stories were crucial to Abe’s ‘counter-realist’ method, as it was through them that his critique of realism was put into practice, as a critique both of postwar ‘realist ideology’ as well as a window into the many ‘ghosts’ created by postwar Japan—so many that, as Abe writes in his play Yūrei wa koko ni iru (The Ghost is Here, 1958), the Yasukuni Shrine commemorating the war dead was “full”

(Abe 1993: 176). Abe was critical of postwar ‘capitalist realism,’ which erased experiences that contradicted the official postwar narrative of rebuilding and progress. In an afterword entitled

Shinin sai-tōjō (Re-Enter the Dead) that accompanies Shinchōsha’s 1959 publication of The

Ghost is Here, Abe thus wrote that the play would serve as a challenge to who were “tied down to the dogma that ghosts (fictional things) don’t exist, so even if they actually see a ghost they think it isn’t one” (Abe 1998b: 35). These realists, he explains “don’t see reality but merely the doctrine of realism” (Abe 1998b: 35).

Challenging the hold that this “doctrine of realism” had over representations of postwar experience, Abe wrote many narratives featuring ghosts that were politically engaged with the representation of alternative realities as historical realities. In addition to The Ghost is Here, works from that period such as Henkei no kiroku (Record of a Transformation, 1954), Seifuku

(The Uniform, 1955), Yūrei no haka (Ghost’s Grave, 1958, unfinished), and Shinda musume ga

utatta . . . (Song of a Dead Girl, 1954)8 return repeatedly to the subject of ghosts haunting

Japan’s postwar narrative of progress. In these works, soldiers, repatriated civilians, and working-class poor wander through a reality in which they remain unseen and unheard. These ghost narratives were not departures from reality, but attempts to represent the marginalized others that reality had made into ghosts—or as he writes in his essay Shinin tōjō––jissai shinai mono ni tsuite (Enter the Dead: An Essay on the Unreal), “The dead are non-existent [hijitsuzai], but by no means unreal [higenjitsu]” (Abe 1997d: 202). His ghost narratives expressed a radical politics wherein alternative historical realities and abjected historical subjects hauntingly reappeared in the present to disrupt the historical self-containment of postwar Japanese empire and capitalism.

Abe corroborated the importance the ghost held for him during this time in several of his non-fiction essays, such as the aforementioned essay Enter the Dead or the unpublished 1954 essay entitled Heiwa to chishikijin kaikyū: Seishin-shugi no kokufuku koso kyūyō (Peace and the

Intellectual Class: The Urgency of Overcoming Spiritualism), essays in which he repeatedly asserts the importance of acknowledging the reality of ghosts existing alongside the living. In these essays, such as Bungaku ni okeru riron to jissen (Theory and Practice in Literature, 1954),

Riaritii ni tsuite (Concerning Reality, 1953), and Atarashī riarizumu no tame ni (For a New

Realism, 1952), Abe developed the theoretical structure of his counter-realist realism. Of these works, the 1954 essay Theory and Practice in Literature provides the most sustained and comprehensive development of Abe’s ideas on realism and fiction. It describes a method of

8 A more literal translation of the Japanese title might be “A Dead Girl Sang …” I take Stuart A. Harrington’s lead in translating it as “Song of a Dead Girl” (Abe 1986).

representation that is organized around praxis, where reality, rather than a given and passively recorded thing, is the product of an active, dialectical negotiation between our structuring of the world and the contingent, material circumstances that shape it. This theory was at once a critique of traditional realism in literature as well as conservative realism in politics. Its purpose was to re-politicize reality as something that is formed through action and through creative processes rather than something that is passively received and accepted.

In his essays, Abe criticized established conventions of realism and their reification of postwar life, by arguing that the popular contemporary modes of ‘ari no mama’ or ‘as is’ realism that dominated mainstream literature and documentary in the 1950s9 were ill-equipped to represent the vastly discrepant experiences of those alienated by the changing material realities of postwar Japan. He frequently argued in his non-fiction writings that these realist trends were limited by their conformity to naturalist and empirical conceptions of reality and did not

“develop and change along with the current state of affairs” (Abe 1997a: 244). “Grasping reality

‘just as it is’ [‘ari no mama’ no genjitsu],” he writes, “is not as simple as naturalist writers think it is. The world just as it is seen [mitamama], just as it is felt [kanjitamama], is not today’s reality. At most, it does not express reality in the process of revolution” (Abe 1997a: 250). In the essay just quoted, “For a New Realism” (1952), as well as others such as “Concerning Reality”

(1953), Abe critiqued proletarian literature (puroretaria bungaku), literary sketches (shaseibun), novels describing everyday life (seikatsu sakubun), and ‘personal novels’ (shishōsetsu, frequently translated as ‘I-novels’10)—each of which he considered to be either too grounded in

9 See Key 2011: 90.

10 The translation of shishōsetsu into English as ‘I-novel’ is contentious, as Masao Miyoshi has argued (Miyoshi 1989). Sharalyn Orbaugh explains that “the Japanese ‘I-novel’ form […] has neither ‘I’ nor ‘novel’ as 20

the introverted, individual experience of the writer, or too adherent to theories of literary realism such as naturalism (shizenshugi) that were incapable of representing a material reality in flux

(Abe 1997a: 244).

Abe’s critique of literary realism engages, both directly and implicitly, with a long intellectual and literary history in Japan. The development of realism in modern ‘realist’ literature in Japan can be traced back to the development of a national aesthetic at the beginnings of the Meiji period. Atsuko Ueda explains that Tsubouchi Shōyō’s Shōsetsu shinzui (The

Essence of the Novel, 1885–86) marked an “epistemological shift” (Ueda 2005: 64) in the mid-

1880s through which literature became seen as separate from politics. Tsubouchi based literary value on a form of realism that was supposedly neutral and politically disinterested, an

‘authentic’ representation of things ‘just as they are’ unclouded by political artifice or didacticism. The depoliticization of literature intersected with Fukuzawa Yukichi’s famous

“separation of learning” (gakumon no dokuritsu) from the political, and, what’s more, coincided with the decline of left-wing political movements such as the Freedom and People’s Rights

Movement (Jiyū Minken Undō) (Ueda 2005: 86).11 In other words, the de-politicization of aesthetics can be tied to the consolidation of right-wing politics in the Meiji period.

Paired with this de-politicization of aesthetics, the construction of a ‘realist’ Japanese national literary tradition in the Meiji period involved an aestheticization of politics. As Tomi

Suzuki explains, the reinvention (and re-gendering) of Japanese literary tradition as progressing

conventionally understood. Nor is it a category whose defining characteristics are clear and widely agreed upon” (Orbaugh 2003: 138). In this thesis, I follow Orbaugh’s decision to use the term “personal novel” rather than “I- novel.”

11 See also Ueda’s book Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment: The Production of "Literature" in Meiji Japan (2007). 21

towards more and more ‘realist’ forms (and away from Chinese literary ‘artifice’) was tied to the invention of the modern Japanese nation as a western nation with western literary tastes (Suzuki

2000: 78)—“national literature” defined “national character” and vice versa (2000: 81). In contrast to Tokugawa period literature, which Tsubouchi rejected in Essence of the Novel for being too didactic, Meiji literary critics praised Heian literature for its ‘feminine’ qualities of

“simplicity,” “sincerity,” “purity,” “grace,” or “elegance”—qualities that were also associated with the character of the modern Japanese nation. Meiji scholars celebrated Heian “vernacular fiction,” which was written in native hiragana (wabun) as opposed to classical Chinese prose

(kanbun), as both a unification of written and spoken language (genbun-ichi) and a unification of expression and reality, language and truth: it was “direct, unmediated expression” rather than

“showy and artificial” prose (Suzuki 2000: 78–79). For this reason, Meiji scholars praised The

Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) for being “the great predecessor to the ‘realistic novel’

(shajitsuryū shōsetsu)” (2000: 79). Heian women’s diary literature (joryū nikki bungaku) was similarly praised for being “unstrenuous” (2000: 79) and expressing “natural human feelings”

(2000: 81). In this way, Japanese national character was reinvented through Heian period writing, which was canonized as both “national literature” (kokubungaku) and “realist” literature.

The definition of Japanese literature as the ‘sincere’ expression of personal feeling continued to influence literature genres in Japan throughout the modern period. Indeed, in the

1920s, Heian diary literature was lauded as a precursor to the development of the contemporary shishōsetsu or ‘personal novel.’ The detached, self-reflective, confessional approach of the

‘personal novel’ was praised by critics as being ‘more sincere’ than didactic proletarian literature of the time. In the postwar, the focus on ‘authentic’ experience manifested in various postwar genres such as shingeki (new theatre), a realistic, socially-motivated proletarian form of theatre

that adopted western-style naturalist techniques.12 We find even in the 1960s that critics in Japan continued to associate realism and naturalism with the unmediated, sincere expression of ‘truth’ and a “lack of political agenda,” as John Whittier Treat explains in Writing Ground Zero using the example of Ibuse Masuji’s Kuroi Ame (Black Rain, 1965), which was taken by critics, precisely because it was seen as ‘realistic,’ to be a natural, ordinary, authentic historical document, unsullied by any particular ideological biases (Treat 1995: 265–68). Needless to say, this depoliticization of reality was itself a political act—in truth, all writing, realistic or otherwise, is representational, and its object, historical or individual, is the product of a discursively constituted reality—yet it was one that sustained the illusion of its own lack of politics and its own transparency of motives. It appealed to its audience to ‘believe’ in its world while hiding its quality of an ‘appeal’ under the veneer of being ‘natural’ or ‘given.’

More recently, Japanese literary criticism has contested the purported ‘authenticity’ of these various ‘realistic’ modes of representation. For example, Karatani Kōjin explains that the replacement of overt artifice in kabuki theatre with the ostensibly ‘naked’ (unmasked, without makeup) face, the unembellished acting style, and the biologically ‘real’ women performers of shingeki did not simply reflect but instead produced a modern rhetoric of interiority (“now they had to search for meaning ‘behind’ the actor’s ordinary face and gestures”) that only became naturalized after the fact (Karatani 1993: 57). Moreover, Ayako Kano argues that the taken-for- granted acceptance of the masculine and feminine in modern theatre forms such as shingeki was anything but natural: “acting like a woman does not come naturally. It has to be taught, learned,

12 For a more comprehensive treatment of shingeki and realism, see Cody Poulton’s “The Rhetoric of the Real” (Poulton 2006).

rehearsed, and repeated. It does not arise from a moment of inspiration, but from many years of persistent inculcation. In an acting woman, the cultural and social desires of an age are concentrated, molding her every gesture, every glance” (Kano 2001: 3).

For the ‘personal novel’ as well, Karatani argues that the concepts of “the self or interiority which the novelistic ‘I’ was supposed to express did not exist a priori but was constituted through the mediation of a material form” (1993: 77). Indeed, the consensus among modern scholars of Japanese literature is that the narrative “I” or watakushi of the wataskushi shōsetsu should be read not an unmediated autobiographical expression of the author’s own interiority but rather, in the words of Masao Miyoshi, “as a literal recording of the composition process,” or in other words as an overtly rhetorical performance of the self: “I-ﬁction can be looked at not as evidence of shutaisei (self-search, self-determination, self-identity) but as exactly the opposite, the public disclosure of the circumstance of the work’s composition”

(Miyoshi 2010a: 106).13 Speaking about Japanese fiction more generally, Atsuko Sakaki’s

Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern Japanese Fiction similarly argues that narratives are not simply transparent and unmediated expressions but instead constitute

“speech acts”: “the use of language, as is any other act, is formed and confined in a context; thus, it also produces effects. Language is not transcendental, universal, or static; it is activated by a specific agent, for specific purposes, under specific circumstances” (Sakaki 1999: 8–9). In this way, contemporary treatments of Japanese literature acknowledge the sense in which the ‘reality’

13 Miyoshi’s also offers a succinct assessment of the shishōsetsu in “Against the Native Grain: The Japanese Novel and the ‘Postmodern’ West”: “Instead of man and author attempting to transform themselves into the third person, they aim at discarding—or at least, concealing—the narrator. The man will speak and write directly. He will not wear a mask […] the shōsetsu is an incredible fabrication that is nonetheless constantly held up as truthful. Art is hidden, while honesty and sincerity are displayed. Distance is removed, while immediacy is ostensive […] The shōsetsu is thus an art that refuses to acknowledge art.” (Miyoshi 1989: 154–155).

of literary expression is not natural or universal but rather is historical and material, and is thus open to change and intervention.

Abe’s writing in the 1950s was explicitly engaged in this dismantling of ‘realist’ literature. The 1950 experienced a return to realism or ‘naturalistic’ writing as a more objective, neutral, or depoliticized form of historical and individual documentation of postwar reality.

Mainstream literary trends, both on the left and the right, were influenced by forms of realism. In my second chapter, I will discuss Abe’s theory primarily in the context of postwar debates on realism, subjectivity, politics, and literature, such as the ‘politics and literature debate’ (seiji to bungaku ronsō) or the ‘subjectivity debate’ (shutaisei ronsō). The left, composed of such literary circles such as the Shin Nihon Bungaku Kai (formed in 1945), emphasized social realism and the importance of ‘scientific’ truth and ‘objectivity’ as a measure of integrity in order to

‘realistically’ represent the hardships of everyday life (Key 2011: 8); whereas on the right, personal novelists (I-novelists,) eschewing overtly ideological content, emphasized naturalism

(shizenshugi) and the immediacy of personal experience as a means of authenticity—they aimed, as the critic and novelist Itō Sei wrote in Shōsetsu no hōhō (Method of the Novel, 1948), to express the truth of their inner selves without artifice, without “extraction or abstraction” (Itō

1957: 70; translation from Suzuki 1996: 59), or, in Karatani Kōjin’s terms, without

“construction” (Karatani 1993: 154). The 1950s also witnessed a return to documentary trends that were popular in the 1920s and 30s: narratives focusing on actual life experience (seikatsu jikken) as a measure of integrity and authenticity in social analysis, the beginning of documentary television broadcasts in 1953, reportage painting and photo-realism (riarizumu shashin) in the fine arts, as well as kamishibai and lantern (gentō) plays produced by the national history education movement (kokumin-teki rekishigaku undo) with the intention of unearthing

various regional histories, all contributed to a focus on realism as a means of reflecting upon the war and grasping the chaotic reality of postwar society.14

Nevertheless, many avant-garde intellectuals, including Abe, expressed skepticism towards ‘realism’ in literature and documentary. Despite its supposed transparency, the spirit of censorship ubiquitous during the war did not end in 1945; or, as Toba Kōji writes,

though existing newspaper and radio media preserving the plans of the occupying forces all changed course away from the Imperial Rule Assistance Organization to Democratization, the wartime ‘announcements of the imperial headquarters’ [daihon-ei happyô] were not yet distant memories, and after independence as well the capacity for self-censorship cultivated during the occupation era remained. (Toba 2010: 9)

Toba explains that with the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 came the suppression of several publications (such as Akahata, the Japanese Communist Party’s newspaper) that were deemed guilty of spreading pro-communist propaganda. Moreover, he says, there was much skepticism among the public over the way that several high-profile incidents were being reported in the mainstream media, such as the Shimoyama, Mitaka, and Matsukawa incidents, three train derailments that all occurred in 1949 and that were popularly labeled as sabotage at the hands of labour unions. Regarding these and other incidents, “there was a desire to learn the truth that was not generally being reported” (Toba 2010: 10). Therefore suspicions regarding mainstream reporting and ideological opposition to its politics of anti-communism formed one backdrop for a demand for new methods of documenting reality, and prompted Abe to search for alternative, overtly political means of documenting the reality of postwar Japan.

14 For more on documentary in the 1950s, see Toba Kōji’s book 1950 nendai: ‘kiroku’ no jidai (The 1950s: The Age of the ‘Documentary’, 2010).

Indeed, the limitations of conventional reporting were framed by Abe in the 1950s as an epistemological limitation that could be overcome only through new forms of representation, new forms of realism. Toba explains that suspicions and ideological opposition towards mainstream bourgeois newspaper (abbreviated as buru-shin) reporting formed one backdrop for a general demand for new forms of reporting or kiroku in the 1950s (2010: 10). During that time,

Abe wrote several pieces of his own reportage,15 pointing out contradictions in mainstream incident reports in order to uncover their mutual contradictions. The aim, for Abe, was to expose the naiveté of relying on the naturalness of objective facts and documentation to understand reality. His emphasis was instead on the “negation of stereotypes (“sutereotaipu no hitei,”) breaking out of established frameworks by “[cutting] through the covering of the stereotype that blankets reality and makes it hard to see” (Toba 2010: 48).

In this way, the critique of the aesthetics of realism was at the same time a critique of the politics of realism. In this thesis, I argue that realism was crucial to the postwar ideology of

‘rationalization’ (gōrika), which posited economic restructuring as a natural, efficient, ‘rational’ process. By challenging realism, Abe’s works re-historicized and de-normalized the postwar process of economic recovery. As mentioned earlier, Mandel described this process in general terms as the “functional rationality” of late capitalism, the ubiquitous third stage of capitalist development that followed the Second World War, whose ideology consists of “de- ideologization,” whereby economics is reduced to a system of technocratic management and organization (Mandel 1976: 501). As I discuss in the first chapter, rationalization of the economy

15 Margaret Key explores in detail one example of Abe’s reportage writing, Michi: Torakku to tomo ni 600 kiro (The Road: 600 KM with a Truck), which was published in 1957 shortly after the creation of the Kiroku Geijutsu no Kai (Documentary Arts Society) (Key 2011: 23–27).

in the mid-1950s legitimized austerity by appealing to its ‘realistic’ outlook—to pragmatic realism or realpolitikal necessity; which is to say that the urgency of the Cold War necessitated economic revitalization. Rationalization reinforced this appeal to reasonableness with a discourse of normality or neutrality: rationalization was “efficient,” “impersonal,” “calculable,”

“standardized,” “modern,” “impartial,” “egalitarian,” and “democratic” (Kelly 1986: 615).

Rather than an institutional and discursive apparatus, rationalization was in this way presented as the passive, technocratic management of a given reality (Hein 1993: 102). It was, as such, wholly transparent—which is to say sincere, self-evident, lacking in artifice.

What was primarily at stake, therefore, in Abe’s challenge to the prioritization of traditional realism in contemporary literary circles was its ability to expose the historical amnesia and foreclosure of alternative political and social formations that characterized the politics of the postwar. Rather than the passive mimeticism and depoliticization of the present in naturalistic or empirical methods of representation, reality for Abe meant a reality that was in “flux” and in the process of “revolution.” His realism thus involved a dialectical negotiation between the individual and society, as well as the material and theoretical, out of which an alternative historical consciousness could emerge.

Organization: Realism, Return, Relation

In order to develop the politics and aesthetics of haunting in 1950s Japan, I have divided this thesis into three chapters that systematically address what I believe to be its three crucial aspects. Capitalist realism, and its concomitant process of haunting, will be organized around three interrelated ‘problems’: those of realism, return, and relation. Political discourse in the

1950s organized itself around three assumptions: that its expression of reality should be taken for granted as simply ‘common sense,’ that this reality constituted a return to a period of normality,

and that it was universal and homogeneous. Each of these three assumptions is ‘haunted’ by three qualities that are inherent to ghosts: ghosts are ‘transparent’ (present yet passed through) yet ab-normal in a way that both mirrors and subverts capitalist realism’s assumptions of self- evidence; ghosts ‘haunt,’ constituting the return of something from elsewhere that persists into the present in a disavowed way, in a way that gives the rehabilitative ‘return’ of postwar capitalism a more problematic valence; and ghosts are located in multiple places at once, while also drawing attention to the dislocation of those places, in this way simultaneously resisting and insisting upon a relation between disparate times, places, and subjects, producing a dialectical relationality that complicates the simple homogeneity and universality of capitalist realism.

These three qualities of the ghost are mobilized by the politics and aesthetics of haunting in a way that disrupts the idea that the present is simply given or ‘common-sensical,’ that it is simply a return to normal, or that it fully circumscribes all possibilities, is self-contained, and is without alternative.

Realism

In the first chapter I focus on the quality of the ghost’s transparency in order to problematize the ‘realism’ that structured official narratives of the 1950s. Transparency refers to something that is present yet passed through. Ghost are literally transparent in this sense. The concept of transparency is also essential to the logic of realism, generally defined as the presentation of things as they really are—without artifice, intervention, or filter. In presenting things ‘just as they are,’ realism posits its own transparency—its own disinterested, unbiased, or

‘genuine’ presentation of reality.

This understanding of transparency produces a contradiction: in reality, what is transparent isn’t so much was appears as transparent as what doesn’t appear, what isn’t revealed:

the invisible substrate that enables something else to appear transparent by itself withdrawing from view. If something is considered ‘transparent,’ therefore, it means that its enabling conditions of possibility are transparent—in other words that it has concealed its own grounding conditions. Realism, in this way, posits a disenchantment of the world, but can only do so by sustaining the fiction that it is self-generating. Capitalism, as well, is grounded upon the idea of its own self-sustainability—the ‘magical’ idea (as Marx explains in the first chapter of Capital) that a thing transcends the “physical properties” and “material relations” that go into its production and assumes the “fantastic form” of a magical object with autonomous, immutable, inherent value (Marx 1887: 43)—value that appears natural to it rather than being the product of an “historically determined mode of production” (Marx 1887: 47). In other words, realism and capitalism share in the character of rendering their own enabling conditions transparent, a transparency that enables their own appearance of being transparent.

The narrative of Japan’s postwar recovery relied on a triple transparency in this sense: that of its own agents (the labouring bodies that enabled Japan’s postwar growth and success), its own memory of wartime (its displacement of imperialism), as well as the transparency of its very function as ideology (enabling its apparent ‘naturalness.’) In this chapter, I attempt to demonstrate this by turning to two films, Otoshiana (Pitfall, 1962), directed by Teshigahara

Hiroshi and written by Abe Kōbō, and Hiroshima mon amour (1959), directed by Alain Resnais and written by Marguerite Duras.

First of all, Pitfall illustrates the sense in which non-middle-class subjects in postwar

Japan—in particular, people living and working in decaying mining communities—were literally rendered transparent within the narrative of Japanese postwar recovery. The film is a ghost story based largely on the 1959–60 Miike coal mine labour dispute in Kyūshū. It documents the plight

of mining communities—the victims, outcasts, and agents of Japan’s growth. Representing them as ghosts was a way for the film to document the unevenness of economic success and social prosperity that resulted from Japan’s socioeconomic policies in the 1950s. In this way, the process of reifying and naturalizing the production of commodities through the erasure and exploitation of labour is literalized in Pitfall by the representation of mining communities literally populated by ghosts—communities of miners who were denied their place within postwar Japan.

By documenting the decay of the mining industry as a ghost story, the film brings attention to the crucial relation between realism as an ideology and the postwar politics of austerity. The austerity that accompanied Japan’s postwar ‘economic miracle’ was part of

Japan’s aforementioned ‘rationalization’ process. Rationalization was an “ideology of productivity” that prioritized efficiency and economic growth above the welfare of labourers

(Tsutsui 1998: 136). It normalized economic austerity by framing this prioritization of economic growth as natural or common sense, and in this way it structured itself around the illusion of its own transparency, its own lack of political agenda or ideological ‘bias.’

This is where the critique of realism comes in to play in Pitfall. The film not only presents a vernacular counter-narrative of postwar Japanese experience that goes against the dominant narrative of progress, but it also critiques narrativization itself: it is not just criticizing the contents of postwar capitalism, but also the form in which it should be criticized. Its overt use of fictional tropes (ghosts) in combination with conventional documentary realism worked to re- politicize the rationalization policies of 1950s Japan. To document the labour developments of the period, it was required that the documentation of reality itself be estranged from a discourse of naturalism or universality that normalized those developments by rendering its own

ideological apparatus transparent—in other words it had to be dissociated from the dehistoricized, realist presumptions of rationalization around which contemporary discussions of economic and social change were organized. In this way, Pitfall’s critique of postwar reality was simultaneously a critique of postwar Japan and of realism—a challenge to the acceptance of postwar reality as natural or without history. It was important for the film not simply to document a postwar reality discrepant from the dominant narrative of national rebuilding, but also to disrupt that narrative’s own presumptions of ‘realism’ and challenge the givenness of the postwar system of economic and social organization. Pitfall incorporates fantasy into the history of mining in postwar Japan in a way that challenges the normalization of economic growth that dominated Japan in the 1950s and onwards—a narrative of rationalization that naturalized socially regressive austerity policies and legitimized a “culture of violence” towards labourers in mining communities by concealing its own function as ideology.

The second transparency that I address in this chapter is the transparency of Japan’s memorialization of the war—a memorialization that, as I mentioned above, reframed Japan as a victim of war through a new “foundational narrative” of US-Japanese relations that enabled the continuation of imperial violence towards Asia in disavowed form (Igarashi 2000: 20). To address this, I turn to the film Hiroshima mon amour. The film, which revolves around a French actress’ love affair with a Japanese man while in Hiroshima, raises several questions about the memorialization and memory of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and the role this plays both in the memory of the war and in the construction of Japan’s postwar identity. The female protagonist, whose name is not given and who is referred to in the script only as “elle” (she), “la

femme” (the woman), or “la Française” (the French woman),16 is a French actress who travels to

Hiroshima for a role in a film. She attempts to gain an understanding of the bombing of

Hiroshima by visiting the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, where she examines photos, newsreel footage, artifacts, remains of human bodies, and other visual evidence. For her, the museum serves as a transparent space in which everything can be seen, without shadows or blind spots: “I saw everything. Everything” (Duras 1961: 15, italics in original17). I argue that her faith in the museum space as an objective, totalizing visual record of Hiroshima elides the function that the museum serves as an ideological space. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and its

‘fantasy’ of Japanese de-colonization and demilitarization contributed to the "foundational narrative” of Japan’s postwar victim status, effectively obfuscating Japan’s continuing complicity in imperialist aggression. In this film, I argue that this elision of the ideological space of the museum is represented in the literal elision of several ‘ghostly surfaces’ in the museum space, ‘transparent’ mediums through which the French woman organizes her experience of the bomb—in particular the glass surfaces through which she ‘witnesses’ the bombing of Hiroshima.

The third transparency that I address in this chapter is the transparency of film itself and its role in enabling the authenticity of the documentary medium. Film is, literally speaking, transparent: an emulsion of particles suspended on a transparent base, one that is divided into intermittent frames (24 per second typically). The subsistence of a continuous, solid image—and, through this, the audience’s visual immersion in the film, the ‘suspension’ of the viewer’s separation from the film and its action—is as such an illusion, one that is conditioned upon a lack

16 In my thesis, she will be referred to either by the pronouns “she/her,” “the woman,” or “the French woman.”

17 All subsequent formatting is unaltered from the original text unless otherwise noted.

of image, the transparency of the image, its ability to be passed through. Yet both films, Pitfall and Hiroshima mon amour, draw into question the transparency of film by including stock footage from documentaries and newsreels whose transparency as a medium of historical documentation is compromised in various ways—through camera shake, or by emphasizing the presence of the camera operator, or by foregrounding the corruption of the image through dust and scratches. Hiroshima, for example, incorporates stock footage from Ito Sueo’s documentary

The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1946).18 In Pitfall, Teshigahara similarly incorporates newsreel footage depicting the hard conditions of mining workers in

Japan. Yet rather than working to reinforce the status of ‘original’ stock footage as a marker of authenticity, both films draw attention to the presence of the filmic apparatus itself as something that mediates and conditions the recording of history. This disruption works as a critique of conventional documentary cinema in both films.

Each of these three instances of transparency brings into focus the structural limitations of the ‘realism’ around which the 1950s discourse of rebuilding was organized. More specifically, the two films draw into focus the aporia of transparency, namely that transparency is conditioned upon the erasure of the transparent base, and a forgetting of its own conditions of possibility. In this way, the films expose the limits of capital, history, and documentation to understand their own base of representation. For capital, this involves the erasure of labour,

18 Though filmed by a Japanese filmmaker, the English title is the original title. The film was suppressed in Japan until 1967, and so was first screened in the United States. While still unavailable in Japan, it was given the Japanese title Hiroshima, Nagasaki ni okeru genshibakudan no kōka; however when screened in 1967 for the first time kōka (results) was changed by Japan’s Ministry of Education to eikyō (influence) in order to avoid what some argued were insensitive implications of “experimentation” embedded in the original wording; and in 1994 when the film was released once more in Japan kōka was again replaced, this time with the word saigai (disaster) (Nornes 2003: 204–205).

which is, not coincidentally, the one thing capital cannot produce itself—it is the transparent condition for the possibility of capital. For history, this involves the erasure of individual memories, experienced that are discrepant with the official ‘remembrance’ of (in this case)

Japan’s wartime history. For documentation, this is the erasure of the materiality of the documentary apparatus—the camera and its operator as contingent, embodied subjects involved in the process of representation.

Return

Where the first chapter was concerned about bringing into focus the transparencies enabling a discourse of realism in order to problematize its various roles in the construction of postwar Japan, the second chapter of my thesis turns its focus towards a discourse of ‘return’ and the related role it played in the production of everyday life in postwar Japan. As outlined earlier in my history section, ‘return’ was crucial to the postwar narrative of national rebuilding. The

1950s were framed as belonging to a postwar linear trajectory of progressive reconstruction and homogenization that established a new structure regulating the parameters of ‘normal’ everyday life that was closed off from the continuing effects of empire and that solidified capitalist conceptions of reality into natural constants, disavowing the experience of displacement it produced for many living in Japan.

The chapter begins by situating the problem of ‘return’ in postwar Japan in the context of literary debates on ‘realism’ that emerged in the postwar period. Immediate postwar literary and intellectual discourse was organized around so-called shutaisei (loosely translated as

‘subjectivity’) debates concerning the validity of individual and collective expressions of reality.

However, in the 1950s the binary opposition between individual and collective reality was problematized by the emergence of a ‘mass’ culture that blurred the boundaries between

individual and collective subjectivity. In this period, the democratic individual subject became universalized as a ‘mass,’ uniform subjectivity that flattened individual differences. Masao

Miyoshi thus argues that shutaisei in postwar Japan was not ‘true’ shutaisei in the sense of a radically new form of individual subjectivity, but was instead merely another form of universal subjectivity conforming to a new hegemony of American liberal capitalist democracy (Miyoshi

2010a: 97). The 1950s were thus defined by the rapid emergence of a mass culture that became regulated as a homogeneous space of democratic individual middle-class consumer subjects.

This idea is reinforced in the chapter by analyzing how the everyday space of postwar Japan was regulated and controlled, much like the space of labour and production discussed in chapter one, by an attempt to ‘rationalize’ daily life. I argue that the routinization, regulation, and consolidation of the new, overdetermined space of mass culture in postwar Japan, under the rubric of rationalization produced various marginalized ‘others,’ including repatriated soldiers and civilians, progressives, immigrants, and women, who were rendered out of place in the

1950s, spatially, politically, economically, and existentially.

In this context, it became important for avant-garde artists and intellectuals such as Abe to denaturalize and re-historicize the ‘everyday’ consumer rationalized space of 1950s Japan— on the one hand, exposing the senses in which the objectivity of everyday life was simply, to borrow Lukács description of reification, a “phantom objectivity” (Lukács 1968: 83), and on the other hand opening everyday life up to its disavowed ‘spectral’ realities. Abe’s writing from this period worked in this way to politicize ‘everydayness,’ by disrupting the dichotomy separating

‘reality’ from ‘fiction’ and challenging the logic of a ‘return to’ normal that characterized the

1950s with the counter-logic of a ‘return of’ the abjected, displaced spectral other.

This is first exemplified in this chapter through Abe's short story Song of a Dead Girl

(1954), which problematizes the narrative of economic and social stability in the 1950s by drawing attention to its reliance on a workforce of exploited women labourers. It follows a girl who works in a textile factory, commits suicide, and returns as a ghost. The text illustrates how the narrative of a return to normal gender roles for women in 1950s Japan (a return to the conventional gender ideology of ryōsai kenbo or ‘good wives, wise mothers’ that positioned women as mothers and housewives) was complicit in the economic exploitation of women in the workplace. A prewar discourse of motherhood celebrating women’s natural/biological maternalism re-emerged in the 1950s (Bullock 2010: 2). Women’s workplaces were made to function as spaces of indoctrination preparing women with an education in their domestic duties.

This legitimized the exploitation of women in the workplace as an inherently temporary, precarious, and cheap workforce and created an unevenness of social and economic freedom that contradicted the general homogenization of middle-class comfort celebrated in official histories of the 1950s.

I also argue in this chapter that the re-emergence of a pre-war discourse of ‘motherhood’ was fundamentally connected to postwar imperialism, as demonstrated by the defining feminist movement of the 1950s, the Hahaoya Taikai (Mother’s Convention). The Mother’s Convention expressed an idea of domestic citizenship that celebrated women’s ‘natural’ domestic roles that aligned with American notions of gender and the nuclear family, notions that were mobilized to serve the politics of Cold War communist containment (Koikari 2008: 23). Moreover, the rhetoric of maternalism was extended to position women as protectors not only of the family but also the nation in a way that was closely tied to discussions of denuclearization and peace, eliding Japan’s ongoing history of imperialism.

Indeed, concomitant with the disavowal of economic disparity underlying the hegemonic

narrative of postwar ‘return’ was, as Seiji Lippit explains, a “lack of engagement with the end of empire” where many Japanese “were able to dissociate themselves from the history of empire, from the experience of those under colonial rule, and from the ongoing effects of empire’s collapse” (Lippit 2010: 290). Though the primary focus of Song of a Dead Girl is on the dislocation of labour in postwar Japan, some traces remain of this “spectral memory of empire”

(Lippit 2010: 294), such as in the phantom figures of dead soldiers that the protagonist sees after her transformation into a ghost. She shares physical space with ghosts of the war dead in a way that suggests that her own fragmented bodily experience shares some territory with the decentered geography of postwar imperialism.

Abe describes this spectral space of postwar imperialism more thoroughly in other works that are more directly about the experiences of Japan’s former colonial subjects, such Record of a

Transformation (1954), The Uniform (1955), and the aforementioned The Ghost is Here (1958), all of which follow ghosts who are in one way or another displaced as unwanted, unseen remnants of Japanese colonialism. Mark Driscoll refers to Japan’s colonial empire as an “empire of the living dead” (Driscoll 2010: 310), one wherein colonial subjects were reduced to inanimate labouring objects, a mass disposable workforce existing in a state of undead servitude, pushed beyond their ability to work until many ended up in mass graves.19 In addition, Driscoll explains that the logic of death adopted by Japanese empire, as expounded by Tanabe Hajime, reserved the ability to fully live and die (and thus attain a “fuller life” in fusion with the nation and the divine emperor [Driscoll 2010: 312–13]) for Japanese soldiers: “With full life reserved

19 Driscoll explains that out of the roughly four million North Chinese workers forced into slave labour in Manchukuo, 40–50 percent were “worked to death” (Driscoll 2010: 289). Later he estimates that “no fewer than 2.5 million Chinese forced laborers were worked to death in Manchukuo” (2010: 304).

solely for Japanese men killed in imperialist war, all other forms of life are relegated to the de- ontological condition of living-dead” (Driscoll 2010: 313). Such was the case not only for

Japan’s colonial subjects, but also for those Japanese survivors of war, whereby the “the modus operandi of colonial fascism in Manchukuo centripetally invades Japan’s homeland” (Driscoll

2010: 313).

The conflation of imperialism, death, and capital-accumulation (what Driscoll following

Achille Mbembe calls “necropolitics”) as well as the de-subjectifying (or abjectifying) process of transforming both colonial subjects and Japanese survivors of war into literal “living-dead,” is dramatized in many ways in Abe Kōbō’s works in the 1950s. In Record of a Transformation, for example, the protagonist is the ghost of a Japanese soldier who dies in Manchuria immediately following Japan’s surrender in 1945. This setting allows the narrative to follow the atrocities of war—the murder of whole villages of Chinese civilians, the uncontrolled spread of disease, the fanatical adherence to emperor worship—while simultaneously documenting its disavowal and its return in the postwar. The logic of spectrality in Record of a Transformation suggests that the

‘end’ of the war cannot be so simply delineated, and that the overt militarism and imperialism of the Asia Pacific War, with its capitalist motivations as a struggle for domination of economic territories in Asia, persisted as a spectral reality of postwar Japan. This problematizes the neat separation of wartime from Japan’s postwar present as an “end of the war” by highlighting a permeable present through the return of displaced ghostly bodies. The return of ‘living-dead’ ghosts in Abe’s work possessed a very different logic from the postwar discourse of ‘return to normal,’ one that resisted the re-assimilation and recuperation of Japanese identity present in the collective, national narrative of return. Where the ‘return to’ solidified the dominant narrative of national and subjective rebuilding into a self-evident natural state of affairs, the ‘return of’

fractured that reality into a network of dialectical relations—the past within the present, possibility within the impossible, imaginary within reality, collective within the individual.

Relation

The third and final section of this thesis focuses on developing the problem of ‘relation.’

Relation is perhaps the most crucial aspect of haunting, as it serves as the linchpin for haunting’s other two aspects of realism and return. Both of these involve relationality: realism, as Abe expressed it, is a kind of dialectic, an overlapping of individual and collective reality, a tension between practice and theory; and return involves the overlapping of disparate times and spaces in the present, a reflection of the displacement experienced within that present by subjects that are both absorbed into and alienated from it. It is important therefore to explore precisely what sort of relation is embodied in the subject of haunting, and in the figure of the ghost. The ghostly form of relation is, briefly summarized, a kind of overlapping of difference: a relation that isn’t simply equivalency, but a kind of palimpsest that brings difference together into the same space.

Ghosts cross over between different locations, different times, producing both resonances as well as discontinuities and displacements—they are, in a sense that seems somewhat paradoxical, both here and not here. In this way, the ghost serves as a kind of embodiment of dialectical relation, of unified oppositions.

In this chapter, I argue that it is important to understand the role that this form of dialectical relation plays in the political and aesthetic programs of avant-garde artists in the

1950s. Making connections—with other people, other times, other mediums, other places—was crucial to the avant-garde projects of this period, and manifested notably in the emphasis on

‘total art’ (sōgō geijutsu) in art collectives such as Kiroku Geijutsu no Kai and Jikken Kōbō, wherein artists working in different mediums such as music, film, dance, theatre, photography,

painting, and television collaborated to produce collective works of art that crossed international, interpersonal, and intermedial borders, as well as the institutional boundaries separating high and low art. Their work emphasized the importance of collaborative work, intermediation, and interdisciplinarity. This relationality was also emphasized in the intermedia projects created within Teshigahara Hiroshi’s Sōgetsu Art Centre (Sōgetsu āto sentā)—projects that later influenced Teshigahara’s collaborative film projects with Abe Kōbō and composer Takemitsu

Tōru, including Pitfall, which I return to in this chapter.

Such an emphasis on forming connections can be understood in the context of the disjointedness characteristic of the 1950s, wherein historical and subjective realities were dislocated from the dominant narratives structuring the present. However, while celebrating connections and the ‘total’ work of art, it was also important for these artists to preserve the heterogeneity of experience. Collaboration was one way of responding to the experiential dislocation of the 1950s, yet the necessity for sustaining individuation was another. In the mid-

1950s, the co-implication of democratic individualism and mass consumer culture blurred the very boundaries of collective versus individual identification. It was not enough to simply invoke a position privileging collective over individual identity, given the mass-cultural homogenization of the middle-class ‘democratic individual.’ Intellectual movements of the early postwar defined themselves through this binary opposition, as shutaisei (subjectivity) debates over the trajectory of postwar leftist politics and literature were split into positions advocating for either individual

(experiential) or collective (class) identity. Neither individualism nor collectivism in isolation resonated with the reality of Japan in the 1950s—‘mass’ identity could refer to both the revolutionary potential of ‘the masses’ as well as the conformity of mass culture, and the

‘individual’ could mean both the heterogeneity of individual experience as well as the

homogeneity of ‘democratic individualism.’

Thus the projects of the 1950s avant-garde reflect a resistance to the binary logic of individual versus collective and an openness to more dialectical forms of relation over and against the individualism of the capitalist middle-class subject as well as the false sense of collective belonging that characterized mass consumer identity. Rather than a simple ‘totality,’ these artists emphasized relation as a synthesis of contradictory and heterogeneous impulses. The totality or ‘sōgō’ of ‘total art’ was itself articulated by avant-garde collectives as a form of

“dialectical” totality (Sas 2012: 156). In this way, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro described Jikken Kōbō’s collaborative process as both “centripetal and centrifugal”—a tension between individual and collective processes (Chong 2012: 53). Takemitsu Tōru similarly explained that film was necessarily an intermediary and “cooperative process,” yet one that “produces contradictions”

(Takemitsu 1962: 15). Abe, moreover, as I described earlier, proposed a dynamic method of creative praxis that was informed by abstract organizing principles yet remained grounded in concrete transformative action. He embodied this method in the figure of the ghost, whose act of haunting was at once both a process of location and dislocation, multiplicity and singularity, synchronicity and asynchronicity, concreteness and abstraction. Haunting was in this way a manifestation of the overlapping of difference crucial to the collaborative and inter-relational art projects of the 1950s. In Pitfall, this haunting overlap is grounded in the political reality of mining labourers, whose contradictory experience produced the haunting reality of being both excluded from postwar capitalist reality and grounding it.

In this chapter, I expand this analysis of Pitfall, already introduced in earlier chapters, by exploring how the collaborative process in creating the film itself, as well as the formal relation between text, image, and sound in the film followed an analogous sort of ‘contrapuntal’ form of

relation. Each of the artists involved in the project, Abe, Teshigahara, and Takemitsu, modeled the intermediation and collaboration of Pitfall on a kind of musical ‘counterpoint,’ an auditory expression of dialectical relation that encapsulated the film’s inter-relations between sound, image, and text—and, to extend the metaphor, between each of the creative subjects involved in the film’s production: screenplay-writer, director, composer, as well as actors, musicians, instrumentation (most notably the film’s prepared and unpredictable pianos), and other agents working together in synchronization while nonetheless providing their own contingent and unexpected elements to the film. Each of these elements in the film, I argue, work together to produce what Takemitsu calls the film’s “more essential contradiction,” a “total expression” that, through a counterpoint of synchronized differences, worked to express the film’s “more essential topic” (Takemitsu 1962: 15), namely the simultaneous displacement and consolidation of the working class subjects of the film into postwar capitalist Japan.

While counterpoint and, more generally, the logic of the ghost—a kind of simultaneous location and dislocation—works in the film to disrupt (the self-contained reality of postwar capitalism, or the position of the self within that system), Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemitsu are all clear in pointing out that ultimately the goal is to connect—not simply effecting dissonance between elements, but creating synchronicity through difference, creating a communion with difference that is, ultimately, the very reason for the ghost, why it returns: to speak to us of its presence. The ghost speaks to us by saying, ‘look at me, your blind spot, that which was always here but just outside of your line of sight’; it pressures us to abandon the self-assuredness of our own ideologies and assurances that we know how things are. It asks us to know it, but not just on our terms, not in our frame of reference. We must re-orient ourselves to it yet see this reorientation not as a further perfection of our knowledge, absorbing it into our world and

expanding its contents to create a fuller understanding. Rather it is to acknowledge that our understanding is always incomplete, that we must always be aware that our frame of reference produces something outside the frame, that there will always be something outside to which we must be attuned.

In this chapter I also mobilize this understanding of relationality or counterpoint as expressed in Pitfall and in the avant-garde art collectives of the 1950s to reflect on what we could learn from it as comparatists. Our agenda as comparatists is always somewhat of an aporia.

As Eva Kushner writes, “from their earliest days comparative literature studies have lived in a paradox: they presuppose universals at work within human literatures and cultures, and seek to bring them to light through the examination of the diversity of these literatures and cultures”

(Kushner 1992: 54). We attempt to cross different disciplines, different media, different geographies, different languages, and different histories and experiment with different frames of reference while also resisting the impulse to universalize. In Asian Studies as well, there exists a sort of tension between the transcendental and the historical—do we ground our analysis of

Japan firmly in specific geographic and historical context and risk essentialism, or do we expand our analysis to explore its universal value and risk dehistoricizing or colonizing what we study?

It remains important, in all cases, for us to continue to speculate on the significance of this aporia. I would argue that this positions us, as comparatists, in a good position to reflect upon the significance of dialectical modes of relation in the context of postwar Japan, where binary models of representation failed to acknowledge continuing crises in its present.

With this in mind, I return in this chapter as well to Hiroshima mon amour, a film project that brings into focus several problems that fall under the category of this ‘aporia’: ‘nuclear universalism,’ the simultaneity of French and Japanese history, the French woman’s mobilization

of Hiroshima to work through her own trauma—each of these threaten the erasure of historical specificity, risk colonizing otherness, and conflate personal and collective traumas in potentially problematic ways. Yet despite these potential pitfalls, I attempt to draw out a radical form of comparativity in the film. Indeed, like Pitfall, Hiroshima is a very tightly interwoven collaboration between three artists (Duras, Resnais, and composer Giovanni Fusco) and three media (screenplay, film, music); and like in Pitfall, Duras, Resnais, and Fusco all employ musical metaphors, in particular counterpoint, in ways that are crucial to the film’s meaning.

Even though counterpoint provides a theoretical underpinning for the many visual relations in the film, critics have mostly focused on the ‘scopic’ doubling of images in Hiroshima, rather than looking at the role of the film’s aural register. In this chapter, I explore how music is synchronized and desynchronized with the images on the screen in ways that were analogous to the haunting logic of dialectical relation. I will argue that what is at stake with this audio-visual counterpoint is the disruption of traditional historiography and its (as well as the French woman’s) privileging of vision, teaching us instead to listen and watch not for discrete but overlapping histories in the film.

How counterpoint is deployed in Hiroshima, however, is quite different from Pitfall: its purpose in Hiroshima is overtly cross-cultural, even trans-historical. I argue that the central politics of the film comes from a counterpoint between the erasure of empire in France and Japan in the 1950s. Hiroshima in the 1950s, which serves as an embodiment of Japan’s rehabilitation after the atrocities of wartime—functioning all at once as a displacement of war guilt and a symbol of national rebuilding—is, the film suggests, much like France of the 1950s, which as

Henry Rousso explains was possessed by a form of historical amnesia that obscured collective

guilt over the Vichy regime.20

Partially, the French woman’s attempts to understand Hiroshima are justified as research for her film role—a film that is ‘transparently’ about “peace,” as she says: “what else could you make in Hiroshima except a film about peace?” (Duras 1961: 34). However, she also wrestles with the fact that her interest is not merely objective, but resonates with her own personal trauma, the death of a German soldier with whom she fell in love during the German occupation of her home town in France, Nevers, and her subsequent ostracization, and her feelings of guilt and fear about needing to forget this ‘taboo’ love affair. In this way, the memorialization of

Hiroshima as a monument to peace and closure is complicated by the intrusion of personal memory and affective remnants of wartime.

Seeming to contradict the woman’s assertion that Hiroshima is a place of “peace,” or that, moreover, she has recuperated from her own personal trauma she experienced during the war, the film brings back her dead, German lover (literally overlaying his corpse on top of her sleeping

Japanese lover’s), and at the same time makes oblique references to unrest within Japan’s sparkling recuperated present, drawing attention to a May Day protest against remilitarization.

We know from the film’s controversial status in France (the circumstances of which led to its rejection from the Cannes Film festival in 195921) that such reminders of war and empire worked

20 I am indebted to Daniel Just’s book Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France for drawing attention to the significance of Rousso’s Vichy Syndrome in relation to Hiroshima mon amour (Just 2015: 130).

21 Edgar Morin explains the circumstances of its rejection: “Objections then came from the side of the festival and Hiroshima mon amour was not selected. The objections stated: ‘it’s a film that will displease the U.S.A. because it shows an American bomb.’ The producers immediately showed the film to the cultural consul of the United States’ Embassy, who said, ‘I have no objection, after all it’s true, we did launch the Hiroshima bomb.’ The producers used this to argue that they had the approval of the Americans, to which they were told that, in any case, the film had a political character that was incompatible with the Fifth Republic, etc.” (Morin 1962: 28).

simultaneously as reminders not only of Japanese unrest, but of the continuing existence of

French colonial empire in Algiers. Insinuations of imperialism and the Algerian war worked to rupture France’s suturing of past empire, much as in Japan the establishment of the Self Defense

Forces and the signing of the mutual self-defense assistance agreement with the United States in

1954—events that spurred the May Day protest in the film—reopened many of the scars that had begun to ‘heal’ over Japanese empire.

The implication, then, is that straightforward distinctions separating past and present, here and there, are compromised when we examine history in a contrapuntal, non-linear way. My aim in analyzing the ‘contrapuntal’ logic of relation explored in these films is to show how both draw comparisons that can teach us in various ways how to listen across established or

‘normalized’ historical, subjective, or ideological pathways to uncover new and unexpected relations.

Learning to Listen to Ghosts

In Abe’s essay Heikōsen no aru fūkei (Landscape with Parallel Lines, 1962), he argues that it is important to prioritize the “wind” that constituted the background or landscape of

Pitfall:

Ears that discover nothing other than banality in the sound of the wind, however different the raw materials are, they of course cannot pick up anything but banality. This wind, or that wind—in a word, wind that all makes the same ‘whooshing’ sound—is from the beginning no more than a general concept. […] Shouldn’t we hope to have the courage to resolutely produce a drama that is only the sound of wind from beginning to end? (Abe 1962: 12)

Much as “air,” as Luce Irigaray says, is the “invisible substrate for the constitution of the visible”

(Irigaray 1999: 116), an idea that I elaborate upon in the first chapter in my development of 47

‘transparency,’ here Abe expresses the need to re-orient one’s listening habits, and one’s compositional priorities, to give ‘wind’ a central role. The background—wind blowing through the mining villages in Pitfall—does not merely embellish the scene. Rather, it is in part what conditions the characters in those villages: “People who have been cut off from background

[haikei] cannot be said to ever have existed. Those kinds of people are, like the abandoned background, no more than the fragment of a stereotyped concept” (Abe 1962: 13).

What Abe suggests is that we must re-learn how to listen—to listen for the transparent

(not absent) dissonances that fracture the givenness of the present moment, and disrupt the narrative, its linear form, of a reconstruction of, and return to, ‘normal’ life. Rather that viewing the 1950s as a ‘fixed’ (rehabilitated, solidified) present, I describe it in this thesis as a period of contingent and contested oppositions and contradictory experiences and impulses. In other words, by listening contrapuntally to this time period, we hear its historicity—the tension and the dynamic interactions between different and often conflicting voices, ideas, people, places, and times. “We think,” Abe says, quoting August Compte, “through the words of the dead […] in this way consciousness can expand to an unknown space beyond experience of space and time, opening a window to the past or the future, drawing out the reality of phenomena and revealing their unseen nature” (Abe 1997a: 245). Cultivating this type of consciousness—a ‘communion with the dead’—involves the incorporation of difference into our experience, a simultaneous internalization of otherness, as well as externalization of the self.

In the conclusion of this thesis I reflect on the totality of this process of haunting—its simultaneous re-configuration of the ideas of realism, return, and relation—in the context of what was considered to be the most urgent (and misleading) crisis of the 1950s, the Cold War consciousness of nuclear war between opposing Eastern and Western blocs. I focus on a

statement prepared by political theorists Maruyama Masao, Tsuru Shigeto, and Ukai Nobushige, and signed by 52 members of the most prominent postwar peace group in Japan, Heiwa Mondai

Danwakai (Peace Problems Discussion Group), which was published in Sekai magazine under the title of “Mitabi heiwa ni tsuite” (The Third Statement on Peace) in December 1950. In this chapter I attempt to thread together the themes of realism, return, and relation through this

Statement. It is, to a large degree, an endorsement of the politics of haunting that I will develop in this thesis: it rejects the ‘common sense’ or ‘realpolitikal’ hypothesis that war is inevitable and asserts the importance of finding relationships or common ground between opposing

(capitalist and communist) viewpoints. However, the Third Statement’s politics are also compromised by a failure to internalize difference. In this way, the Third Statement brings into focus the precise demands of the politics of haunting: there must be mutual compromise between self and other, collective and individual—a process Abe articulated as a ‘communion with the dead.’

Comparing Japan’s 1950s avant-garde approach to collaboration with the Third

Statement’s appeal to mutual understanding brings into focus a crucial difference that defines precisely what is at stake in the politics of haunting, namely the internalization of difference.

While both groups grounded their positions in what the authors of the Third Statement called a

“paradoxical truth [gyakusetsuteki shinri]” (Heiwa Mondai Danwakai 1985: 123)—insisting upon the necessity to remain grounded in concrete reality of the present moment and its immediate practical needs, while also appealing to the idealism of international cooperation—the authors of the statement failed to internalize that paradox, appealing instead to an undialectical discourse of ‘peace’ that universalized democratic individualism and glossed over the contradicting particular domestic realities of postwar Japan. The very borders of the political

landscape of the 1950s could not be mapped on a single plane, and instead needed to be traced in a palimpsestic way, as a multiplicity of what Karatani Kōjin called “discursive spaces” operating along axes of internal and external relations as well as relations between East and West (Karatani

1991: 200). Mapping these parameters requires the negotiation of multiple frames of reference.

By focusing entirely on the international crisis in which global reconciliation and nuclear disarmament were paramount, the authors of the Third Statement elided the domestic discursive space in which global cooperation signified Japan’s capitulation to (and universalization of) western democratic individualism and in which denuclearization was complicit in the elision of postwar empire.

What needs to be acknowledged, therefore, is that historicization as a ‘communion with the dead’ is a dialectical process in which each pole—individual and collective, internal and external, realism and idealism—is only intelligible in relation to the others. This fact was central to the understanding of ‘totality’ or ‘synthesis’ (sōgō) around which art collectives in the 1950s were organized, and it was central to Abe’s own dialectical understanding of theory and method.

It was concretized in the embodied acts of ‘haunting’ described in Abe’s fictional works in the

1950s, which re-historicized the self-assured and solidified present of postwar capitalism as a space in which multiple conflicting realities intersected. What’s more, by understanding the

1950s historically in this way as a period of contestation and contingency where discrepant voices overlapped, we also learn to understand that our present moment is not the outcome of an inevitable unfolding of the past, or the justified outcome of an inevitable and unalterable chain of necessary events, but rather the result of past contestation out of which has emerged one reality that is nonetheless haunted by the ghosts of many others.

When Horkheimer and Adorno write in the postscript to their “Theory of Ghosts” in

Dialectic of Enlightenment that in modern society “the dead are in truth subjected to what for the ancient Jews was the most grievous curse: To thee shall no thoughts be turned” (Horkheimer and

Adorno 1993: 179), they draw attention to an ostracization of ghosts symptomatic of modern experience (the “sickness of experience today”). Their meditation on the “disturbed” relation to the dead criticizes institutionalized responses to death and the modern obsession with the immediacy of the present moment and its repudiation of all “traces” of the past. In their text, ghosts constitute history, or rather the return of a history from which we have become alienated and which we have repressed. It is this history of the ghostly that I hope this thesis will be able to traverse.

Three Ghosts, Three Transparencies, Three Limits in Pitfall and Hiroshima mon amour

At the beginning of his book 1950 nendai––‘kiroku’ no jidai (The 1950s: The Age of the

‘Documentary’, 2010), Toba Kōji explains that the lifting of wartime censorship laws led to a resurgence in the 1950s of documentary (kiroku) trends that were popular in the 1920s and 30s, the “golden age” of Japanese documentary (Toba 2010: 8). Amidst the outbreak of the Korean

War (1950), early postwar Japan experienced communist agitation (the Mountain Village

Operation Unit or Sanson Kōsakutai), official purges (the ‘Red Purge’), labour unrest, and sensationalized reports of union sabotage and assassination (the so-called Japan National

Railway Three Great Mysteries or kokutetsu sandai misuterī jiken that occurred in the summer of

1949). The narrative of these events was largely shaped by Occupation-regulated newspaper and radio media; and even after the lifting of occupation censorship in 1949, “the capacity for self- censorship cultivated during the occupation era remained” (Toba 2010: 9). Suspicions and ideological opposition towards that type of reporting from intellectuals and writers in the 1950s formed one backdrop for the demand to produce new types of kiroku. New forms of documentary realism emerged in the postwar both to record the “chaotic reality” of contemporary events and to “learn the truth that was generally not being reported” (Toba 2010:

10).22

22 These forms varied, encompassing different movements and media: personal records and social analyses of everyday life (seikatsu kiroku), on-site journalism or reportage (ruporutāju) of conflict sites, television and film documentaries, reportage painting and photo-realism (riarizumu shashin) in the fine arts, and a turn towards recording regional histories around Japan, for example through the National Movement for the Study of History (kokumin-teki rekishigaku undō) (Toba 2010: 9).

This urgency to document the changing reality of the present, driven by suspicion regarding what was being reported in mainstream media, was combined with an avant-garde aversion to conventional forms of ‘realism’ and a search for new forms of recording the reality of the present. As Toba explains,

The postwar political and literary vanguard’s joint hypothetical enemy was old naturalist literature [shizenshugi bungaku], and even though they turned towards the existing trends of socialist realism [shakaishugi riarizumu] and surrealism, there was a strong desire for a methodology to establish an as-yet nonexistent form of realism of ‘kiroku.’ (Toba 2010: 11)

The documentary filmmaker and critic Paul Rotha’s work Documentary Film (1935)—translated into Japanese in 1938 by screenwriter Atsugi Taka, former member of the prewar Proletarian

Film (Prokino) League—in part motivated this drive to apply new forms of realism to documentary film and reportage literature (Toba 2010: 11). In Documentary Film, Rotha defines documentary as “the use of the film medium to interpret creatively and in social terms the life of the people as it exists in reality” (Rotha 1963: front flap). This was a less succinct version of his collaborator John Grierson’s own famous definition of documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality” (Grierson 1933: 8). The key point is that documentary is here interpreted as a balance between creativity, directorial intervention, and realism. This was mobilized in 1950s Japan as an alternative to existing forms of naturalism, surrealism, and social realism where fiction and documentary would overlap—or as Toba says, where the ‘record’ or ‘kiroku’ of reality would be negotiated through “independent/subjective/active” (shutaiteki) interpretation (Toba 2010: 11).23

23 Abé Mark Nornes argues convincingly that the enthusiasm for ‘neorealism’ in postwar cinema was not so much a rejection of the rigid conventions of regulated wartime cinema but a holdover of the way in which wartime cinema itself combined documentary realism with overt fictional staging, aestheticization, and doctoring/censorship of reality (Nornes 2003: 105). 53

The reinvention of realism as an overlap of the fictional and the historical was a frequent topic among postwar avant-garde writers and intellectuals. Sekine Hiroshi, for one, wrote in his essay “Ōkami ga kita—gendaishi no hōkō ni tsuite no kansō” (The Wolf Has Come: Thoughts on the Direction of Modern Poetry), published in the March 1954 issue of Shin nihon bungaku

(New Japanese Literature), that the problem with literature of the past was its mutual separation of individual and social realities: proletarian literature was “separated from surrealism,” whereas surrealism was “separated from the motif of human liberation” (Sekine 1954b: 65). However,

Sekine states, “we will not get into this rut again” (1954b: 65). Thus, in the essay “Shi to wa nani ka” (What is Poetry?) published in the January 1954 issue of Rettō (Archipelago), he describes a new form of a revolutionary surrealism that combines poetic creativity with reportage: “in a word, the theme of new poets is the synthesis of dreams and reality” (Sekine 1954a: 4).

According to the poet and novelist Kiyooka Takayuki (1922–2006) who, incidentally, like Abe spent his childhood in Manchuria, and perhaps felt somewhat disconnected from mainstream Japanese literary trends, surrealist writing such as Sekine’s was to be celebrated as an alternative to the rigid separation of reality and fiction and the reification of social life.

Sekine, he argued, wrote “reportage as a dream that reflects irrational reality” (Kiyooka 1955:

11), and in this way blurred the boundaries between internal and external, subjective and social reality. Nevertheless, Kiyooka was wary of surrealism’s interiority and lack of social engagement, and also argued that there remained a “rupture” (danzetsu) between these two realms that needed to be mediated by a form of “execution” or “practice” (jissen):

To borrow the words of one theorist of avant-garde literature, Hanada Kiyoteru, “between the inter world and the outer world there is rupture [danzetsu]. It goes without saying that that which mediates between these two worlds is nothing but practice [jissen]’ […] and in

this case the only direction for this ‘practice’ to transition is from inside to outside. (Kiyooka 1955: 12).

Thus, according to Kiyooka, literature “retained the potential for synthesis [sōgō]” between reality and fiction or interior and exterior “as long as it did not lose its orientation towards realism” (1955: 11).24 Ultimate literary value came from its ability to engage with social life and the empirical world.

Sekine and Kiyooka’s critiques were representative of aesthetic and political projects of the 1950s, which focused on a critique of established representational conventions, whether they be realist or surrealist, social or individualist. The problem they articulated was the mutual blindness of these projects to each other. By acknowledging this blindness, the creator would acknowledge their own embodied, material role as agents negotiating the relationship between internal and external reality in the act of representation. It was necessary to acknowledge, in other words, that kiroku is a form of practice rather than a passive reception of one’s experience or of the world.

Abe Kōbō’s work in the 1950s contributed significantly to shaping this notion of kiroku as a “creative treatment of actuality.” Repositioning the act of writing as a relation between internal and external worlds (or theory and practice) is the focus of his most sustained exploration of the writing method, “Theory and Practice in Literature” (Bungaku ni okeru riron to jissen, 1954), which I will explore in my next chapter. In this chapter I will turn to two contemporary films that worked in similar ways to challenge conventional ‘realism’ by

24 Credit goes to Toba Kōji’s 1950 nendai––‘kiroku’ no jidai for drawing my attention to Sekine and Kiyooka’s comments on the relationship between surrealism and various forms of documentary (Toba 2010: 51–53).

combining fiction and documentary, Abe and Teshigahara Hiroshi’s 1962 film Pitfall, and

Hiroshima mon amour, Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais’ 1959 film. Both combine a social- realist emphasis on documentary realism and reportage with overt fictionality, and both rely, I will argue, on a quality of the ‘ghost,’ namely its transparency, that worked to challenge conventional realism and counter realism’s erasure of discrepant subjectivities, disavowal of wartime memories, and concealment of its contingent materiality and mediated quality.

Labour, Archive, Film

Ōba: You can use the ghost to justify anything, can’t you? Fukagawa: (cuts him short with vehemence) You mustn’t say such things. There’s nothing he hates so much as being talked about in that way. The Ghost is Here (Abe 1993: 163)

Three ‘ghosts’ manifest in these films, in three distinct forms: those of labouring bodies, historical archives, and media of representation (film, photographs). Labouring miners, museum spaces, and the materiality of film itself each play key roles, as objects of documentation as well as objects that are undocumented, as documenting objects and spaces as well as spaces and objects that disrupt documentation. They are ghosts that possess a specificity, historicity, and materiality that demands due diligence: that can’t simply “justify anything,” as the greedy capitalist in Abe’s The Ghost is Here says of Fukagawa’s ghost. They are historically existing empirical groups of people, and actual, concrete media of remembrance and representation. In

Pitfall, ghosts literally emerge in the form of itinerant coal miners who have returned from the dead as victims of Japan’s postwar rationalization and austerity economics. In Hiroshima mon amour, ghosts haunt the museum, in the literal material of the clear containers and surfaces that 56

house the artifacts through which the French woman constructs her memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Finally, in both films, the ‘filmic’ medium itself, by which I mean the physical material of film, which is typically concealed for the purposes of rendering film

‘authentic,’ hauntingly emerges, disrupting the immediacy of perception and foregrounding the relation between camera, eye, and object in the production of reality.

What each of these things—the miners, the artifices of the museum, and the filmic apparatus—possess in common is that they are transparent. They are, quite literally, present yet passed and seen through—people, display cases, and film surfaces that remain present while being traversed. Ghosts are typically understood in this way, in very concrete terms, as beings that exist between visibility and invisibility, as well as tangibility and intangibility. This is what distinguishes a ghost from mere absence: absence implies a hollowness, an empty space, a lack, a void, a radical unknowability or imperceptibility; with transparency, however, there is still something that remains yet is seen through. The essential quality of the transparent is that it is traversed as if it were absent while nonetheless remaining present.

This quality of being present yet traversed as if it were absent is what Akira Lippit calls the “phenomenology of the transparent” (2005: 85). Discussing in particular the transparency of the human body in Nobuo Adachi’s film Tōmei ningen arawaru (The Invisible Man Appears,

1949), he explains that, unlike invisibility, where there is “an absence at the very core of one’s presence,” with transparency “the body is there but traversed [and] violated” (2005: 87).

Transparency in this way connotes the crossing, not only of a physical, but also an ethical boundary. Like ghosts, it embodies as such a continued presence of something that is treated as if it were nothing—or, as Judith Butler says of the ghost, it embodies the presence of “what or who is living but has not been generally ‘recognized’ as life” (Butler 2009: 12). Put differently, we

can say that transparency is alienation in literal, concrete terms, a limit to what can be seen or recognized as present, something that is there but is in excess of what is perceived in itself.

Unlike the absence of the body, transparency is the alienation of the body, a purely “optical vision” (as opposed to a tactile, “haptic vision,”) that Laura Marks explains does not acknowledge its “location in the body” (Marks 2000: 132).

To add to Lippit’s phenomenology of the transparent, it is important to also recognize that ghosts, as transparent things, are not simply victims of being traversed (“traversed [and] violated” [Lippit 2005: 87]) but are also in a significant sense agents of traversal; which is to say that transparency’s own effacement and traversability conditions the very possibility of everything (but itself) to appear through it. Were it to ‘fully’ appear as something opaque, it would cease to function as a medium allowing other things to appear, and when it functions as a medium allowing other things to appear, it cannot itself appear. The very mobility or visibility of that which passes through it is conditioned upon the oblivion—the reduction to non-existence— of its own continued presence. By displacing the materiality or the tactile experience of seeing, transparency conditions the presence of that which it mediates by rendering its very function as mediator invisible. This withdrawal of mediation—the forgetting of the presence of the transparent and its function as medium—is essential to the illusion of immediacy or naturalness.

The illusion that there is no mediation is conditioned upon a transparent medium through which things can appear and that, in being transparent, can also easily be forgotten.

Luce Irigaray provides a concrete example to illustrate this point in Oubli de l'air chez

Martin Heidegger (The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger), wherein she argues that air— which is not absent, but “diaphanous, translucent, transparent” (Irigaray 1999: 9)—is a condition for the possibility of presence. We do not simply create our world out of nothingness. In a quite

literal sense, air is used up (breathed in and out) in the process of articulating the world to ourselves; and like breathing, this articulation is best accomplished when we are not conscious of it, when it appears self-constituted, natural, or spontaneous. In a more philosophical sense,

Irigaray wishes to propose that air—or more precisely its transparency, its ability to be transgressed, to withdraw—is the transcendental condition for the possibility of all western metaphysics, with its emphasis on ground, being, presence, or logos. This metaphysics, she argues, has forgotten this constitutive condition, and appears, as such, to be self-grounding or self-sufficient. Air is the prerequisite for all meaning, yet is forgotten, and thus “remains a transparency imperceptible in the entry into presence” (1999: 97).

The context of Irigaray’s argument is that it is a response to Heidegger’s claim that the transcendental foundation for Being/beings is a kind of “clearing” within which thinking can take place. She takes opposition to this in that Heidegger, she claims, forgets that within this

“clearing” there is air. Air, which by its nature gives way, recedes into the background and is easily forgotten, permitting us to think that “there is nothing but absence there [in the clearing]”

(1999: 9). This erection of the world upon a forgetting of air, Irigaray argues, is a violence that

Western metaphysics imposes on the other, a “reduction of the other to nothingness” (1999: 98).

By reducing air’s transparency to mere nothingness, one can forget that it is the transparency of the medium that conditions all appearance, and posit instead that there is no medium, and that in effect one’s perception or cognition is self-grounding.

Irigaray’s conceptualization of air, as a transparent substance, is very similar to that of the ghost, without the element of subjectivity and sociality that undergirds the ghost’s person-hood; what is typically called a ‘grievance’ in the rhetoric of ghosts is indeed an anthropomorphosis of air’s status as the unrecognized, forgotten ground of being. Both in this way ground what appears

and do so through their own withdrawal from the space in which things can then appear. Irigaray thus explains that air is the “invisible substrate for the constitution of the visible” (1999: 116).

Western metaphysics, she claims, has forgotten the air upon which it is grounded. Air and its forgetting thus contains an ethics of recognition and representation, and I will show in this chapter that the ghost similarly (dis)embodies a disavowal of foundations, whether they be those foundations of capital, history, or representation itself (film).

First Ghost: Labour

Pitfall is the first of four collaborations between novelist Abe Kōbō, filmmaker

Teshigahara Hiroshi, and composer Takemitsu Tōru. Screened first in 1962 and based on Abe’s

1960 television drama Rengoku (Purgatory),25 the film falls slightly out of the purview of this thesis’ time frame. Nevertheless, it is extremely important in the context of the 1950s in that it refers to the struggles experienced by people working in the mining industry throughout that period, struggles that culminated in the year-long Mitsui Miike Coal Mine labour dispute beginning in 1959—an incident that, as the director of Rengoku, Umezu Akio, points out, was frequently referred to as the “strike of the century” (quoted in Takanobu 1998: 6).26 In turning its attention to the violent oppression of miners by the unforgiving logic of rationalized, growth-at- all-costs capitalism in the 1950s, the film reflects the new documentary style of the 1950s avant-

25 This teledrama first aired on Kyūshū asahi hōsō (the Kyushu Asahi Broadcasting Company) on October 20, 1960, and was published later that year (December) in the avant-garde journal Gendai geijutsu (Contemporary Arts). It can be found in Abe’s Collected Works (Abe Kōbō Zenshū), volume 12 (1998a: 313–340). There is no English translation, and I follow several other scholars in translating Rengoku as “Purgatory” (see Galbraith 2008: 211 and Key 2011: 73).

26 This citation references the “Notes on Works in Volume 12” (Sakuhin nōto 12) that are provided as an appendix by editor Takanobu Satō in Abe’s Collected Works, volume 12.

garde and its general scepticism towards realism and its reinforcement of the status quo of economic recovery and social prosperity.

The film follows an itinerant miner traveling with his son, who is lured with the promise of paid work in to an abandoned pit and murdered by a mysterious man in white (referred to simply as X in the original credits).27 We eventually learn that the murder is linked to labour disputes at two mines operating in the area, called the Old Pit and the New Pit, both owned by the same company but represented by different union factions. Tensions had been escalating between the workers at the two pits, with the New Pit’s workers on strike and the Old Pit’s workers continuing to work. The Old Pit Chief explains the situation to reporters that come to investigate the murder:

The guys at the New Pit call us traitors and company stooges. But it isn’t that simple. Before the split, the New Pit was the mainstay, since we were small. We had few workers. We were like a subunit. We all belonged to the same union, so we pretended to get along. But then the company moved in to divide and conquer. It all began like this: The company decided to lay off some of our men. The union didn’t put up a united front. The New Pit guys didn’t care what happened to us […] The company exploited our weakness and took an even tougher stance. How could we fight back with the New Pit selling us out? A confrontation between us and the New Pit became inevitable […] Just then the company baited us with the promise to not lay us off if we split off and formed a second union. Is that ruthless or what? We debated three full days and nights. Break off and betray the union or let them betray us? We were in tears when we finally decided to split off. It was hell having to do that to our fellow workers. (Teshigahara 2007: 1:03:20)

27 Critic Ogi Masahiro refers to him as the “shirofuku no otoko” (man in white) (Ogi 1962: 7). He is listed as Otoko X (X Man, or Mr. X) in the original television series (Abe 1998a: 314).

In this way, the Old Pit Chief describes a scenario in which the mining company manipulated the union into dividing and weakening itself by exploiting the conflicting interests of labourers at each of its mines. What the Chief implies therefore is that the company drove a wedge between the two mines to fracture the union in hopes that internecine strife would eventually lead to their mutual self-destruction and an end to the work stoppage.

The murder of the protagonist is significant in this context, as it turns out that he is the spitting image of the union chief of the Old Pit. Moreover, the Man in White has coerced a woman still living near the worker’s barracks (tanjū) of a nearby abandoned coal-mining village who witnessed the murder into framing it on Toyama, the union’s second-in-command at the

New Pit. It would thus appear to the observer as if the New Pit’s second chief attempted to murder the Old Pit chief over tensions that had been building between the unions, but had murdered the wrong man in an instance of mistaken identity. However, as is typical of Abe’s writing, there is one more turn of the screw: one journalist suspects that the murder could have been intentional, the Old Pit chief having murdered his look-alike in order to frame the rival union and have them disbanded. Tensions increase as a result of the murder. The New Pit chief suspects the whole thing is some sort of “trap” (a pitfall?) being set by the company and attempts to convince Toyama that it is a setup, though they eventually end up killing one another, foreshadowing the demise of both unions.

Intertwined with this relatively mundane realist narrative, however, is a ghost story. The protagonist returns from the dead after he is murdered, and we follow him through much of the film while he is in this ghostly state. Many other ghosts populate the film as well: the woman who was coerced in to framing Toyama is later raped by a police officer then murdered by the

Man in White; the two union bosses who kill one another also return as ghosts; a third, now-

abandoned mine that the protagonist wanders through is populated by the ghosts of miners who lost their lives working the mines, seemingly oblivious to each other and continuing to perform their invisible labour even in the afterlife. Invisible to living characters in the film, but visible to the audience, and to each other, these ghosts bear silent testimony to their own victimization

(rape, murder, exploitation) at the hands of institutional forces. Near the end of the film, the ghosts of the woman and the protagonist run after the motorbike of the Man in White, demanding an explanation as to why they were murdered. Though they remain unheard, oblivious to the reasons for their deaths and powerless to rectify them, it is through their perspectives that we are able to piece together the facts: that the Man in White was hired by the company running the mines to bust the unions and end the strike by violently pitting the unions against one another.

Pitfall (like the tele-drama upon which it is based) is set against the backdrop of a real labour dispute in 1959–60 between the Mitsui corporation and the Miike coal mine in Kyūshū.

Indeed, the protagonist is based on a union picketer named Kubo Kiyoshi who was murdered by company thugs at Mitsui Miike in 1959 after violent clashes between picketers and strike- breakers (Abe 1998b: 6; Price 2015: 65). The events at the Miike mines in 1959–60 were the largest labour dispute to date in postwar Japan—Asada Akira calls it “the last big struggle of labour against capital in Japan” (Asada 2000: 19)—and the film attempts, through overtly fictional tropes, to address its social significance by drawing attention to the other side of

Japanese postwar prosperity—the disavowed and discarded labourers that served as raw materials for Japan’s economic recovery.

In the narrative of Japan’s postwar ‘economic miracle,’ attention is rarely paid to the parallel history of economic austerity that enabled it. The decay of the mining industry in

particular is “rarely noted,” as Laura E. Hein explains, since “attention has been riveted to the

[success] of the iron and steel industry” (1993: 109). Certainly, as I addressed in my introduction, the prevailing image of postwar Japan in official narratives of progress is one of rapid economic growth, with Japan’s economy returning to its prewar highs in terms of GNP by the mid-1950s. In contrast to this, Pitfall documents an unevenness to economic success and social prosperity in postwar Japan, with the mining industry in particular being hard hit by the economic restructuring that occurred during the Reverse Course in the 1950s. Matthew Allen’s research has explored Japan’s postwar mining industry and its communities in detail, as an example of the darker underbelly of Japan’s economic miracle. His book, aptly titled

Undermining the Japanese Miracle, argues that the coal industry in Japan was “like the angel who can no longer beat its wings and fly against the storm of progress in Walter Benjamin’s

Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which left “human debris and their children” in its wake,

“the new poor, the welfare dependants of the present” (Allen 1994: 10). Indeed, as with

Benjamin’s ‘angel of history,’ Pitfall looks back to reveals the wreckage of history belied by

Japan’s postwar paradise of historical progress.28

Allen, among others,29 links the ruination of the mining industry and dispossession of its labourers to a critique of socioeconomic changes in Japan that began in the early 1950s. During

28 Allen’s reference is to Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Paul Klee’s painting, Angelus Novus, in his essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress” (Benjamin 1968b: 257–258). 29 See Allen 1994; Gordon 1993; Hein 1993, 1990; Martin 1961; and Price 2015.

this period, the ‘Reverse Course’ in economic policy overturned many of the labour rights and protections instituted by the Allied occupation in the immediate postwar. In response to the Cold

War and the resulting pressure to reassert capitalist ideology on an international scale, the Allied occupation, wishing to integrate Japan into the effort to contain the spread of communism, altered its approach to Japanese governing at the end of the 1940s, moving away from democratization and demilitarization towards economic growth as an overarching priority. This led to “an austere program of domestic belt-tightening” (Hein 1990: 11) in the 1950s, one usually discussed under the rubric of rationalization (gōrika).30 The 1960 Miike strike in a sense serves as a focal point for the labour crisis that developed out of the economic rationalization policies implemented in the 1950s. Therefore, it is important for us to understand precisely how rationalization impacted the mining industry and its labourers, as we will see that Pitfall’s incorporation of fantasy works as a critique of how rationalization became normalized in 1950s

Japan.

By its very definition, economic rationalization relied on instrumental rationality, prioritizing efficiency and cost-effectiveness over the welfare of labourers. William M. Tsutsui defines it as an “ideology of productivity” that espoused “harmonious labor relations, a compliant working class, and a social consensus that legitimized a managerial, technocratic order” (Tsutsui 1998: 136). Initially, rationalization policy focused on reforming the coal and steel industries and was intended to stimulate economic growth and recovery by increasing

Japan’s international trade competitiveness, investing in new manufacturing technologies, and promoting economic efficiency and productivity. As part of this process, two “Temporary Coal

30 A more precise term would be “industrial rationalization policy” or sangyō gōrika seisaku.

Rationalization Bills” were created in 1952 and 1954 (Allen 1994: 62, 65) in order to pare down costs and keep the industry solvent in the face of lowered demand for coal. Japan had accumulated massive stockpiles of coal during the Korean War (Allen 1994: 62), had turned to cheaper sources of fuel such as petroleum,31 and had shifted focus away from domestic industry towards the development of technologically sophisticated export manufacturing (Hein 1993:

112). Many companies were motivated to cut wages, lay off workers, and downsize their mining operations to meet lowered demands for coal, to maintain productivity, and to compensate for market restrictions imposed by the rationalization bills (Allen 1994: 62–67). This led to a depression in regions where the economy depended on mining, such as the Chikuhō coalfield

(Chikuhō tanden) region in northern Kyūshū where the Miike mine was located.

The negative effects of Japan’s economic austerity plan were felt throughout the 1950s in coal mines across northern Kyūshū. Benjamin Martin summarizes a survey published in 1960 in the Japan Times:

It has been estimated that by 1958 approximately 99 percent of the medium-sized mines in the north Kyushu Chikuho [sic] coal fields had gone out of business either temporarily or permanently, causing unemployment for 32,900 workers while another 22,700 continued to work despite the inability of their companies to pay their wages. (Martin 1961: 26)

The dismissal of 5,738 Mitsui miners in 1953 is notable, as it sparked a six-month-long strike at the Miike mine (Gordon 1993: 381–82); as is Mitsui’s plan to dismiss 2,000 workers at the

Miike mine in 1959, which precipitated the 1960 strike upon which Pitfall was based. Though

31 The SCAP prohibition of petroleum refining, an attempt to handicap any potential attempts to remilitarize Japan, was rescinded in 1949 (Hein 1990: 64).

initial strikes led to some concessions, the 1960 Miike strike marked an abject failure in the union’s resistance to economic change. Andrew Gordon explains that Mitsui was “determined to

‘rationalize’ the mines by strengthening line authority, changing the wage structure, lowering company welfare payments, and ending preferential hiring of worker children. It was also set on dismissing activists and breaking the union” (1993: 383). Pitfall clearly documents this latter process of union busting, which typically involved the creation of a second union endorsed by the company.32 Allen explains the effects of this on the Miike strike in more detail:

Animosity between the [two unions at the Miike mine] developed into all-out war, and there were numerous instances of the groups attacking each other, with the police inevitably siding with the miners from the ‘New’ union. Gradually [Mitsui] was able to increase the relative number of miners in the New union so that only a small percentage of miners in the ‘Old’ union were left to offer resistance to the wage and rationalisation proposals put forward by the company. (Allen 1994: 71)

Management as such was able to replace militant unions with pro-company unions that were complicit in rationalization’s prioritization of productivity, as well as what Gordon describes as its emphasis on “cooperation”: as Gordon explains, rationalization espoused the idea that “unions and workers should participate in the workplace not through activism that challenged management and assumed conflict of interest, but by working flexibly to accept new technology and offering suggestions for improvement through quality control [QC] programs” (Gordon

1998: 132). As such, labour became far more exploitable through a combination of mine closures, mass layoffs, eroded union protections, and shifting union allegiances.

32 The split and creation of a dai ni rōdō kumiai (a second, or ‘breakaway,’ labour union) “arising out of severe factional differences within the union, or at company instigation, or a combination of the two,” was typical of postwar Japanese union politics (Martin 1961: 28; see also Hein 1990: 171).

Rationalization and its focus on productivity also led to compromises in workplace safety

(Gordon 1993: 393), and there was an increase in mining-related workplace injuries and deaths during this period, with an estimated 5,000 deaths in the coalmining region between 1950–60

(Allen 1994: 63).33 The health of miners’ families was also affected, with 93 percent of children belonging to families of jobless miners, according to a survey conducted in 1960, “suffering from skin diseases, bloated bellies caused by malnutrition, and trachoma” (Martin 1961: 26).

Allen also describes a pervasive and legitimized “culture of violence” in the mining communities, “from the day-to-day violence of the overseers, exhorting the miners to work under pain of reprisals, which often meant death in the smaller mines, to the physical intensity that existed intrinsically in the type of work the miners did at the pit face, to the confrontations between the miners’ unions and the police and yakuza in the 1960s” (Allen 1994: 107). Many workers, lacking alternatives, and accustomed to violence as part of the status quo, were willing to risk their lives in these substandard safety conditions.

The release of Pitfall in 1962 thus coincided with the development of industrial rationalization and the concomitant collapse of mining communities in Japan. The third, abandoned mining village represented in Pitfall with its rows of empty, dilapidated boarding houses was not an uncommon sight in the Chikuhō region during this time. In an essay published after the film’s release entitled Heikōsen no aru fūkei (Landscape with Parallel Lines,) Abe writes that these communities were “a special kind of world of death,” one that he says “was once again appealing to me as an author, as if it were releasing a desperate cry” (Abe 1962: 13).

33 Injuries at the Miike mine alone amounted to over 80,000 between 1944 and 1983 (Allen 1994: 85–6).

Abe and Teshigahara both indicated their desire for Pitfall to document this disavowed darker side of industrial rationalization and its effects on mining communities. They explained that the film—in departure from the satirical nature of Abe’s teledrama Rengoku—would be an empirico-historical documentary grounded in concrete events. Therefore, in preparation for

Pitfall, Teshigahara spent several months recording footage on location and documenting the conditions of the northern Kyūshū mining region (Ogi 1962: 8). Abe also emphasized the importance of the film’s setting. Contrasting the original teledrama Rengoku with Pitfall, Abe explained that the film was more grounded in reality and less conceptual because it paid attention to the “background” (haikei). Abe took this term “background” very literally to mean the physical background or landscape. In Pitfall, this meant the landscape of mining villages that served as the setting for the narrative. It was important, he explained, for films like Pitfall to connect characters to their surroundings, in order to give their existence context avoid turning them into ‘stereotypes’: “people cut off from background cannot be said to have ever existed.

Those kinds of people are, like the abandoned background, no more than the fragment of a stereotyped concept” (Abe 1962: 13). Pitfall, Abe stated unequivocally, was “wholly concerned with the pursuit of this background” (Abe 1962: 13), as it was what gave the characters of the film their substance.

Abe, generally speaking, insisted upon grounding the construction of the self in external or physiological origins, and was resistant to the notion that the self has a stable, interior, psychological integrity. He frequently references the materialism of Pavlovian neuro-psychology in his non-fiction writing, for example in “Theory and Practice in Literature” where he writes,

“as is clear from Pavlov’s theory, the soul is subordinate to the flesh, it is nothing other than the movement of matter” (Abe 2013: 26). Dreams for Abe shared a commonality with film in that

both were, in this way, images ‘conditioned’ (in the Pavlovian sense) by material stimuli.

Speaking of dreams, he writes that they are a “false experience [nise taiken]” made up of

“images,” and are only experienced as reality because they are “backed up by physiological things [seiriteki-na mono]” such as “pressure on the hem of one’s nightwear or an unfamiliar noise in one’s ears” (Abe 1979a: 25).34 Much in the same way that Abe describes film and its characters as dependent upon “background,” therefore, dreams are a visual medium shaped and supported by external, contingent physiological stimuli that act on the sleeping dreamer. Films and dreams both have their narratives grounded in something concrete and exterior. In other words, for Abe dreams, like film, aren’t psychological or existential but firmly grounded in the historical, shaped and changed by contingent exterior events and actions.

By adopting an historical documentary form that positioned its characters in a real setting, Pitfall was thus able to bring into focus the reality of workers’ experiences in the mining region of Kyūshū. Nevertheless, despite adopting the form of a historical documentary, it is impossible to ignore the fact that Pitfall remains a ghost story, one that, in critic Ogi Masahiro’s words, doesn’t simply do away with fantasy but instead “embodies” (gushō suru) it in its very documentation of historical reality. “The key point of Pitfall,” Ogi explains in an essay published soon after the film’s release, “was to depict the fantastic symbolism of Abe’s radio play […] embodied in a realistic form in the style of a thorough report on location” (Ogi 1962: 9). It is therefore crucial to identify the precise relation between realism and fantasy in Pitfall in order to understand how the film works as a critique of the labour conditions that it documents.

34 Timothy Iles discusses this passage and provides a longer English translation (Iles 2000: 158).

Though several critics have emphasized Pitfall’s juxtaposition of documentary-like realism with fantasy, I believe that the significance of their relation has often been misinterpreted, with the film’s use of fantasy often being read in an existential or allegorical register separate from the film’s historical purpose and its politics.35 Dore Ashton, for one, writes:

Teshigahara’s seemingly documentary technique, recording the abandoned mining town, is contradicted by the orchestrated appearance of ghosts that function much as a Greek chorus or the chorus in Noh drama. The tension between the camera-eye realism and the fantasy heightens the troubling situation. In real terms the film describes a nasty labor dispute. In allegorical terms it is an exposure of human frailty and psychological desolation. (Ashton 1997: 90)

Ashton thus describes a “tension” or “contradiction” between reality and fantasy, attributing the film’s “allegorical” ghostly elements to abstract concerns regarding the human condition, and the

“camera-eye realism” of its documentary technique to historical and political concerns. Rather than viewing the presence of ghosts and the realism of the documentary as a contradiction, however, I believe that Teshigahara’s and Abe’s commentaries on the film seem to suggest instead that there is an affinity between documentary and fiction that draws into question the very parameters of ‘realism’ itself.

It is in this context that we should interpret the central problem Teshigahara envisioned when creating Pitfall, namely how exactly film as a medium of expression can best document the

35 There is a tendency to see a ‘turn’ in Abe’s work in the 1960s away from overtly political themes stemming from his Communist Party affiliation towards more existential and depoliticized work after his departure from the party. Donald Keene, for instance, describes Abe’s disillusionment with communism after a visit to Czechoslovakia in 1956 (Keene 2003: 78). Nina Cornyetz, however, argues against “the critical tendency to herald the shift in Abe marked by Woman in the Dunes from ‘dogma-driven communist’ to ‘individualist’” (Cornyetz 2007: 61).

reality of miners in postwar Japan. In the essay by Ogi that I referenced above, he quotes commentary by Teshigahara where he explains his feelings after visiting mining villages in

Kyūshū during his research for the film. In these comments, were can observe a tension—not between realism and fantasy but between realism and reality:

When I first saw the location, I thought, can one live here? Of course, this drama was about Abe’s notion of a protest against the black machinery of the world. However, for me the biggest problem here was: to what extent could Japan’s reality [nihon no riariti] be expressed through film’s realism [eiga no riarizumu]? (Teshigahara quoted in Ogi 1962: 8)

Here, Teshigahara couches a prioritization of reality (as opposed to Abe’s allegory of “a protest against the black machinery of the world” in the original teledrama) in a questioning of film’s very ability to document that reality through its realistic form: “to what extent could Japan’s reality be expressed through film’s realism?” Specifically, he questions “realism’s” ability to document the extreme, near-unimaginable reality (“can one live here?”) of life in the mining villages. What Teshigahara suggests, therefore, is that the problem with adapting Abe’s teledrama isn’t simply one of overcoming its conceptual generality and translating its existential metaphors into an historically factual documentary register. Instead, what he suggests is that documenting the reality of labourers in Japan is incomplete unless the very taken-for-grantedness of “realism” as a genre is brought into question.

Teshigahara’s comments after visiting Kyūshū express a notion of documentation wherein “realism” (rearizumu) is removed from “reality” (riariti). Indeed, Ogi supports this interpretation of Teshigahara’s documentary method by explaining that the meaning of Pitfall’s

“realistic form” (riarizumu to iu katachi) should not be taken for granted as representing

“reality” (genjitsu) (Ogi 1962: 9):

“Realism” [riarizumu] […] did not mean to tear away the abstract satirical nature of Abe’s script [for the teledrama Rengoku]. For example, it doesn’t mean uncovering the so-called “material foundation” [sozaitekina shitajiki] of the drama, the original theme of the Coal Miners Union’s “raw” [nama] dispute that underpins the story. Or, for example, it doesn’t mean ripping away the abstract symbolism of the drama’s major lead character the Man in White and rewriting him as a real hitman dispatched by a real [genjitsu] group. (Ogi 1962: 7)

Realism, in other words, did not mean simply peeling away the layers of “abstraction” and artifice to arrive at the “raw” unmediated reality of empirical events and people. Instead, Ogi claims that Pitfall tries “to express a largely fantastic drama in a largely documentary method”

(Teshigahara quoted in Ogi 1962: 8)—meaning that fantasy persisted on the level of a content that was documented through a realistic form. It would therefore be a mistake to view the deployment of ghosts in the film as, thematically speaking, existential or psychological, and contradictory to the film’s historical concern with postwar Japanese labour disputes. Rather, we need to understand that in Pitfall it is a fantasy that is documented as a historical reality. The problem, therefore, is not one of how to disavow the fantastic and create a more historical narrative, or even one of how to juxtapose metaphorical/allegorical elements with historical ones, but rather one of how to properly reorient history in relation to its own fantasies and its own ghosts.

Pitfall’s effectiveness as social critique comes not simply from its documentation of the historical and empirical reality of workers in Japan but from its acute awareness of what was at stake ideologically in shaping the reality of those workers. This is where fantasy comes in to play in Pitfall, as a response to rationalization policies in 1950s Japan: Pitfall incorporates fantasy into the history of mining in postwar Japan in a way that challenges the normalization of austerity politics that dominated Japan in the 1950s and onwards—a narrative of economic

rationalization that naturalized socially regressive austerity policies and legitimized a “culture of violence” towards labourers in mining communities by concealing its own function as ideology. I use ideology here in the Althusserian sense, where ideology “represents individuals’ imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser 2014: 186). Ideology as such is always a kind of fantasy of our real relation of the world that structures our beliefs and the material practices that derive from them; or in other words, our understanding of the ‘real world’ and our relation to it is always produced retroactively through fantasy. This fantasy aspect of postwar reality is what Pitfall exposes in its documentation of the postwar rationalization of the mining industry.

The normalization of economic austerity that began in 1950s Japan was structured around the illusion of its own transparency, which is to say around a fantasy of being self-evident, self- generating, natural, and non-ideological. As we have observed, rationalization legitimized austerity measures by appealing to realism—to the realpolitikal necessity of economic growth and its concomitant necessity for austerity. In response to the Cold War threat of communism, the renewal and expediency of Japan’s economic expansion was framed as a practical necessity, a realistic, natural response to the threat of communist encroachment in Asia. In the global context, this shift in priorities in 1950s Japan was an extension of the US attempt to homogenize global political ideology along capitalist lines. In effect, what was occurring in Japan and globally during this period was a diminishing of ‘reasonable’ political alternatives, and a universalization of capitalist ideology.36

36 It is important to note, however, the rationalization was also at the same time a repetition of the economic and social policies implemented in Japan in the 1920s, which were also then defined as ‘rationalization policies’ (Kelly 1986: 606). As such, rationalization can be understood in the context of both local and global “discursive spaces,” to borrow Karatani Kōjin’s term (see Kōjin 1991).

Rationalization reinforced its reasonableness with a discourse of normality or neutrality: it was “efficient,” “impersonal,” “calculable,” “standardized,” “modern,” “impartial,”

“egalitarian,” and “democratic” (Kelly 1986: 615). Rather than an institutional and discursive apparatus that structures reality, it understood its function as being the mere technocratic management of a given reality (see Hein 1993: 102). Rather than being historically constructed, it framed economic relations in natural, even “biological” terms, wherein industries, like people, possessed “biological life cycle[s]” with beginnings and ends (Hein 1993: 113). As Tomoda

Toshiyuki explains, “the decline of the coal industry [in 1950s Japan] was seen as historical fate

[shukumei]” (Tomoda 2012: 98). In this context, the Miike strike could simply be explained away, as Andrew Gordon explains, as “the dying gasp of an obstructive union in a sunset industry” (1993: 382). In short, rationalization was an ideology that denied its very function as ideology: rather than being one system of making sense of the world, it positioned itself as the only reasonable means of (scientifically, technocratically) managing a national and global crisis.

As such, rationalization in postwar Japan could be compared to what Ernest Mandel says concerning the “functional rationality” of Late Capitalism, that ubiquitous third stage of capitalist development that followed the Second World War, whose ideology consists of “de- ideologization,” whereby economics is reduced to a system of technocratic management and organization (1976: 501).

All of this contributed to a process of what Hein (borrowing Carol Gluck’s terminology) calls a “political denaturing” of economic developments in 1950s Japan (Hein 1993: 102), a naturalization of economic relations that obscured the fact that rationalization was not “an automatic development” resulting from fate, nature, or even biological necessity. What is important to remember, as Hein explains, is that “the acceptance of economic growth as a

primary goal was itself a historical development during the postwar era” (1993: 108) and “a profoundly political act—perhaps the most antidemocratic development in postwar Japanese history” (Hein 1993: 102). Rather than being a natural and necessary response to a fixed series of events leading to a present without any alternative, rationalization was a product of human decisions based on economic policies that responded to changing circumstances, led to unanticipated outcomes, and were constantly being contested by alternative political and social outlooks (Hein 1993: 108). In other words, Japan’s socioeconomic developments during the

1950s were contingent rather than inevitable, historically constructed rather than natural, and a product of ideologically structured systems of belief rather than common sense.37

Pitfall’s radical response to the naturalization of socioeconomics was to estrange rationalization from nature by representing social relations in fantastic terms—by presenting, in other words, the relation between history and fantasy in the form of ideology. “What is represented in ideology,” Althusser writes, is “not the system of real relations governing individuals' existence, but those individuals' imaginary relation to the real relations in which they live” (Althusser 2014: 183). Rather than a simple misrecognition of reality, Althusser here frames ideology as a misrecognition of our relation to reality—which is to say that our access to the real is always one step removed, deferred and retroactively produced through fantasy. This simple shift in focus changes the role of historicism from clearing away false truths and delusions to exposing the truth as fantasy. Rather than objective fact dispelling fantasy, fantasy itself is installed as an objective fact, a material reality of social life. In Pitfall, this insight is expressed by incorporating fantasy into the documentation of historical and material life.

37 For a discussion of “common sense” as ideology, see Cazdyn and Szeman (2011).

Documenting labour developments in 1950s Japan required that ‘documentation’ itself as a record of reality be separated from a discourse of naturalism or universality that rendered its own ideological apparatus transparent. In other words, it was not enough for Pitfall to merely document the ‘reality’ of miners in postwar Japan, but the apparent neutrality and objectivity of documentation itself had to be dissociated from the dehistoricized, realist presumptions of rationalization that dominated contemporary discussions of economic and social change.

There is a parallel to be made here with the way in which Marx, in Capital, dissociates capitalism from its 18th century rationalist pretensions. Teshigahara and Abe both sympathized with Marxism, so this is no arbitrary connection to make. Like them, Marx denaturalizes

Capitalist economics by challenging its naturalist pretences and grounding its material reality in phantasmal processes and affects. This is perhaps most clearly articulated in the first chapter of

Capital, where Marx describes the inherently “mystical character of commodities” (Marx 1887:

41). He writes:

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the products of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table- turning” ever was. (Marx 1887: 41–42)

Through commodification, as Marx elaborates in the first chapter of Capital, a thing transcends the “physical properties” and “material relations” that go into its production and assumes the

“fantastic form” of a magical object with autonomous, immutable, inherent value (1887: 43)— value that appears natural to it rather than being the product of a “historically determined mode of production” (1887: 47). Capitalist social relations are thus imagined to consist of an exchange of reified objects in possession of inherent, universal value, divorced from the historical conditions of their production so as to appear outside of history and unrelated to the concrete labour that went into their making.

Marx thus inverts the typical bourgeois understanding of capitalism as founded upon an emancipation from medieval religious superstition—a stripping away of religion’s “haloes” and

“veils” (Marx 2012: 90) and reduction all life to cold, calculated monetary relations.38 On the contrary, commodity fetishism reveals itself to be very much like religious mysticism: both operate under the illusion that certain products of human activity are “independent beings endowed with life” (Marx 1887: 43). Fantasy as such is installed in the very heart of capitalist life processes as an objective fact, or, as Žižek writes, an “‘objective’ illusion, an illusion inscribed into facts” (Žižek 2006: 171). Althusser’s insight into the nature of ideology is that life is organized around such “objective illusions,” in that our relation to the world is always mediated through ideology (in Lacanian terms, through the Symbolic). Therefore, despite its rationalist pretensions as a disenchantment of life, capitalism grounds social life upon a

38 “The bourgeoisie […] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation […] The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers […] The bourgeoisie has town away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation” (Marx and Engels 2012: 76).

constitutive fantasy, an objective logic whereby the abstraction of labour is positioned at the very centre of its real processes of production and exchange: in the commodities exchanged within the phantasmagoria (literally: ‘ghost in the marketplace.’39) In the commodity, in other words, we have a materialization of the interdependence of fantasy and reality within the historical Abe and Teshigahara strived to document in Pitfall. Where Marx identifies the “real fantasy” at the core of instrumental reason, so too does Pitfall expose the ghosts that haunt Japan’s technocratic system of economic rationalization, estranging Japan’s economic and social policies from the

1950s onwards from their pretentions of naturalism, instrumental reason, and necessity.

The fact that fantasy in Pitfall takes the form of ghostly commodified labouring bodies reflects this Marxist understanding of commodification as literally a ghostly abstraction of labour projected into the object world. It is important to emphasize that both Pitfall and Capital position commodities literally as ghosts, as the haunting return of the subject, now embodied in commodities with their own autonomous “spirit.” The commodity is very literally capitalism’s abstraction of labour in material form, in that in the commodity “human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised” (Marx 1887: 5). Through the commodity, this phantom-like abstraction of labour becomes a thing, or, as Marx writes, a “ghostly concreteness” (gespenstige

Gegenständlichkeit [Marx 1872:13.])40 In this way, ghosts in Pitfall are the spectrality of labour’s commodification made concrete as an objective reality.

39 Credit goes to Graeme Gilloch for this insight into the etymology of “phantasmagoria” (Gilloch 2017: xi).

40 I have translated “gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit” as “ghostly concreteness” instead of referring to the existing English translation of “unsubstantial reality” (Marx 1887: 5) since this not only evokes the parallel with ghosts in Pitfall that I wish to make but is also a more precise translation. I must credit Michael Heinrich for pointing this out, though he translates the phrase as “spectral objectivity” (Heinrich 2012: 49).

This idea that the commodity is a material expression of human labour in the abstract recalls Teshigahara and Abe’s comments about Pitfall being a historicization of the fantastic, or a materialization of the conceptual. Teshigahara’s “physiology of film,” quoting Ogi, involved just such an “embodiment of concepts,” its central tenet being that a concept cannot exist without concrete, material foundations (Ogi 1962: 8). As Ogi writes, “a habitually cherished belief of

Teshigahara was that ‘all concepts have no meaning if they cannot grow legs and run’” (1962:

8). By literally giving legs to the abstraction of labour in the form of ghosts, Teshigahara wished to concretize (literalize) Abe’s metaphor for postwar existence by expressing it as part of a material and historical reality. Pitfall is thus able to give Abe’s allegorical criticism of modern society “legs” in that the ghost literalizes capitalism’s relation to labour as a commodity in concrete form.

This is where I believe we arrive at what is most at stake in the way the film repositions both documentary and fantasy genres: out of this interpenetration of fantasy and reality emerges a ghostly materialism, a physiology of the ghost as a body that exists in a material world within which it is disavowed—as life that isn’t simply unreal, but rather that remains physically present but unseen, and is, in other words, more transparent than absent. The ghost as Pitfall expresses it is an embodiment of the sense in which the postwar narrative of growth and return has absented an entire labour force upon which it was built—and, more generally, it reflects capitalism’s alienation and dispossession of labour in the form of commodification. The key here is the indifference of capitalism, in its reduction of labour to abstract value, to the specificity of concrete labour: it renders its labouring bodies transparent—transparent bodies that return in the form of the commodity—to quote Spivak, “labor-power as commodity is the ghostliness of the body” (Spivak 1995: 73). Pitfall’s ghosts embody the subject’s material relation to capitalism,

which literally renders its labour transparent. If we recall the logic of transparency, of air, we know that it is both “here” and “not here,” passed through as if it were absent while nonetheless remaining present. It is not simply absence, but a presence that behaves as if it were absent, and thus serves as the condition for the possibility of presence-ing. The transparent bodies that circulate unseen within Pitfall are people who remain as invisible.

Incidentally, the terms rengoku (purgatory) and otoshiana (pitfall) both refer to a kind of suspension between worlds—rengoku as an abstract condition of agonizing limbo where people remain, neither here nor there, and otoshiana as a covered pit, a trap, literally ‘a hole one falls in to,’ that remains invisible until one falls inside of it, and within which one is held indiscriminately for some insidious purpose. Indeed, the narrative describes the mines as a kind of hellish trap in which mining communities have fallen, a negative space that is both embedded in and denied by the ‘bright life’ (akarui seikatsu) of postwar Japan.41

This is how the film tries to embody the historical and material conditions of Japan’s precarious postwar labour population. Workers are represented in the film as literally worked to death for the purposes of Japan’s postwar economic recovery, yet they remain largely unseen and disavowed. The existence of these workers was largely obfuscated by the celebratory emphasis on economic recovery and prosperity in the postwar. Yet this recovery and prosperity was nonetheless guaranteed by the labour of these very same workers that it erased. “By the

1950s,” Allen explains, “working conditions in the Chikuho mines had deteriorated to such an extent that it was no longer feasible to consider coal-miners as anything other than human capital

41 Tomoda Toshiyuki notes that the motifs of “pit” and “fall” are hidden throughout the film, for example in the tin of hard candies or “drops” (doroppu) under which the woman who runs the candy shop hides X’s bribery money (Tomoda 2012: 118).

(jinzai)” (Allen 1994: 265). Postwar growth was predicated upon the simultaneously forgotten and continuing existence—in other words, the transparency—of this “capital.” Miners were, through their labour power, the condition for the possibility of a certain accumulation of capital, yet were nonetheless in excess of what capitalism could incorporate into its logic of instrumental rationality. Pitfall’s literally transparent people (dis)embody a disavowal of capitalism’s foundations in labour power. The ghosts in Pitfall are not an allegory for psychological isolation, or even an allegory for labour, but rather a literal, material embodiment of capitalism’s relation to labour and its rendering of commodified labouring bodies transparent.

There is a connection to be made here between the film’s representation of ghostly dead labour in postwar Japan and Achille Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics,” which he describes as

“the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” by colonial-imperialist powers (Mbembe 2003: 14, italics in original).

Taking to its extreme Foucault’s conception of biopolitical control over the body, in the necropolitical “to exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality” (Mbembe 2003: 12).

“Necropolitics” thus provides a vocabulary that can help us further make sense of the ways in which labouring bodies are represented in Pitfall. In Pitfall, the destruction and disposal of worker’s bodies is part of an imperialist economy that can now maximize profit through death or the disintegration of “bodily integrity” (Mbembe 2003: 34–35) rather than the mere

“biopolitical” management of bodies. “Don’t worry, it’s about a job […] Just be glad it’s work”

(Teshigahara 2007: 0:16:47), the protagonist is reassured before being lured in to the pit to be murdered: in one of the film’s most precise dramatizations of the necropolitical, his last job is literally to be killed—though to be sure we also see this same logic repeated at other points in the film, through stock-footage images of miners killed in accidents, their children dying of

malnutrition, people who have, as the miner says, been given 1000 yen then been ‘eaten up’

(2007: 0:08:44). This dismantling of the mining industry and the violence done both to workers and their families was justified within the discourse of rationalization and its prioritization of economic growth.

Pitfall thus dramatizes the disavowal of Japan’s precarious itinerant mining population as a source of commodified labour. In the film, dispossessed and alienated labour literally becomes transparent people; people who, when alive were already like the wandering hungry ghosts of

Japanese folklore (like the miner and his son, traveling between mines in a “hellish […] a slow tailspin to the depths of hell” [Teshigahara 2007: 0:08:52]) and who have now been literalized in their metaphorical ghostliness. To put it more explicitly: the film foregrounds labouring bodies as capitalism’s enabling transparency (its most important commodity), or, in a literal sense, as ghosts. The film’s ghosts literalize capitalism’s requirement for, and disavowal of, a mass disposable workforce, one that capital needs but cannot itself bring into being because labour power, as the sole commodity that inheres within the body, is the one commodity that capitalism cannot produce on its own, and that must therefore be systematically produced through dispossession. Ghosts are the form and substance of this dispossession, subjects that have literally become dispossessed of even their own bodies, ones that nonetheless persist in spectral disavowed form as capitalism’s internal other.

Second Ghost: Archive

The film Hiroshima mon amour illustrates another crucial aspect of the ‘transparent’ ghosts that structured postwar Japan’s spectral reality. Where Pitfall focused on the transparency of mining communities that conditioned Japanese capitalism through their own alienation,

Hiroshima brings into focus the transparent museum spaces that condition historical and

subjective remembrance: specifically, the glass cases and picture frames, acrylic and liquid suspensions, and other mediating transparencies that condition and limit the French woman’s vision as she moves through the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Like the ghosts of labouring miners in Pitfall, these transparent mediums possess a literal “ghostly concreteness,” an absent presence through which she witnesses and thereby attempts to authenticate her knowledge of Hiroshima early in the film. Where in Pitfall, the transparency of ghostly labour is what allows Capital to freely circulate, despite the withdrawal of the very agents responsible for that capital, labouring bodies, here I will argue that it is the transparency of the museum space that facilitates the impression of history as an unproblematic object that is freely circulated, witnessed, and understood.

Hiroshima mon amour concerns a brief but consuming love affair in postwar Hiroshima between a French actress and a Japanese architect, characters who are unnamed in the film.42

Having come to Japan to play a part as a nurse in a documentary, the French woman attempts to prepare herself for the role by visiting the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, visiting a hospital, watching the newsreels, and, as she insists, generally seeing “everything” there is to see concerning the bombing of Hiroshima (Duras 1961: 15). In a sense, her research for her film role within Hiroshima mon amour mirrored Resnais’ research for Hiroshima mon amour itself, which, as I will discuss in more detail later in this chapter, involved trips to Japan to scour for archival materials. However, just as Hiroshima transformed as it was being produced from being

42 As I indicated in the introduction, the female protagonist is referred to in the screenplay as “elle,” “la femme” or “la Française” (“she,” “the woman,” or “the French woman,”) and she is referenced in my thesis either as “she,” “her,” or as “the French woman.” Similarly, the male protagonist is referred to in the screenplay as “lui,” “l’homme,” or “le Japonais” (“he,” “the man,” or “the Japanese man.”) In my thesis I will refer to him either as “he,” “him,” or as “the Japanese man.”

a straightforward documentary to becoming fictionalized account, so too does her own experience bleed documentary research into personal and subjective experience. Hiroshima becomes shrouded in her own personal history, blending with her own memories of Nevers, her hometown in France, as she attempts to come to terms with her own experiences of loss after the war: her scandalous love affair with a German soldier, his death, and her subsequent disownment, confinement, and mental anguish. Through her present-day affair with the Japanese lover, she revisits these memories, and he becomes inscribed, like the history of Hiroshima, into her own private history of suffering. As in Pitfall, the autonomy and objectivity of the present becomes clouded by the overlapping presence of ghosts, interrupting its self-sameness and stability. In her screenplay for the film, Duras calls it a “false documentary that will probe the lesson of Hiroshima more deeply than any made-to-order documentary” (Duras 1961: 10). By breaching the barrier between two singular tragedies, the film aims to document the un- documentable, and re-frame history as a negotiation between personal and collective experience, and an often contingent, unexpected product of the dialogue between disparate times and places.

The central crisis of Hiroshima mon amour can be described as the possibility or impossibility of the French woman’s act of ‘seeing’ Hiroshima. This is established in some of the film’s first lines of dialogue:

Him: “You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.”

Her: “I saw everything. Everything”.

When she says that she has seen “everything,” her immediate reference is to the photographs, reconstitutions, news reels, documentary footage, as well as the physical remains, melted bottle- caps, mutilated iron, burned hair, preserved flesh “still in the bloom of its agony” (Duras 1961:

17), among other exhibits that she sees on display at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. In 85

this scene, as she delivers her monologue to the Japanese man describing what she saw in the

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, the camera tracks slowly across various exhibited objects she saw during her visit. The museum as such plays a crucial role in the French woman’s reconstruction of Hiroshima and authentication of experience. For her, this space serves not simply as a repository of dead objects, but of living experience, an archive of devastation through which she believes she is able to ‘witness’ the bombing of Hiroshima.

The French woman insists that her vision constitutes knowledge of an experience that she nevertheless has not witnessed firsthand. As Kyo Maclear says, “for the French actress, history is obvious, undeniable. The burned iron, the human skin, the shattered stones: it is all there in the newsreel footage. [. . .] Through rote remembrance, a recitation of visual evidence encountered in a once-infernal city, she has emotionally and cognitively incorporated the atomic bomb experience” (Maclear 2003: 238). Her witnessing mirrors a cinematic illusion of being able to witness the event itself in its unmediated presence—not to merely have ‘seen’ everything through the mediating and compromised position of the camera/eye, but to immediately feel the heat of the blast, as if she had returned to the very origin of the atomic bombing: “I was hot at

Peace Square. Ten thousand degrees at Peace Square. I know it. The temperature of the sun at

Peace Square. How can you not know it?” (Duras 1961: 17).43 She herself describes how she is drawn into this scene of devastation: “the illusion is so perfect that tourists cry” (1961: 18).

Suddenly, the museum space seems to disappear entirely: the camera, which is tracking alongside a row of mannequins in glass cases, suddenly transitions with a rapid swish pan to footage from Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima (1953), a film dramatizing the aftermath of

43 Kaja Silverman has argued similarly in “Cure by Love” that “to look in the way the French woman seeks to look at Hiroshima [. . .] means to apprehend what was as if it still were” (2003: 218).

Hiroshima’s bombing (00:07:15, Figure 1). She claims that this film is “as authentic as possible”

(1961: 18), though it is ultimately another reconstruction, like the mannequins in the museum, except rather than a static preservation they appear to have ‘come to life’ on screen, in a kind of forgetting of the museified condition in which they are preserved in their glass containers.

The distinction between ‘first-hand’ or ‘eye-witnessing’ of the event and the collection of archival evidence in the museum space collapses. Through looking, it is as if the past could be made present again, that the French woman can see through the eyes of the dead—mannequins become people, reproductions become originals—an experiential slippage akin to what Derrida refers to as an “archive fever,” an “outbidding” (surrenchère) of the archive’s partial truth to arrive at the thing itself: “the archê then appears in the nude, without archive. It presents itself and comments on itself by itself. ‘Stones talk!’ In the present” (Derrida 1996: 92–93). Derrida notes the irony here: that it is right when the archaeologist appears to have exorcised the phantom traces of the thing itself, and reached a more properly true base of perception, the illusion of presence, immediacy, of the dead (stones) coming to life, and speaking, constitutes another ‘delusion’. There is a simultaneous exorcism of ghosts and a new belief in ghosts. The delusion repeats itself. In escaping from the haunting of the archive, one is haunted again by the illusion of being in the immediate base of perception—an illusion that the Japanese man reminds us of when he challenges her claim of absolute vision with an absolute denial: “You saw nothing at Hiroshima. Nothing.” In doing so, he makes an obvious point: she was not there, she was in

Paris, and before that in Nevers, suffering her own loss, the death of her German lover, a scandal for which she is shunned, shorn of her hair, and locked away in a cellar by her parents, where she descends into ‘madness,’ a mourning which takes on the form of a singular attachment to the memory of her dead lover.

The slippage of difference and displacement in the museum space elides the role that the museum itself plays in the construction of memory or memorialization. Lisa Yoneyama has explained in her book Hiroshima Traces that the Memorial Peace Park in which the Museum is located, as an official site of memory, does not simply preserve ‘genuine’ archival evidence that works to authenticate one’s understanding of the past, but functions as a discursive space that curates, contains, and controls memory, minimizing painful reminders of Japan’s continuing imperialist legacy and producing new narratives of nuclear victimology, peace, and postwar recovery and capitalist progress. “Historical ‘reality,’” she argues, “can only be made available to us through the mediations of given categories of representation and processes of signification.

We must therefore suspend the belief that past events and experiences can automatically manifest themselves and their meanings prior to discourse” (Yoneyama 1999: 32). By eliding the museum space’s importance in the construction of memory and history, we risk depoliticizing that meaning and obscuring the nationalistic, political, or ethnographic motivations behind the production of historical narratives.44

Hiroshima mon amour and its French protagonist mostly focus on the museum as a space of visual authentication. The museum space gives vision and memory an embodied quality, organizing memory in a physical configuration through which the observer must navigate peripatetically; yet, it is significant that Duras notes in the screenplay that “we see what she has

44 It is interesting to note that both the Miike Mine in Kyūshū and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park are significant sites of Japanese national heritage—with the Miike Mine being designated part of a UNESCO “World Industrial Heritage” site in 2015, and with the Memorial Park containing numerous heritage monuments, including the UNESCO-recognized Atomic Bomb (Genbaku) Dome. Echoing Yoneyama’s statements about Hiroshima’s memorialization, Matsuura Yusuke explains that “in industrial heritage production [such as Miike’s Unesco designation], there occurs a process of conscious memory selection, through which the positive aspects of industrial heritage are celebrated, while the negative ones are neglected and marginalized” (Matsuura 2019: 314). Matsuura turns to “vernacular histories” of Miike (interviews with ex-miners, for example) to present a less homogeneous historicization of the region and challenge the celebratory narrative of Japan’s industrialization process.

seen” (1961: 3) though “we never see [her] seeing” in any of the museum shots, and the camera remains “coldly objective” (1961: 17). In these scenes where she describes her witnessing of

Hiroshima, her embodiment as a witness is obscured, and her vision achieves a sort of abstraction and ‘objectivity’ (a ‘transparency.’) Though the Japanese man challenges this vision

(“You saw nothing at Hiroshima. Nothing”) he does not actually problematize this privileging of vision. It is not, for her, that she is wrong about vision as a measure of authenticity, but that she was not physically present at ‘ground zero’ to see. He shares with her the idea that complete understanding is possible only if one has ‘seen’ ground zero. Both, in other words, accept that vision is a measure of authenticity, and accept ‘ground zero’ as the place that needs to be witnessed. Though they disagree over whether she has ‘seen’ Hiroshima, the prioritization of

‘seeing the thing itself’ is never challenged, and they retain the belief that seeing possesses a certain transparency and unmediatedness.

Yet this impulse to minimize one’s presence in the museum space and universalize vision as a measure of authenticity is perpetually thwarted by the film itself. Our attention is drawn away from the illusion of an immediate base of contact and back to the archive, to the glass itself as an agent conditioning sight. This is accomplished, in several shots, by drawing attention to the reflections and distortions that appear in the transparent surfaces through which the French woman forms her visual memory of Hiroshima: human flesh is encased in acrylic and immersed preserving fluid, photographs are behind glass frames, glass cases house various mannequins

(wax figures) in burned clothing, and the fuselage of an aircraft has its interior workings revealed through transparent acrylic glass (Figure 2). As the camera pans across the museum space, its angle and the lighting create distortions and reflections in these transparent surfaces. For example, the camera cuts to a close-up of the image of a man whose back is covered in radiation

burns, and the reflections on the glass surface of the picture frame are conspicuously foregrounded—a reminder to the viewer that we are not simply witnessing this referent but witnessing the material conditions of its archival storage (Figure 3).

Though the glass creates the illusion of immediacy in so far as what is behind it appears to be at hand’s reach, access remains necessarily mediated through an archive that the French woman herself recognizes is composed solely of “reconstructions, for want of something else”

(1961: 17). Resnais also acknowledges this in a letter to Duras in August 1958: the wax figures in the museum “cannot be touched, as they are behind glass […] [C]an she not say that these mannequins have been put behind glass to prevent tourists from touching them, since ‘some make the gesture (of wanting, of trying) to touch the wax?’” (Minato and de Navacelle 2008:

72). In a sense, all the preserved archival evidence and reconstructions in the museum give the effect of bringing the dead back to life, of making the dead ‘undead,’ like the immortalized human flesh encased in acrylic, yet the glass intervenes, preventing the immediacy of contact that would fully bring the dead back to life, ‘in the flesh.’ Her contradiction here is in being able to touch and feel the dead even if they are untouchable, behind glass. This contradiction evokes the delusion Derrida calls the ‘archive fever’: the feverish impulse to preserve the thing itself which is at the same time predicated upon its destruction, its absence or forgetting.

The cause of this ‘fever,’ which is the French woman’s fever, consists of two conflicting desires: one to witness “truth” in the archive, the other to overcome the archive in order to unearth the thing itself, which embodies a more “complete truth” than that possessed by the archive, a “complete truth” wherein stones speak in their own tongue: “the origin then speaks by itself [...] ‘Stones talk!’ In the present” (Derrida 1996: 92–93). Derrida speaks of the ‘truth of delusion,’ in contrast to this ‘complete truth,’ as “the spectre of the truth which has thus been

repressed” (1996: 87). Derrida’s example, Hanold the archaeologist’s delusion in Wilhelm

Jensen’s novel Gradiva, constitutes a spectral truth.45 Hanold travels to Pompeii to find the ghost of Gradiva, yet his desire to find Gradiva is actually his displaced desire to recover his childhood friend, Zoe Bertgang, with whom he used to play, the memory of whom he has replaced with this specter, Gradiva, whom he imagines lived and died in Pompeii over eighteen hundred years ago, in 79 AD. He chases after this Pompeian specter, to find her flesh and blood, to re-unite her foot with her footprint, in effect to dispel her specter, to arrive at a Gradiva rediviva. The French woman, too, chases the specter of her dead German lover by tracing his footprints in the ashes of another tragedy, the bombing of Hiroshima. She, too, looks for his ghost in the flesh of a

Hiroshima rediviva.

There irony, however, is that right there when she-as-archeologist appears to have exorcised the ghost—overcome the illusory images of the archive and reached a more properly true base of perception—the illusion of the presence of the dead coming to life and being seen in the flesh constitutes another act of haunting. There is a simultaneous exorcism of ghosts and a new belief in ghosts. The delusion repeats itself. In escaping the haunting of the archive, she is haunted again by the illusion of the presence of the ‘real thing’—just as she is haunted, driven mad even, in her cave/cellar by the presence of her dead German lover. She drinks her own blood, blood that she loved “since I had tasted yours” (Duras 1961: 55; Resnais 1959: 0:47:30).

Drinking his blood, which is her blood, is her attempt to return to a corporeal experience of his death, to bring his death to life, not only in the flesh but deeper, in the blood. Put differently, we can say that she herself becomes a ghost, anachronistically travelling back to haunt Hiroshima,

45 Derrida is also playing here with Sigmund Freud’s own interpretation of Jensen’s Gradiva in his “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva.” See Freud 1959.

believing she has returned to the immediate base of perception that is ground zero (“I was hot at

Peace Square. Ten thousand degrees at Peace Square [Duras 1961: 17; Resnais 1959: 0:06:10]).

However, this is only one side of the French woman’s desire: there is also her desire to see nothing, to preserve her memory by refusing to reconstitute the past, refusing to cheapen it by bringing it into tangibility, intelligibility, as a “three-penny story” (Duras 1961: 80). The aporia of the glass cases housing the specimens on display at the Peace Memorial Museum literalizes a logic of displacement—a logic of transparency—that governs her desire: the glass is a condition for the possibility for ‘witnessing’ the event, yet this condition is only sustained by a displacement and inaccessibility—to actually touch the mannequins, the preserved flesh, the melted metal, would be to render them lifeless. Her desire to ‘preserve’ her story (as if encasing its fragile flesh in glass) is also forked in this way, paradoxical, mad, feverish, torn between life and an archival afterlife. It is, as both a desire to see the image and a desire to pierce it and drink its blood, to bring it to life and to kill it, a simultaneous avowal and disavowal of the archive. Did

Resnais’ own reluctance to film a documentary about Hiroshima stem from a reluctance to accept the transparency of the tangible, a reluctance to profess that we can not only ‘see everything’ but feel the absolute presence of Hiroshima through the ‘transparency’ of the film?

Was he afraid, like the French woman, that by showing the story of Hiroshima, it would become a three-penny story, obliterated by being brought into the field of cinematic ‘gaze’? Duras also expresses a concern regarding film’s transparency: like Teshigahara and Abe, she rejects the production of a generalized “made-to-order documentary,” “just one more made-to-order picture”: it must remain a “personal story” (1961: 10–11). Its power to ‘transmit’ Hiroshima lies therefore in its reluctance to render Hiroshima transparent, unmediated, filtering it instead through the spectral truth of the ‘personal story,’ the experience of the other.

Foregrounding the transparent glass surfaces of the museum through which the French woman sees and thus recalls (remembers, resurrects) experiences Hiroshima thus gives material expression to the central problem of vision. To borrow Marx’s phrase regarding the commodity, it is through glass’s transparency that Hiroshima mon amour gives the limits of specular representation themselves a ghostly concreteness. Returning to our definition of transparency at the beginning of this chapter, we recall that it embodies the concept of absent-presence in concrete form: a transparent thing is both here and not here; here in that it is present to facilitate the possibility of that which it holds in place or suspends; but not here in that it withdraws so that it can be traversed—a withdrawal that, as Irigaray writes, is itself forgotten, so as to appear as if there is no transparency there at all. This withdrawal (or double withdrawal) is, as Luce Irigaray says of air, the condition for the possibility of presence: things appear through it only through its withdrawal, and they appear to be unmediated because this withdrawal is itself forgotten. In this way, what is concretized here in the transparent surfaces that mediate the French woman’s vision are the conditions that enable sight by themselves remaining unseen—the conditions through which sight appears unconditioned and transparent and our scopic knowledge of the world appears self-sufficient, in so far as those conditions remain invisible, exceed visibility and in doing so enable vision. Her assertion of having ‘seen’ Hiroshima brings into sharp focus this aporia of sight: had she truly been present to ‘see’ Hiroshima, she would be dead; and were she alive to assert her act of witnessing, she would not have been there to witness it. In this way, she transforms herself into a ghost, by erasing the impossible presence of her own body in the witnessing of Hiroshima; and this is an extreme, literal example of the very spectrality inherent to the process of ‘seeing’: as Cathy Caruth writes in her analysis of the film, “the act of seeing, in the very establishing of a bodily referent, erases, like an empty grammar, the reality of an event.

Within the insistent grammar of sight […] the body erases the event of its own death” (Caruth

1996: 69). Not only must the “bodily referent” be killed, but its very death must be erased, effectively transforming it into a ghost, suspended in a transparent afterlife.

If it seems a stretch to think that ‘glass’ and the problem of its transparency plays a central role in the film, we might also recall that the French woman’s memory of Nevers is also conditioned by a glass object, the marble she discovers while confined in a cellar by her parents, ashamed of her scandalous affair the German soldier, after the war. While she describes this experience to the Japanese man, we see a marble roll down the stairs into the cellar (1:00:33), clear enough that the light passes through to reveal the colored veins of glass that swirl inside like “brightly colored rivers,” as Duras writes in the notations to the screenplay (Duras 1961:

91). Carol Mavor compares this marble to the ones that Proust describes in the first volume of

Temps Perdu: “They had the transparency and mellowness of life itself” (Proust 1992: 572).

Indeed, this is what is promised by the marble’s “brightly colored rivers”: the ability to consume life itself—its jouissance—in the raw, absolutely transparent, without artifice or mediation.

Duras writes that for the French woman “summer was inside the marble” (Duras 1961:

91). Within it, she sees a memory through which she returns to the world of the living. And yet,

Duras also claims that this marble “posed an insoluble problem” (1961: 91): the memory, event, or happiness remains contained within an impenetrable yet transparent glass. Hence, though she placed the marble it in her mouth, she “didn’t bite” (Duras 1961: 91; at 1:00:45). Instead, she plays with the marble, throwing it and retrieving it, like Freud’s grandson playing the game of fort/da with a wooden spool. Freud explains in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that children will play similar games of deliberate loss and retrieval in order to re-stage, through a surrogate object, the disappearance and return of the lost other (their mother) and thereby master the experience of loss. The marble that falls into the French woman’s cellar, which belongs to children outside,

serves for her in this way as a kind of surrogate for the thing itself, what Lacan would call the objet petit a: an object that stands in the place where what Lacan calls das Ding, the object in its brute reality, cannot stand: a semi-transparent object that preserves the thing precisely by holding it at a distance from us. The originary lost object is preserved within the objet petit a but is also in an important sense produced by it: it was never there in the first place, was always already gone, absent, created, paradoxically, by its own replacements, the partial objects that sustain the illusion of the thing through barring access to it. The marble thus serves as a semi-transparent surface through which her lost object, the colours trapped inside the marble, is both barred and produced. Put in slightly different terms, we can say that this thing is only ever accessible through its distortion, its presence conditioned by the transparent barrier that enables its visibility while also necessarily blocking access to it. Nothing in itself, inherently spectral, its existence is constructed retroactively through the glass, which defers its total presence, the spectres of spectres. As Žižek explains, the object is only accessible “in a partial, distorted form, as its own shadow—if we cast a direct glance at it we see nothing, a mere void” (Žižek 2005: 95).

Hiroshima provides a literal analogy: “The shot of a shadow, ‘photographed’ on stone, of someone killed at Hiroshima” (1961: 23). Atomic bombing thus expresses a logic of negation synonymous with that of film: it radiates a light that destroys flesh and bone but leaves shadows on stones, like a negative image left upon an emulsion. We only see the original through this negative image, this transparency or emulsion, or these shadows on stone.

Carol Mavor interprets the insolubility of the marble as a marker of Hiroshima’s un- mournability. For the French woman, the summer contained within the marble is obscenely regenerative in a way that parallels the perverse “extraordinary vigor” with which flowers “rose again from the ashes” of Hiroshima (Duras 1961: 19). For her, this regeneration constitutes a

betrayal of memory, much as for Derrida mourning as a form of consolation violates the insistent return of the ghost: to mourn, to bury the dead, means “to ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead” (Derrida

1994: 9). She fears that making her trauma fully legible would constitute an act of betrayal, a form of trespass against the dead. Kristeva frames this betrayal in alimentary terms that echo the

French woman’s refusal to bite into the marble: mourning is a kind of “melancholy cannibalism,” says Kristeva, a “passion for holding within the mouth […] the intolerable other that I crave to destroy so as to better possess it alive. Better fragmented, torn, cut up, swallowed, digested . . . than lost” (Kristeva 1989: 12). The French woman’s refusal to bite into the marble, to merely play with it at the surface, can be interpreted as a resistance to this kind of cannibalistic act of mourning, and a refusal to abandon the lost object of her desire. As she tells her story to the Japanese man, she laments that through her rehabilitation she has begun to forget the German man, and that in telling his story it becomes, when told, a mere trifle, a “three penny story”

(1961: 77). Her worst fear is that her memory will become ordinary, communicable, soluble. As

Kaja Silverman writes, “she related the story of her first love to no one, lest it fade like a ghost in the light of day” (Silverman 2003: 34). The marble, with its transparent glass that both suspends her desire and distances her form it, embodies this problem: to bite into the marble is an act that would release the desire contained within it, but at the same time removing it from its contained, rarefied atmosphere of memory and exposing it to the everyday would destroy it. As long as what she desires remains within the glass it is protected. If broken open and consumed, it disappears. Its very accessibility is sustained by its inaccessibility. For the ghost to be exorcised, the glass broken, means an “outbidding” of the very archive that enables its visibility.

Hiroshima mon amour is haunted by material referents that remain unseen in their conditioning of the visible. The film as such produces a sort of resistance to simple visual fidelity, unhinging the illusion of being there alongside the original referent; and in doing so, it also suggests a kind of new fidelity to the transparency of the frame that both conditions our vision and serves as its representational limit. The glass in a way articulates the collapse of the binary opposition between “I saw everything” and “you saw nothing,” between absolute presence and absolute absence. At once, glass is a transparent barrier that enables our ability to witness Hiroshima and draws attention to our own compromised ability to witness it absolutely.

It suggests, in other words, that our understanding of the event is in a way conditioned upon a materiality that holds it in a particular place, whether it be a physical frame, a camera frame, a narrative construction, or a body that sees.

Third Ghost: Film

The absent-presence of such transparent materialities (of labour, of vision) are reinforced in each film on a structural level. Both films, through the ghostly concreteness of labouring bodies, or of mediating glass surfaces, introduce corporeality into the visual, a corporeality that both conditions and limits the visual field in fundamental yet invisible ways. We can interpret these ghostly presences that populate each film as a kind of literalization of the spectral “film” or

“transparency” that separates and conditions the relation between object and viewer in cinema.

Hiroshima mon amour and Pitfall each draw attention to the structure of film as a medium of representation. Thus, the third and final ghostly transparency that I want to note is that of film itself.

Film is, literally speaking, transparent: a clear emulsion of many particles suspended on a transparent base through which light is able to pass. The moving image, moreover, is produced

through an alternation of absence and presence: composed of intermittent frames, typically 24 per second, film moves through the projector separated by regular, almost imperceptible instances of imagelessness as light is shuttered. In this way, the illusion of continuity and solidity—what Deleuze calls the “movement-image,” the sense of immediate and natural movement crucial to realist cinema (Deleuze 1986: 2)—is conditioned by a kind of porosity, a lack of image or solidity. In other words, the illusion of a natural, unmediated, continuous image is sustained by the transparency of a film medium that has to withdraw in order for the illusion to be sustained: if attention is drawn to the materiality of the transparent film base, through uneven exposure, scratches, or changes in framerate, the transparency of the image is threatened.

Therefore, transparency serves in film once again as the condition for the possibility of presence through its own withdrawal from presence. The materiality of film has to withdraw for the illusion that the image is present to be sustained. However, both Hiroshima mon amour and

Pitfall foreground the materiality of film in a way that threatens this withdrawal. This is most strongly expressed through each film’s use of stock footage.

In both films we find the use of documentary footage and newsreels. Near the beginning of Pitfall, over the protagonist’s monologue describing the hellishness of his life as a miner,

Teshigahara splices several stock footage scenes of miners at work, along with their families, malnourished children, dilapidated living quarters, dead bodies, and the wounded being rushed out on stretchers (Figures 4 and 5). Similarly, early in Hiroshima mon amour, over the French woman’s monologue describing what she has “seen” in Hiroshima, we are shown footage of victims of the atomic bombing, images of flattened ruins, bandaged survivors, burn victims and those suffering from radiation poisoning or birth defects, as well as newsreels of a May Day protest from 1952 against Japan’s remilitarization (Figure 6). In both films, documentary footage

is used ostensibly to communicate traumatic collective histories of violence and resistance. No doubt both film-makers felt that in part it was necessary to defer representation of these traumatic events to first-hand visual testimony and to resist, in a sense, “memorializing” the event, translating and assimilating a history of loss that is fully legible, interpretable, and transmissible. Indeed, as was mentioned above, Teshigahara expressed doubt at being able to represent the near-unimaginable reality of miners in Japan (“can one live here?” [Ogi 1962: 8]) and similarly Duras writes in her screenplay that it is “impossible to talk about Hiroshima. All one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima” (1961: 9). Rather than through overtly fictional representations, each filmmaker relies on stock footage to represent the events, as if each filmmaker is relinquishing their legitimacy to speak for each event, as if only these visual artifacts from an originary ground zero of representation bear testimony to this history. Nevertheless, we will see that in fact their usage of this footage, on the contrary, works to challenge the very legitimacy of the camera as a source of objective authenticity or authentic witnessing.

In the screenplay for Hiroshima mon amour, we are told that “Resnais brought back a great number of documents from Japan” that were used in the final “cutting of the film” (Duras

1961: 17), including many of the shots in the museum, the hospital, and other scenes that are shown over the film’s opening dialogue between the French woman and the Japanese man. In fact, the original film was to be a short commissioned documentary, and Resnais had collected much of this archival footage for that purpose.46 The film also incorporates footage from the

46 The idea to make Hiroshima mon amour a documentary was later abandoned—Resnais explains that he did not want to simply make another documentary, after having filmed Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), a documentary on the concentration camps, in 1955 (see Monaco 1979).

documentary The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1946), a scientific documentary directed by Itō Sueo. Though it is considered to be the first major documentary film dealing with the atomic attacks on Japan,47 it was (or several distinct prints of it were) long- suppressed—confiscated and classified by the United States, clandestinely hidden from the

Occupation Government by the Nichiei filmmakers in Japan, surreptitiously deposited into the

U.S. National Archives for public consumption, censored by the Japanese government—and it remained unscreened for years.48 Because of these circumstances, the film acquired the label

‘maboroshi’ or ‘phantom’ atomic bomb film, a term which, as Abé Mark Nornes explains in his extensive treatment of this film, describes “an object whose existence is known but whose location remains a mystery” (Nornes 2003: 193). When parts of this ‘phantom’ film were made more readily available in the 1950s after the suppression of the US Occupation, portions were taken and repurposed by several other filmmakers, including Kamei Fumio49 and Alain Resnais, for use in their own films (Nornes 2003: 216).

The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was filmed in collaboration with Ministry of Education’s (Monbushō’s) Special Committee to Study the Damage of the

Atomic Bomb (Nornes 2003: 195), whose interest was in recording the scientific effects of the bomb, and so it is appropriate that the documentary places a strong emphasis on being objective

47 The first film on the atomic attacks was a newsreel produced by NHK International, “Nippon News, No. 257” (September 22, 1945).

48 Parts of a silent, incomplete copy of the film that had been hidden in Japan by its filmmakers were first used publicly in a newsreel produced by Asahi News in 1953. The more complete, non-silent copy of the print was returned to Japan by the American Government in 1967, though scenes depicting human victims were censored by the Japanese government in domestic screenings. For more on the twists and turns involved in the history of this film’s dissemination, see Nornes 2003: 243–4.

49 Kamei Fumio incorporated parts of this documentary into his film Ikite ite yokatta (It’s Good to Be Alive, 1956). See Nornes 2003: 216.

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and scientifically accurate. Nornes explains that the film is “a cold, hard examination of the effects of the bombs from a ruthlessly scientific point of view” (Nornes 2003: 204). Its filmmakers, he explains, “opted for the ideology-less, objective pose of the science film” rather than “the full-throated purging of anger” (2003: 191). As a “science film,” or kagaku eiga, it thus

“represented the extreme end of the approach that makes the direct, scientific representation of reality an uncompromising value” (Nornes 2003: 207). Nornes describes how this scientific aspect was reinforced in the film through the depiction of “scientific teams walking through the rubble, taking measurements, picking flowers, peering into microscopes” and by a narrator who speaks “in the strange, unnervingly technical language of specialists” (Nornes 2003: 209).

Several critics have, for this reason, condemned the film for its inhuman lack of emotion, for example Tsurumi Shunsuke, who writes that “there is no attempt in [this film] to ‘think from within the wounds’ and to apply the lessons of human suffering” (quoted in Nornes 2003: 211).

In this way, we can argue that this documentary projected a scientific objectivity that emphasized the absolute indifference of the filmic apparatus as an objective tool of scientific observation.

Nevertheless, none of the scenes of clinical observation in the Hiroshima documentary were selected for inclusion by Resnais in Hiroshima mon amour. If we analyze the footage that

Resnais selected, we can see that they appear to have been chosen almost as if to draw attention to the very compromised quality of film itself as a scientific, objective, transparent record: as the camera pans shakily across the devastated ruins of Hiroshima (00:07:53), for example, the image flickers with irregularities and overexposed frames, and dust, watermarks, and scratches put the surface of the film itself into relief (Figure 7). These material traces, ‘scratches’ in the film’s transparent surface, brings attention to film’s emulsion as, in a very literal sense, what Laura

Marks calls the “skin of the film,” which she describes as “a metaphor to emphasize the way film

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signifies through its materiality” and “the way vision itself can be tactile, as though one were touching a film with one’s eyes” (Marks 2000: xi). We are drawn, in this way, into a tactile experience of film in which the materiality of film itself as a surface—a marble whose reflections have put into relief the scratched surface of its own body—works against the scientific ‘transparency’ of these documentary artifacts.

During Hiroshima mon amour’s display of documentary footage (both those taken by

Resnais as well as those from the “phantom” Hiroshima documentary), it therefore significant to note that the Japanese man and the French woman are debating the possibility/impossibility of witnessing through images (newsreels, documentaries, and photographs): “She tells him that she has seen everything in Hiroshima. We see what she has seen. It’s horrible. And meanwhile his voice, a negative voice, denies the deceitful pictures, and in an impersonal, unbearable way, he repeats that she has seen nothing at Hiroshima” (Duras 1961: 8). In this way, the very moment

Resnais seems to be relinquishing authority to the documentary image, he also questions, through this voiceover, the very transparency of those images as records of the bombing. In much the same was as the French woman fears her story will become a “three penny story” if the glass surface (of the marble, the display case, etc.) ceases to serve as a resistance to visual fidelity, Duras herself expresses a distrust of the documentary with its “deceitful pictures” as a source of absolute legibility: she warns against Hiroshima becoming “just one more made-to- order picture” (1961: 10); it must remain a “personal story,” not some generalized “made-to- order documentary” (1961: 10). Rather than a depersonalized and objective record of the history of Hiroshima, she wishes instead to record a subjective history of personal loss, a documentary that is necessarily tied up in the physicality of human experience. Hiroshima mon amour must

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serve, she explains, as an anti-documentary, or “false documentary” (1961: 10), one within which the filmic gaze is materialized and understood as an embodied experience.

This embodiment of filmic experience is literally expressed by the camera itself as an object that mediates vision, for example in the documentary footage Resnais shot of the museum, used at the beginning of the film as the French woman describes her visits there to the Japanese man. This footage is shot in a way that seems to insist upon estranging the mechanical gaze of the camera-eye from the eyes of the viewer of Hiroshima. As mentioned above, in her screenplay directions Duras makes it explicit that “we never see her seeing” in any of these shots, and that the camera is to remain “coldly objective” (1961: 17). In one sense, this seems to be adopting an objective visual rhetoric akin to The Effects of the Atomic Bomb. However, by intentionally distancing the camera-eye from the French woman as an immediate observer, it is also in an important sense differentiating itself from that film’s use of first-hand observers to authenticate the filmic gaze—in a sense framing the camera-eye as a mere extension of on-site recording.

Moreover, in many shots of the museum the camera is positioned at an unusually low vantage point and pans with a deliberate slowness and regularity of movement that, rather than producing a sense of the image’s transparency and naturalness, seems to instead render its detached objectivity unnatural—it seems instead to suggest a kind of mechanical regularity distinct from organic vision, detached from the supposed naturalness of the human eye, as well as the supposed naturalness of the documentary camera-eye gaze (Figure 8). Through this process (akin somewhat to the Brechtian alienation effect), the viewer is made to acknowledge the presence of the camera itself as a mediating agent, one that is typically erased or that withdraws in the production of a transparent visual record.

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Much like Resnais, in researching for Pitfall Teshigahara spent time on location in northern Kyūshū, as mentioned earlier. Teshigahara, also like Resnais, was primarily known before Pitfall as a documentarian, having made films on Hokusai, Tokyo, and ikebana.50 It would be a mistake to ignore the experimental techniques that Teshigahara employed in his earlier films, yet in Pitfall—which, as we recall, Teshigahara called a combination of documentary and fantasy—we see a more overt subversion of the documentary form, one that is in line with Abe’s own challenge to “reportage” throughout the 1950s (elaborated upon in the next chapter). In

Pitfall, fiction and reality overlap in ways we have already discussed, in order to challenge the hegemonic reality of Capitalism in post-war Japan and its disavowal of the ghostly labouring bodies that support it. This concern is reflected on a formal level as well, by bringing into relief film itself as a means of documenting reality. The clips of documentary footage used in the film are noticeably, jarringly even, of a different material quality than the rest of the film (Figures 4 and 5). The scenes are overexposed, blurry, scratched, and otherwise compromised, exposing the materiality of film, a materiality that is further conditioned by the photographer’s own embodied presence in shaping each image, through sudden jerky motions, shakiness, or awkward and less than optimal framing.

This footage, moreover, is presented not as objective historical record but as memory. As the protagonist lies in bed discussing his plans to flee his current job with a mining comrade, he begins to contemplate life as a miner. First we see a close-up shot of his face, eyes fixed intensely upon a position beyond the frame, and then this shot dissolves in to documentary footage over which runs the protagonist’s internal monologue. This footage is similar to the

50 Teshigahara came from a prestigious iemoto family, his father, Sōfū Teshigahara, having founded the Sōgetsu school of Ikebana.

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documentary footage that runs alongside the French woman’s monologue in Hiroshima mon amour: her documentary footage also becomes a “memory,” and one that is material, embodied.

She says to the Japanese man, “Like you, I have a memory. I know what it is to forget […] I wanted to have an inconsolable memory, a memory of shadows and stone” (Duras 1961: 23). As she says this, we see documentary footage of “a shadow, ‘photographed’ on stone, of someone killed at Hiroshima” (Duras 1961: 23). Not the light, effortless reproduction of a historical record, in both films the image solidifies into a shadow on stone, a maboroshi, a “ghostly concreteness” (Marx) that is at once both the medium for vision and a marker of its limits.

Both films, as such, problematize filmic representation by drawing attention to the material conditions upon which the image itself is founded. The transparent ghosts in both films, the materiality of labour, or vision, are reflected and redoubled through the way each film insists upon its own limits as film. However, each film also demonstrates that film is capable through its very transparency of producing alternative modes of representation, alternative ways of documenting reality. A prime example of this is the way in which Pitfall makes repeated use of the technique of superimposition. In one scene, as the protagonist, now dead, enters an abandoned mining town, a blooming teardrop slowly fills the screen, revealing the ghostly presence of the dead miners that continue to haunt it (see Figure 9). Over one image of the empty mining town this other image spreads, beginning as a small drop in the center of the screen and expanding to fill and replace the first image that dissolves into it. The film as such acts as a kind of transparency paper whose layers of images overlap one another. Like a sheet of transparency paper placed on top of another surface, two planes become superimposed on the same space at the same time, an overlapping of surfaces that permits multiple and even conflicting variables to occupy the same area simultaneously. One traces lines that overlap, contiguously, even if

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traveling in different directions. In this way, Pitfall can represent conflicting yet simultaneous realities, such as Capitalism and its disavowed others. Through this ghostly double exposure

(among others where double exposures are used to give the ghosts their transparency, such as in

Figure 10), Pitfall expresses the displaced and disavowed presence of labouring bodies within postwar Japan’s capitalist reconstruction, bodies absent in one frame (of film, of recognition) but present in another, now intercalated to express the simultaneity of their absent presence. We recall that the ghostly bodies represented by the film embody the sense in which capital is conditioned upon the disavowal and death of its labour. Through techniques enabled by the transparency of the medium of film, the very transparency of these labouring bodies that enable capital is able to be reproduced on a formal level.51

Pitfall thus undermines the authority of camera-eye realism as an objective documentary record while also showing how film itself in its materiality can function instead as a means of visualizing alternate histories that are ignored by the official, normative narrative gaze. This contrast is explicitly dramatized in a scene when police forensic officers arrive to inspect the crime scene of the protagonist’s murder. As they carefully surround the body, wearing white gloves and standing on boards so as not to contaminate the empirical evidence with their own physical presence, they take photographs while the scene is ‘policed’ from a hilltop in the distance by more officers (Figure 11). Meanwhile, the ghost of the murdered man silently and invisibly observes this scene—one of his own corpse’s institutionalized, forensic documentation—as if to challenge (through his witnessing of witnessing) the insistent

51 This is not the only use of overlapping in the film. In a scene already described, the protagonist’s face is superimposed over documentary images. And in another scene, the ghost’s transparency reveals itself through a double-image.

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transparency of the camera eye with the persistence of his own representational erasure within its frame, a frame that is produced by the authoritative forensic gaze of the capitalist police state.

The cameras of these forensic analysts, with their pretence of authority, disembodied objectivity, and hyper-visibility, miss the presence of his ghost and the reality of his murder, and simply corroborate what becomes the official narrative of the man’s death as the outcome of internecine union strife. This form of cut-and-dry forensic camera recording is complicit in the erasure of the miner’s true victimization. However, there is another camera in this scene, the one through which we see the ghost, existing both within and without this scene. Through this ghostly double vision, Abe and Teshigahara gesture towards film’s non-mimetic capacity to bring in to focus the representational limits of the photographic gaze.

In Hiroshima mon amour, as well, we see similar techniques of overlap, as well as counterpoint: the sudden and anachronistic juxtaposition of the French woman’s dead German lover over her Japanese one, or the overlap of two bodies covered in ash with two bodies covered in sweat (Figure 12). Akira Lippit compares the overlapping of “ashes and rain” in the opening scene of Hiroshima to a photographic “emulsion,” an immiscible mixture in which the photograph is held in an unsynthesized suspension, “neither absorbed by the surface nor allowed to dissipate into the air” (2005: 111). In this way, film embodies a kind of paradox, a “synthesis without synthesis” that is “suspended between two dimensions and arrested in time” (2005: 111).

Where in Pitfall, this ghostly double-focus, the superimposition of multiple transparent images over one another, reveals the presence of overlapping realities—that of labour as well as its disavowal—in Hiroshima mon amour, such techniques work to paradoxically bring into simultaneous focus disparate, incomparable, seemingly irreconcilable experiences. Rather than documenting the history of the bomb as a causal chain of discrete events proceeding in linear

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succession, this double-vision instead produces an overlapping visual field of incommensurable tragedies and singular histories. Here, the historical is given what Benjamin would call in his

Theses on the Philosophy of History a “theoretical armature,” in so far as it is not simply an objective documentation of cold facts but an actively constructed unearthing of haunting overlaps and associations. History represented as such documents not a linear succession of moments through time but an overlapping of moments in space, a moment of “shock” where time “crystallizes into a monad” (Benjamin 1968: 262–263).

Already in the first scenes of Hiroshima mon amour, this visual history of overlapping moments suggests that this will not be a film bearing witness to atomic devastation, but a “false documentary” (Duras 1961: 10) in which the very self-evidence and transparency of witnessing itself will be de-naturalized and a new logic will emerge. Rather than the well-known archival footage that Duras originally had intended to have shown of the “’mushroom cloud’ developing over Bikini Atoll” (Duras 1960: 15), we witness instead an ambiguous negative image of tendrils reaching out from a central point in all directions, an image that then returns again throughout the film in various contrapuntal forms: as growth through concrete, a vine, the branches of the

Delta estuary, hair that fell out from radiation exposure, or cracked skin (Figure 13)—as if we are witnessing, not a visual document of the bombing itself, but the visual traces of its atomic rupture, “visual echoes” that Luc Lagier identifies as the “cinematographic equivalent to […] nuclear fission” (2007: 84–85; 28). From the beginning, then, we see that film is equated with a certain spectral logic of haunting, of evocative visual-material associations across temporal and spatial boundaries, the many fissures and fractures of the image rupturing the sense of a singular historical referent: Hiroshima, 1945, August 6, ground zero.

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What is suggested by the film on a structural level is that it is through the potential for splicing and re-combining various haunting “visual echoes,” rather than through the impossible desire to recuperate a lost original referent, that understanding of Hiroshima is made possible. In the introductory chapter to this thesis I suggested that Hiroshima mon amour treats history as a form of “contrapuntal equation,” a concept Derrida, drawing on Barthes, defines as “the substitution of one absolute instant by another [..] the replacement of the irreplaceable, the replacement of this unique referent by another that is yet another instant, completely other and yet still the same” (Derrida 2001: 60). Rather than an accumulation of documentary evidence, the film suggests that historical consciousness be produced through an overlapping of images leading into other images, as ghosts move through time and space.52

Interrogating the Limits of Capital, History, and Representation

We have observed three variations on the theme of ghosts as a transparent materialities and have demonstrated the role that these ghosts played in documenting 1950s Japan. In Pitfall, ghosts take the form of mining labour, which was essential to Japan’s industrial growth yet was disavowed by postwar Japan. These transparent ghosts foreground the limits of capitalism to represent its internal other, its enabling yet forgotten conditions of possibility, labour that adheres in bodies. In Hiroshima mon amour, we looked at the spectral surfaces challenging the hypervisibility of the museum space and its memorialization of the war in postwar Japan. The play of transparent surfaces and objects, the glass, the acrylic, the marble, all foreground the limits of the French woman’s specular memory by shifting focus on to the very frames through which memory and history are conditioned. The third and last transparency is film itself as a

52 Kaja Silverman describes this in psychoanalytic terms as a process of “transference” (see Silverman 2003).

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transparent medium, whose very transparency is what allows it to mediate, yet also allows it to recede and remain unquestioned as a natural or objective source of authenticity. It is by bringing in to focus the texture and materiality of the visual field as a film and foregrounding it as an irreducible material condition for vision that these films negotiate certain structural limits of the cinematic gaze and explore alternative forms of historicization that are sensitive to the overlapping, haunting ‘visual echoes’ that make up postwar Japanese reality.

What is at stake here in both films is the potential through alternative modes of documentation to interrogate the respective ideological, representational, and structural limits of capital, history, and film, and thereby give a ghostly concreteness to the unexamined people, thoughts, or structures that enable each. This is perhaps most generally expressed through the sense in which each film challenges the very naturalness of film itself as means of documenting reality. Each film in this sense draws in to focus the ideological or political nature of truth/reality as mediated and narrativized through images. This is significant in Hiroshima mon amour in so far as it is ostensibly about the possibility or impossibility of documenting the tragedy of

Hiroshima. It is relevant in Pitfall in so far as it is about the erasure of labouring bodies within the frame of postwar Japanese society. In both cases, it is relevant in so far as each film insists upon examining the pretences and premises upon which the historical is grounded, and that are erased in the de-politicization of the historical.

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The Ghost is “Here”? Return and Displacement in 1950s Japan

This chapter argues that Abe Kōbō’s ghost stories reflect an experience of displacement underlying the rhetoric of return in the 1950s. As outlined in my introduction, the 1950s in Japan is often narrativized as a time of ‘return’—a period of recovery and recuperation. Indeed, population had returned to pre-war levels by 1950, and wartime shortages had been largely recovered. Much of the physical damage to cities leveled by air raids had been repaired, and

Japanese citizens sent abroad as agents of colonialism began to return to the ‘homeland’ or the furusato. Moreover, the U.S. occupying forces had ‘reversed’ many of the economically and militarily punitive and restrictive aspects of their early postwar occupation policy, adopting instead the goal of full-scale restoration of Japan’s capitalist economy. As a result, Japan’s GNP surpassed its prewar peak in 1955, a year that became known as “the best year of the postwar economy (sengo keizai sairyō no toshi)” (Dower 2012: 205). Japan’s economic recovery and integration into the U.S. network of capitalist allies dovetailed into a repudiation of wartime politics and celebration of western democratic principles. With the signing of the peace and mutual cooperation treaties in San Francisco in 1951, Japan symbolically cast off its shameful history of aggressive militarism and fascism and announced itself to be part of an international community of democratic, capitalist states. Japanese subjects embraced a western capitalist consumer lifestyle, rejecting autocratic emperor worship in favor of a ‘freedom’ organized around individual (consumer) choice. This capitalist consumer lifestyle was shaped through the emerging mass culture of the 1950s, disseminating itself through the mundane in a way that coloured it as simply the common-sense condition of ‘everyday life.’ As such, the narrative of

Japan’s postwar development is often framed as one of social, political, and geographic recovery,

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a democratic repudiation of wartime imperialism, and a return to the ‘normal’ democratic individual and capitalist parameters of the subject and the nation.

Nevertheless, this narrative of a ‘return to normal’ is frequently contradicted by personal experiences. The shift in government agenda towards economic and industrial growth in the

1950s was alienating for many. As was discussed in the previous chapter, workers in Japan were negatively affected by the normalization in the 1950s of economic growth as a priority in government and corporate policy, particularly with the easing of restrictions on heavy industry and corporate monopolies (zaibatsu), the rolling-back of union rights and protections, the ‘Red purge’ of union leaders and Communist party members from government positions in 1949–50, and the creation of ‘second unions’ (dai ni rōdō kumiai) amenable to company interests. The downturn of the mining industry in particular led to a surplus of precarious and easily exploitable transient labour that, as Abe and Teshigahara reveal in their film Pitfall, were effectively erased by the narrative of economic progress and recovery that historically has characterized the 1950s.

Other groups experienced similar forms of dislocation in the 1950s, such as repatriated soldiers and civilians, leftists, immigrants, and women. Hence, while historically the 1950s have been presented as a period of economic recovery and growth, a ‘return to normal,’ this is problematized through consideration of the fact that the narrative of recovery coincided with the disavowal of lingering wartime history, the consolidation of a right-wing conservative hegemony, and the re-inscription of a homogeneous subjectivity that worked to marginalize various people who were in fact rendered out of place in the 1950s—spatially, politically, economically, and existentially.

It is in this context that we need to interpret why Abe was concerned throughout the

1950s with reinventing literary ‘realism’ by documenting a present ‘haunted’ by people that have

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returned to a place in which they are not given a place—a place from which they are displaced.

The majority of Abe’s ghost stories were published in the 1950s, and they constituted what he called a ‘new realism’ (atarashii riarizumu)—a challenge to the taken-for-granted ‘return to normal’ that characterized the 1950s. By combining an investment in realism with ostensibly unreal narratives of haunting, Abe’s writing from this period disrupted the separation of ‘reality’ from ‘fiction’ in a way that estranged and thereby re-historicized the ‘normalcy’ of everyday reality. In this way, his work reveals a disconnect—a spectrality—between individual and collective understandings of the present: underlying the seemingly benign narrative of a ‘return to normal,’ the 1950s experienced a ‘return of’ spectral realities that haunted the present.

This chapter will situate the development of Abe’s ‘new realism’ in the context of wider developments occurring within and between postwar literary groups in the 1950s. Throughout the late 1940s and the 1950s Abe associated with several literary groups, most significantly those that published the journals Shin nihon bungaku (New Japan Literature) and Kindai bungaku

(Modern Literature), as well as the avant-garde associations Yoru no kai (Night Society), Seiki no kai (Century Society), and Genzai no kai (Now Society).53 Abe’s aesthetic and political approach to literary production developed in conjunction with the literary concerns of these groups. Many progressive intellectuals and artists resisted the socioeconomic changes of the 1950s, though they had very different opinions on the nature of present-day reality. Debates between them focused on the proper relationship between art and politics, individual versus collective representations of reality, and the search for alternative modes of representation opposed to realist and naturalist

53 For a more detailed history of Abe’s relationship to postwar literary movements see Schnellbächer (2004) and Key (2011).

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conventions. It was through and against these concerns that Abe formulated his own understanding of postwar realism.

Moreover, in this chapter I will shift focus from the rationalization of industry and labour, the topic of the first chapter, towards the concomitant process of rationalizing ‘everyday life’—a kind of social rationalization that involved the management of leisure time, which was increasingly being framed in terms of commercialism and consumption. In this context, I will argue that the emergence of mass culture in the mid-1950s was of particular significance to the development of Abe’s new realism. Through mass culture, the ‘everyday life’ of the (capitalist, democratic) individual subject was regulated and standardized in a way that obscured the disconnect between individual experience and collective narratives of the present. To better understand this, I compare the rationalization of ‘everyday life’ in the 1950s and the interwar period. In particular, Tosaka Jun’s ideas about ‘everyday life’ in Japan in the 1920s and 30s will provide a crucial link to Abe’s attempts in his own work re-politicize the reality of the 1950s and disrupt the apparently ‘natural’ laws of capitalist modernity.

The Early Postwar Avant-Garde (1945–1950)

Early postwar literature is often discussed in connection to the literary groups Shin Nihon

Bungaku and Kindai Bungaku, groups that are defined against each other’s methods of representing the reality of the modern subject. In the early postwar , these two groups engaged in several interconnected debates, in particular the Politics and Literature Debate (seiji to bungaku ronsō, 1946–47) and the Subjectivity Debate (shutaisei ronsō, 1946–48), the latter of which I

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will be focusing on in more detail in this chapter.54 Shin Nihon Bungaku was formed in 1945 under the Japanese Communist Party’s (JCP) auspices. Primarily associated Communist party members and Socialist realism (shakaishugi riarizumu), its goal was to bring about social change along party lines, by using literature to document the objective reality of ‘the masses.’55 Shin

Nihon Bungaku emphasized the importance of politicizing class identity as an antidote to the passive emperor worship and nationalism of prewar and wartime Japan, as well as an alternative to the acceptance of Occupation control over postwar Japanese agency (Barshay 1998: 289–90).

A younger generation of writers and filmmakers objected to this old-guard approach of subordinating art and individual expression to politics and collective consciousness—likely, as

Nina Cornyetz suggests, out of an aversion towards the reproduction of “prewar and wartime anti-individualist ideology” (2007: 192). These artists formed the literary journal Kindai

Bungaku in 1946, which insisted instead upon the importance of individual freedom of self- expression above political didacticism and collaborationism.56 Rather than believing reality to be the unmediated and objective expression of class consciousness, the artists that formed Kindai

Bungaku asserted that literary representation was always necessarily mediated through the individual agency of the author, and needed to reflect the raw experience of personal suffering and degradation—the “physical and moral collapse”—that came out of the immediate disorder of the postwar (Barshay 1998: 290–91). Marilyn Ivy suggests that the visceral sense of disorder and

“struggle for survival” that characterized the immediate postwar created an atmosphere

54 For more on the Subjectivity Debate in postwar Japan, see Victor Koschmann’s “The Debate on Subjectivity in Postwar Japan” (Koschmann 1981). For more on the Politics and Literature Debate, see The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism, 1945–52 (Ueda, Atsuko et. al. 2017).

55 See Motoyama 1995: 309; Key 2011: 8; Koschmann 1993: 398; Barshay 1998: 289–90.

56 See Key 2011: 8; Barshay 1998: 290; Koschmann 1993: 399; Keene 1984: 971.

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conducive to “an intensely fragmented, individualized sense of consciousness”—one that led many writers to “identify a striking ‘subjectivity’ (shutaisei)” and an “autonomy and individualistic consciousness” (Ivy 1993: 245–46). The individuality aspired to by Kindai

Bungaku in the late 1940s aimed to exceed the abstract forms of subjectivity represented by Shin

Nihon Bungaku by capturing this raw immediacy of postwar life.

Such an individualist position was not new to Japanese literature, and somewhat mirrored that of the biographical, confessional approach of pre-war ‘personal-novelists’ (shishōsetsuka),57 who argued that reality could only be expressed through the authenticity of the individual’s raw experiences and observations. Nevertheless, both Kindai Bungaku and Shin Nihon Bungaku criticized the individualist, confessional approach of the shishōsetsu form for depoliticizing subjectivity (Key 2011: 8). Indeed, the groups shared a similar investment in using literature to re-politicize the postwar present, though they disagreed as to whether realism should be individual or social in nature. In the inaugural issue of the Kindai bungaku journal in February

1946, Honda Shūgo thus argued for a “realism of depth [fukasa no riarizumu]” over the “realism of breadth [haba no riarizumu]” privileged by proletarian literary advocates such as critic

Kurahara Korehito (Honda 1946: 5–6), who in the same year argued in Shin Nihon Bungaku’s own inaugural issue that it was necessary for literature to have “social foundations [shakaiteki kiso]” (Kurahara 1946: 2). Therefore, the opposition established in early postwar literary criticism wasn’t between reality and fiction, but rather between individual and collective realism—realism that preserved the individuality of the writer versus realism that privileged the external objectivity of collective social structures. As Toba Kōji explains, within the postwar

57 As stated in my introduction, in this thesis I follow Sharalyn Orbaugh’s decision to avoid the contentious translation of ‘I-novelist’ and instead use the term ‘personal novelist’ (Orbaugh 2003).

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literary scene there was a strong aversion towards formal realism, in particular personal novels and naturalism, and a strong push towards finding new forms of representing reality (Toba 2010:

11). The majority of debates between various literary factions in postwar Japan thus circulated around the question of how to define the category of the ‘real’ and its relationship both to the individual and the present-day politics of postwar Japan. In other words, this debate over the

‘real’ nature of subjectivity established ‘the experience of reality’ as a problem and point of contention in a way that politicized subjectivity and history.

1950s Japan: The Emergence of Mass Culture and The Rationalization of Everyday Life

Nevertheless, as the concrete ‘reality of the present’ changed in the early to mid 1950s— with the Cold War, the ‘reverse course,’ remilitarization, and the rise of mass consumer culture—so too did the orientation of this early postwar debate. Largely, the 1950s rendered the debate over the authenticity of individual versus collective expressions of reality irrelevant, as the ‘reverse course’ policy and the emergence of a ubiquitous middle-class mass consumer culture worked to naturalize and thereby depoliticize the concepts of the ‘individual’ and

‘collective.’

In the 1950s, individualism and collectivism became folded into capitalist mass culture in ways that complicated the simple dichotomy of individual and collective set up in the early postwar. Responding to Occupation Cold War policies and the emerging mass culture of the

1950s, the JCP and artists of Shin Nihon Bungaku shifted to a more explicitly “anti-imperialist and nationalist stance” (Koschmann 1993: 401), and began to more pointedly criticize the early postwar ideals of individualism as being an extension of Western imperialism, attacking

“advocates of shutaisei, now labeled ‘modernists,’ for allying themselves with petty bourgeois

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individualism and revisionism” (Koschmann 1981: 612). Indeed, Maruyama Masao, eager to renounce wartime conceptions of ‘Japanese thought,’ which he argued were feudal and antidemocratic, promoted a ‘universal’ form of modern subjectivity or shutaisei that was largely synonymous with western concepts of democratic individualism.58 In contrast, conservatives adopted an anti-western discourse of Japanese uniqueness that redefined shutaisei through cultural and national essentialism (nihonjinron) in order to explain the economic success in the

1950s and onwards without needing to rely on a discourse of Westernization (Sasaki-Uemura

2007: 326).

The shifting politics of the 1950s thus revealed the limitations of the binary approach to identity taken by early postwar literary groups, which focused on either the collective life of the masses or the individual’s autonomous self-expression. This either/or debate over the merits of shutaisei was displaced by the emergence of a mass culture wherein individualism was subsumed into collective forms of identification—not, as Miyoshi argues, ‘true’ shutaisei59 in the sense of a radically new form of expression, but instead merely another form of universal subject conforming to a new hegemony of American liberal capitalist democracy (Miyoshi 2010a: 97).

Miyoshi gives several reasons for the acceptance of Western individualism in postwar

Japan: wartime contrition, Occupation censorship, fear of repeating Pan-Asian ultranationalism,

58 See Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics, which contains several of Maruyama Masao’s essays, translated by Ivan Morris (Maruyama 1963).

59 Miyoshi explains the meaning of shutaisei as follows: “The Japanese thought they saw the concept they named shutaisei everywhere in Western intellectual discourse: individualism, democracy, liberalism, libertarianism, subject, subjectship, subjectivism, and libertinism flourished without bound. A compound of shu (subject, subjective, sovereign, main), tai (body, substance, situation), and sei (quality, feature), the word means inclusively the agent of action, the subject of speculation or speech act, the identity of existence, and the rule of individualism” (Miyoshi 2010a: 83–4).

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a sense of “moral futility,” and a “long-standing deference to the West” (2010a: 96–99).

However, it is perhaps most important to acknowledge how the homogenization of the democratic individual subject was facilitated by the rationalization and normalization of everyday life in the emerging mass culture of the 1950s. Massification did not develop immediately after the end of the war, as Ivy argues, since its atmosphere of disorder and fragmented subjectivity “tended to preclude the formation of a ‘mass’ sensibility,” and artists often operated within local or small-scale unmediated cultural forums, black markets, and barter economies rather than mass markets (Ivy 1993: 245–46). While such decentralized forms of communication re-emerged in the 1960s and 70s in the form of small-scale mini-komi (mini- communications) publications that resisted the ubiquity of capitalist mass media (Sasaki-Uemura

2007: 322), in the affluent, high-growth period of the (especially mid-) 1950s, there was a large shift towards commercialization of culture for mass consumption in magazines, cinema, television, and especially radio.60

Benedict Anderson has provided a useful model for understanding how the dissemination of mass-produced media works to consolidate individual, ‘everyday’ experience into an

‘imagined’ homogeneous community. In Imagined Communities, he explores how technological developments in the mass-production of print media enabled the ubiquitous and synchronous dissemination of information to the masses, creating the illusion of a shared, communal identity in which individuals are “reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life”

60 Less than one percent of Japanese households could afford a television in the mid-50s, and half of the theatres in Japan had been destroyed during the war (Ivy 1993: 245), yet one third of households in Japan owned a radio at the end of the war, and radio could reach even more through organized “radio listening groups” (rajio no tsudoi) (Jung 2010: 54). The first commercial radio broadcasts began in 1951. Television broadcasts began in 1953, yet at fifteen thousand yen per set owning a television was beyond the reach of most people. By 1960, however, almost 50 percent of Japanese households owned a television (Ivy 1993: 248).

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(Anderson 2006: 35–36). Mass media as such produces, to borrow Althusser’s definition of ideology, an “imaginary relation to [the] real conditions of existence” (Althusser 2014: 186), or in other words a cross-wiring of collective structure and individual experience in which “fiction seeps quietly and continuously into reality” (Anderson 2006: 36). As such, Anderson’s theory of

‘imagined communities’ and their reliance upon the ‘everydayness’ of mass media helps articulate the sense in which the individual’s relation to collective forms of belonging is a

‘fiction’ that becomes accepted un-reflectively as a given, natural condition.

While Anderson focuses on print-media (newspapers), in Japan a vast array of cultural forms emerged in the 1950s. Ji Hee Jung’s thesis on the politics of mass culture in 1920s–1950s

Japan provides a case study illustrating how radio in particular contributed to the reification of the capitalist democratic subject: radio in Japan, she explains, was “designed to serve larger political projects for transforming mass audiences into individuals who would fully grasp transmitted political messages through disciplined and focused radio listening,” and it did so by

“appeal[ing] to listeners’ desires” rather than simply through the centralized dissemination of propaganda (Jung 2010: 65). In other words, radio helped produce a collective consciousness of the ‘private individual’ by mobilizing the wants and needs of the public and spreading power

“ubiquitously […] throughout society” (2010: 14)—echoing Adorno and Horkheimer’s claim that radio created the homogeneous individual subject by “democratically [making] everyone equally into listeners” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1993: 95). In 1950s Japan, with the “historical transformation in the organizing principles of capitalist society in the contexts of the U.S. occupation and the rising Cold War,” Jung explains that radio disseminated a “‘new’ form of subjectivity for postwar Japan” that was in line with “American liberal capitalist democracy”

(2010: 19–20).

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The connection between radio and the development of the capitalist individual private sphere is reinforced by the fact that in the mid-1950s technological improvements to radio transformed listening to radio from a communal into a private practice. During wartime and in the immediate postwar, it was common practice to listen to radio broadcasts communally, for example by gathering to listen to radio recitals of national poetry (kokuminshi) (Tsuboi 1997:

10). However, as Maeda Ai explains,

By the mid-1950s, when portable transistor radios had been invented and the television set had become the center of entertainment in the living room, radio-centered communality broke down, and radios moved into private chambers and bedrooms for solitary listening. These changes brought transformations in the nature of radio broadcasts and the style of radio announcing; for example, late-night radio announcers began to address solitary listeners in hushed tones, temporarily creating a space for private communication. (Maeda 2004: 228)

As such, the spread of radio in the 1950s reconfigured the parameters of individual and collective subjectivity in postwar Japan. Mass media worked to codify the everyday lives of modern subjects as democratic middle-class (chūryū) private individuals whose collective identities extended only so far as the nuclear household. As Ivy says, this “American way of life” became

“the utopian goal and dream of many Japanese in the 1950s” (Ivy 1993: 249–50).61 Radio, as such, contributed to the reification of a cohesive national ‘community’ organized around the imagined universality of the middle-class democratic individual subject. As Martyn David Smith explains, “individual subjectivity and national subjectivity were intimately linked to the notion of

61 The opposite, reactionary emergence of neo-nativism resistant to Western influence was similarly rooted in the “cognitive patterns of daily life (seikatsu shisō)” (Koschmann 1993: 411), with films and television in the 1950s disseminating a popular vernacular of Japanese cultural cohesion that relied on exceptionalism and essentialism (Dower 1993: 32).

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Japan as a ‘free’ country in the context of the Cold War in East Asia. […] This served to merge national identity with individual subjectivity, because the Japanese media promoted individual consumption in the name of the recovery of the Japanese nation as a whole” (Smith 2018: 5)

The emerging everyday space of mass culture was a space of subjective disciplining that worked to rationalize and homogenize the capitalist logic of the classless, individual, private sphere. Because of this, the debate concerning the authenticity of individual versus collective approaches to reality that characterized the shutaisei debate of the early postwar years was beside the point of 1950s politics, where ubiquitous mass media worked to normalize the everyday as a space of universal democratic individualism. This was the contradiction of mass consumer culture in postwar Japan, which based its conception of the subject on the private, isolated individual, yet attempted to rationalize and regulate it in conformity to a homogeneous commonly-experienced everyday life, one that was nonetheless isolated and alienating. Echoing

Miyoshi’s point, this new subjectivity (or shutaisei) was therefore not radical autonomy but itself a form of collective, codified subjectivity conforming to Western capitalist ideals of bourgeois individualism, shaped by Cold War politics, and produced through mass culture.

Interwar Japan: Tosaka Jun and Re-historicizing the Everyday

Comparing this history of 1950s Japan to that of Japan’s so-called interwar period can help clarify precisely what was at stake in this rationalization of everyday life: in both cases the experience of everyday life, regulated through mass consumer culture, became reified and objectified in a way that was disconnected from individual subjective experience. There are many parallels between the 1950s and the interwar period. In the first chapter, I gestured towards these parallels in terms of ‘rationalization’ being the watchword in each period, though the focus in that chapter was mainly on industrial rationalization and the naturalization of a discourse that

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prioritized productivity and utility in the sphere of production. It is important to consider that rationalization had its effects in the sphere of consumption and everyday life as well. In the

1920s and 30s, rationalization not only took the form of the Taylorization of work (Silverberg

2006: 13; Naruse 1991: 34), but also, as Sheldon Garon explains, manifested in campaigns of

“daily life improvement” (seikatsu kaizen undō), forms of social Taylorization that attempted to manage and control consumer habits and leisure time by encouraging various forms of “rational consumption” (Garon 1997: 129). Garon argues that the systematic efforts to rationalize daily living in the 1950s—in particular efforts to reverse “the Occupation’s safeguards against the central management of social education”—derived from these daily life improvement campaigns in the 1930s (1997: 161).62 It will therefore help us better understand Abe’s response to the rationalization of everyday life in the 1950s by turning to the 1920s and 30s, and in particular by drawing a comparison between Abe and the philosopher Tosaka Jun, whose ideas on everyday life are crucial to understanding what was at stake in the depoliticization and dehistoricization of the everyday in both periods.

Fundamentally related to the rationalization of daily life is the fact that interwar Japan, like Japan in the 1950s, experienced a bewildering explosion of mass consumer culture.63

Modern life in the 1930s was synonymous with an emerging urban lifestyle of mass consumption. This change produced a chaotic space of new and contradictory practices that

62 Though Garon focuses on top-down state influence (“moral suasion”) over everyday lives, it is important to note, as Ji Hee Jung does for radio in wartime and postwar Japan, that “power [is] ubiquitously spread throughout society” and “the power of the state [is] only one form among the [quoting Foucault] ‘manifold forms of domination’” (Jung 2010: 14). In this way, mass culture “was not a clear-cut story of top-down control and indoctrination but was characterized by complex interactions between the intentions of transmitters and the desires of audiences” (Jung 2010: 263).

63 See Miriam Silverberg’s analysis of mass culture in Japan from the 1920s to the 1940s, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass culture of Japanese Modern Times (Silverberg 2006).

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threatened the coherence and fixity of traditional social and cultural bonds upon which the nation-state was constructed. The rationalization of daily life was thus proposed in part to mediate “dangerous tendencies in popular sentiments in the cities” (Garon 1997: 11). Harry

Harootunian also explains that rationalization was mobilized to “control the newly emerging everyday life being imagined and figured in the new popular media and beginning to be lived in the cities” (Harootunian 2000a: 117). Everyday life campaigns functioned to systematize and control new and overdetermined forms of urban consumer living (embodied for example in the threatening figure of the “Modern Girl” or modan gāru as a flaunter of immorality and a reckless consumerism64) through a logic of rationalization—promoting responsible, common sense, efficient usage of commodities of convenience, utility, and economy, such as “kitchen labor- saving devices” as well as western clothing (“all cheaply made and seen as more efficient wear,”) cheaper and more “nourishing” foods, and economical housing for city dwellers

(Harootunian 2000a: 118). These initiatives were directed at the urban middle class, but they came to define a more homogeneous modern identity that cut across “class, gender, and sexuality,” forming instead a ubiquitous “culture of the masses” (Harootunian 2000a: 118). In this way, mass consumer culture in the 1920s channeled the politics of rationalization into everyday life as it did in the 1950s to normalize and regulate the everyday experience of the modern bourgeois individual subject.

While this rationalization of everyday life made it more manageable, standardized, uniform, homogeneous, it also worked to erase historical differences and flatten the actual

64 For analysis of the “Modern Girl” as an overdetermined and largely sensationalized figure of the 1920s and 1930s, see Miriam Silverberg’s chapter “The Modern Girl as Militant” in Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass culture of Japanese Modern Times (Silverberg 2006: 51–72).

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experience of living in modern Japan. Harootunian therefore argues that modern life in interwar

Japan created a crisis in meaning where the complexity of the individual’s everyday experience exceeded the limitations of those structural narratives of social cohesion used to describe it:

In the 1920s and 1930s, the first reflex was to determine the meaning of this experience of lived existence. The crisis of modern life in Japan and elsewhere was thus one of meaning, which called into question the relationship between forms of communicating experience, namely, historical narrative and discourse and lived reality. (Harootunian 2000a: 124)

This breakdown between meaning and lived experience resonates with Fredric Jameson’s observations on the modern “crisis in reality,” one wherein the disjunction of the Taylorized rationalist work process and the imperialist decentring of the capitalist centre from its colonial base produced a gap between “individual and phenomenological experience and structural intelligibility” (Jameson 2007: 240). In any case, the sense of disjuncture between social narratives of economic progress and lived individual experience led many critics of the interwar period to focus on re-politicizing the rationalized space of the everyday.

Most notable among them was Tosaka Jun, who argued that it was crucial to re-politicize the ‘everyday’ in the 1920s and 1930s. For him, it was important to reclaim the history of

‘everydayness’—to give its rhythms and divisions a historical character informed by the practical and material necessities of human activity. In much the same way as Abe’s philosophy of ‘theory and practice’ problematized the shutaisei debates in the 1950s, Tosaka’s theory critiqued the dissociation of individual and collective experience. In his 1930 essay “Nichijōsei no genri to rekishiteki jikan” (The Principle of Everydayness and Historical Time), Tosaka argues that everyday life is neither isolated to individual experience (what he calls “time of consciousness” or “phenomenological time” [2013: 4]) nor objectively scientific (time of the “natural sciences”

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[2013: 6]), but rather a historical totality that is informed by “practice” [jissensei] (Tosaka 2013:

13).

On the one hand, phenomenological time, he explains, turns history into a property of

“consciousness,” something outside of history, thus making “the principle of history […] not something of history itself” (2013: 4). Time of consciousness is experienced as “pure duration,” a temporal flow without divisions (2013: 5). “In the natural sciences,” on the other hand,

“division itself [such as the division of clock time] is so completely accomplished that people have made the division independent” and “homogeneous,” an “empty placeholder” whose measurement is “superficial and arbitrary” (2013: 6). Whereas phenomenological time dehistoricizes time, this ‘empty, homogeneous time’ (echoing the Benedict Anderson’s comments on the standardization of everyday life) de-temporalizes history, reifying the division itself as something alienated from the material processes that structure historical periodization.

Tosaka concludes therefore that

if we exaggerate the removal of the principle of divisibility from the concept of time, time becomes temporality and temporality is made eternal, as with the phenomenological concept of time suggested in expressions like “time stops” or “the eternal now.” On the other hand, if we isolate and exaggerate the principle of divisibility, time is spatialized and is no longer time (as in the natural sciences). In the end, these two concepts of time are nothing more than caricatures of two kinds of time that come from totalizing partial aspects. (2013: 7)

In both cases, therefore, time is reified, achieving a certain independence from the history of everyday life that shapes historical time.

In contrast to both of these “partial” understandings of time, Tosaka argues that historical time is grounded in the material life of human beings: “people live [seikatsu suru] within

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historical time”—it is “the time of our lives” (Tosaka 2013: 11). Its measurements as such are derived from everyday quotidian embodied human patterns, “the constant repetition of the same act though it is a different day, in the common activity of drinking tea, in the absolute inevitability of the principle of everyday life” (2013: 13). Tosaka places particular emphasis on the patterns and demands of the “worker” (rōdōsha) (2013: 13) and positions “material relations and forces of production” at the centre of history (2013: 9). Embodied patterns of everyday life, when repeated, become routine, and solidify into custom, producing the “character” or

“configuration” of a historical period, giving that period the appearance of objectivity and inevitability. In this way, we forget that the character of historical time “comes from the contents of that time itself” (2013: 7).

Though Tosaka does not spell out his politics directly,65 he is adamant in this text about rejecting the homogenization of everyday life and denunciating any idea of an “organic” society

(Tosaka 2013: 10). His resistance to arbitrary and formalized history works as a critique of the capitalist rationalization of everyday life—the routinization of behaviour, the uniformity and standardization of mass production and consumption. Moreover, his critique of impractical utopian “fictions” of “idealism” (Tosaka 2013: 15) and suggestion that “reality” needs to be aligned with human agency and “practise” (Tosaka 2013: 13) suggests that the individual’s role in the process of historicization is not simply passive. Tosaka writes that historical time is “three- dimensional,” meaning it possesses a “dialectical logic” (Tosaka 2013: 15): it is in motion, subject to changes negotiated by human practice. Challenging the ahistorical quality of phenomenological time was a challenge to the isolated individual’s dislocated consciousness of

65 Harootunian suggests that Tosaka did not directly state his politics due to “censorship and the threat of state repression” (Harootunian 2000a: 150).

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the present divorced from material history. As such, while a period’s ‘character’ is a totality that solidifies into necessity, the embodied particularity of the everyday is an “accent” of history

(Tosaka 2013: 12) that, as Harootunian argues, harbours for Tosaka certain subjective specters of history that resist being assimilated into the whole. Indeed, Harootunian explains that by returning to the material contingencies of everyday life, Tosaka’s work opens up the quotidian reality of the present to the intervention of unacknowledged coeval presents—what Harootunian, referencing Benjamin, calls “spectral” histories of the present (Harootunian 2000a: 16). Thus,

Tosaka depicted the ‘everyday’ as a space in which individual and formal reality needed to be conceived three dimensionally and in dialectical negotiation. The present was not simply a formalist space of capitalist rationalization, routinization, and commodified human relations, but also a space of difference and newness—a space of “contingent happenings, chance occurrences, unexpected meetings, and surprising events” (Harootunian 2000a: 150)—that could serve to dislocate conventions and disrupt the apparently ‘natural’ laws of capitalist modernity.

Abe’s response to the rationalization of daily life in postwar Japan parallels Tosaka’s response to similar conditions in the ‘interwar’ period in fundamental ways. Both thinkers centered on a ‘crisis of reality,’ one whereby the individual’s link to the totality that structured their social relations was fractured, prompting the search for new methods of historicizing the present. Both thinkers attempted to interrogate and disrupt normalized, official narratives of contemporary Japan by exposing them to their historical contingency. Moreover, both recognized that this historical contingency could only be expressed through media that were invested in re-historicizing and de-naturalizing the concrete material reality of everyday life, opening that life up to alternative dispossessed ‘spectral’ realities that continued to haunt the present. Finally, both argued that it was necessary to produce a dialectical history of the

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everyday in which formal and particular realities (what Abe will call theory and practice) intersect. The 1950s was a return to ‘normal,’ a period of reconstruction and homogenization that solidified capitalist conceptions of reality into natural constants that disavowed the experience of alienation it produced for many living in Japan. As the massification of culture began to dominate the 1950s, what became important for avant-garde artists and intellectuals such as Abe was the de-normalization and re-politicization of the ‘everyday’ both as a space of ideological disciplining as well as a space of radical opening to alternative spectral histories of the present.

Abe Kōbō’s Theory and Practice: A Spectral Materialism

Like many avant-garde artists in the 1950s, Abe responded to the reverse course of

Japanese Cold War politics by taking a more concrete interventionist stance, one that was invested in subverting the taken-for-grantedness and depoliticization of reality as represented in contemporary art forms and politics. He was, like Tosaka Jun in the 1920s and 30s, keenly aware of the disconnect between the abstract rationalization of social life and the reality of lived experience, and aimed to produce a new form of realism that would work to undermine the given parameters of the 1950s by representing the spectral, disavowed reality of alienation and displacement that undergirded Japan’s socioeconomic recovery.

Abe’s work in the 1950s attempted to create a new realism that overcame the limitations of both surrealism and realism. Toba Kōji explains that his work as such was connected to the development of a genre known as “sabu riarizumu” (sub-realism) (Toba 2010: 54)—a movement that aimed to create a new form that was at once more concretely invested in uprooting the substrata of material reality than surrealism while also repudiating the dogmatic and sterile social realism of the Communist Party—a form that art critic Segi Shin’ichi (a member of Yoru no kai) referred to as “social existentialism [shakaiteki jitsuzon shugi]” (Toba 2010: 54–55). Though

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Abe himself did not use the term ‘sub-realism’ in his writing, it was a very “Abe-esque” concept, as artist Katsuragawa Hiroshi (also a Yoru no kai member) said, one that became a “watchword” of Abe’s own literary journal Seiki (Toba 2010: 53–54). Indeed, sub-realism is often associated with Abe in that his own “social existentialist literature” (Schnellbächer 2004: 296) similarly positioned itself against both surrealism and realism by challenging abstract theoretical methods and investing itself in the practical transformation of concrete reality.

While Abe explained the substance of his ‘new realism’ in several essays and interviews—for example in “For a New Realism” (1952) and “Concerning Reality” (1953)—its most sustained development can be found in his 1954 essay “Theory and Practice in

Literature.”66 In this essay, Abe outlines a crisis in literary representation analogous to that experienced in the social sphere of the 1950s. According to Abe, established realist methods paralyzed literature’s radical potential by reifying either concrete experience or abstract knowledge—in his words, practice or theory. Specifically, he targets the realism expressed by the genre of the personal novel and naturalism. The personal novel projected a rhetoric of

“unmediated directness and veracity” stemming from the authenticity of the author’s own personal experiences (Orbaugh 2003: 138). It is typically tied to the development of Japanese naturalism or shizenshugi, in that both emphasized the ‘unmediatedness’ of personal, confessional expression. However, when Abe discusses naturalism in this essay, his description

66 Theory and Practice in Literature was first published on June 30, 1954 in Iwanami kōza bungaku, vol. 8 (Iwanami Shoten). Translations from this essay are taken from Richard Calichman’s collection of Abe’s essays, The Frontier Within (Abe 2013).

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suggests a Western model of naturalism whose scientific, objective, and detached method of representation he contrasts with the immediate, introverted expression of the personal novel.67

Abe argues that both the personal novel and naturalism are problematic as forms of realism in that they prioritize either theory or practice without understanding their relation—an argument that is analogous to Tosaka’s aforementioned critique of phenomenological versus natural time (“caricatures of two kinds of time that come from totalizing partial aspects” [Tosaka

2013: 7]). On the one hand, the “culture” of the personal novel prioritizes practice as immediate, individual expression of feelings and perceptions, restricting the function of theory to

“commercial journalism” whose aim is merely to evaluate literature’s “commodity value” (2013:

20–21). On the other hand, naturalism prioritizes methodology as the expression of an abstract, objective knowledge existing independently of perception or expression, restricting practice to the degree of transparency with which an individual writer is able to record that reality (their

“expressive capability”) (2013: 22–23).

Therefore, the problem that Abe identifies with conventional forms of realism is that they reify practice or theory in a way that separates lived experience and collective structures of meaning. Each form as such is blind to what is of value in the other: when the author expresses the reality of immediate, individual lived experience this obscures the individual’s relation to a totality that structures their experience; yet if the author apprehends that theoretical structure abstractly and scientifically, then lived experience is accepted as natural in a way that limits actual transformative practice. Abe was concerned with neither a “realism of depth” nor a

67 In this way, he references Flaubert as an example of naturalism’s “privileging of methodology” over practice, and suggests that the shishōsetsu’s rejection of theory for personal feeling might reflect a form of “Japanese national particularity” (2013: 21).

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“realism of breadth,” to borrow Honda Shūgo’s distinction from earlier (Honda 1946: 6). For

Abe, it was necessary instead for a realist aesthetic to express the relation between depth and breadth—in other words, it was important to understand experience as being three dimensional, and be guided by a theoretical method while also working to uproot the solid foundations reifying material reality.68

Abe argues in Theory and Practice that literary production needs to be grounded in material knowledge and in concrete practice rather than the dogmatism of conventional literary forms and methods. However, blind fidelity to immediate individual experience of the ‘everyday world’ such as that embodied by the genre of the personal novel limits reality to individual expression, when historical movement is a product of the relation between individuals. Practice is fundamental, but without general theoretical understanding one remains ignorant of collective historical structures of meaning that shape the present and guide practice: “practice is never in and of itself ‘absolute,’ for materialist action is formed only by combining with knowledge”

(2013: 28). Knowledge is therefore a product of the relation between practice and theory, expression and structure, individual and collective, and as such is not simply about empirically reproducing reality as in empiricism or simply projecting it as in idealism, but about actively producing it through guided praxis:

68 Incidentally, this method manifested in Abe’s own material writing practices. Photographs of Abe’s study show that he planned his writing by composing notes on individual cards and pinning them to a board on his wall (I am indebted to Komori Yōichi for bringing my attention to this fact in person at the Asian Studies Conference Japan [ASCJ] at the International Christian University in Tokyo in 2011). This method, similar to Nabokov’s index-card- based method of writing, is arguably an intersection of theory and practice, where the writer must actively re-arrange and construct the totality of the work though a physical practice of re-arranging and composing text in a non-linear, synchronic configuration. Abe was also a very early adopter in Japan of the word processor, which he first used to compose his 1984 novel The Ark Sakura (Hakobun sakura maru). Word processor writing, unlike typewriter or pen writing, provides a freedom from linearity and pre-planning that allows for spontaneity, recombination, and flexible structuring. For more on Abe’s use of word processor, see Sakaki (2006), and Gottlieb (2000: 149).

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[N]ondialectical knowledge can never apprehend the laws of reality. Without grasping these laws, it is impossible to re-create and transform reality. Nondialectical knowledge thus results in a completely superficial classification of phenomena (pragmatism) or clings to subjective visions of utopia. (Abe 2013: 24).

True realism thus involves apprehending a dialectical relation, wherein reality is structured through “broader social laws” (2013: 25) which are, nonetheless, neither absolute nor objective, but constructed and contingent, produced through social praxis. Practice is not merely individual but social, connected to the life of the masses and determined by collective structures of meaning; and theory is not simply the refinement of self-generating, given natural laws, but exceeds those laws, and is mediated by concrete revolutionary practice.

What was at stake in Abe’s rejection of “nondialectical knowledge” (Abe 2013: 24) was his belief that practice detached from theory or theory detached from practice lacked the dialectical knowledge to understand—or, in Jameson’s words, “cognitively map”69—the reality of postwar Japan, and thus were incapable of radically transforming that reality: “An increase in nondialectical knowledge can never apprehend the laws of reality. Without grasping these laws, it is impossible to re-create and transform reality” (2013: 24). Practice on its own was

“mechanical” and “pragmatic,” and theory on its own was simply “reformism” or “merely internal refinement” of existing laws (2013: 25). What was necessary was a dialectical unity of individual experience and collective knowledge, action and program, one that would accomplish no less than the transformation of nature and the liberation of humanity by dislodging given

69 For discussion of “cognitive mapping” see Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), specifically pages 50–66.

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reality from the apparent self-evidence of its own permanence and naturalness, exposing it once again to the contingency of material relations and historical time.

This notion of a reality that is historically created rather than given, that is produced in relation to others and within a collective structure rather than as an expression of isolated experience, yet is not limited to naturalism or empiricism and its presumption of ‘natural’ social laws and instead acknowledges how we are invested in the transformation of social structure rather than neutral or passive participants in it, and which is neither purely concrete nor theoretical but instead always in a state of dialectical becoming, are the key features of Abe’s realism, which is thus at the same time both a challenge to established literary realist conventions as well as established political and ideological norms.

This was clearly a response to the crisis of subjective dislocation characteristic of his contemporary historical conjuncture. Within his critique of literary realism’s separation of practice and theory, with its inability to represent reality “in the process of revolution” (Abe

1997a: 250), is an implicit critique of postwar capitalism, with its reification of mass culture devoid of actual mass consciousness and individuality alienated from actual individuality— positions which Abe says are not “real practice” or “real knowledge” (Abe 2013: 23), echoing

Miyoshi’s point about bourgeois individualism being divorced from “true” shutaisei. Abe presents reality as the outcome of political contestation, difference, and historical change, a truth that contradicts the depoliticized rationalization of everyday life in postwar Japan. Much like

Tosaka’s critique of everyday life in the 1920s and 30s, Abe’s new realism thus worked to undermine the reification of Japan’s reality as a ‘return to normal’ and re-expose its ideological foundations and its historical contingency. In his fiction, Abe turned to ghosts both to both represent and critique this disconnect between individual experience and the structural reality in

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postwar Japan, and to express alternative lived histories of the present that hauntingly emerged from the official, taken-for-granted logic of postwar Japanese growth, recovery, and return.

Song of a Dead Girl: The Forgetting of Female Textile Workers in Postwar Japan

One of Abe’s most explicit renderings of the discrepancy between the structure of postwar Japan and the alternative lived histories of the present is found in his short story Shinda musume ga utatta . . . (Song of a Dead Girl, 1954).70 The narrative, which follows the ghost of a factory girl, explores several aspects of life in Japan for women textile workers and their families that are widely discrepant from the image of economic and social progress that characterized the

1950s. In this way, Song of a Dead Girl challenges the official narrative of Japanese recovery through relation to the material reality of precarity and alienation for certain Japanese labourers.

The protagonist, simply called “Miss M” (M-san) (later given the name “Umeko” by her employer) first works in a textile factory in the countryside. After being laid off due to

“overproduction” (1986: 238), she moves to Tokyo to take a position as a shop assistant. Most of her salary is deducted for lodgings and food, and the owner implies that many of the women resort to prostitution to support themselves. M is then jilted by her white-collar boyfriend, who explains that “marriage now is out of the question”; he then goads her into committing suicide

(1986: 227). M overdoses on sleeping pills and returns as a ghost. As she revisits her family and her workplaces, she recalls her experiences as a factory worker.

70 English translations of this work are by Stuart A. Harrington (Abe 1986).

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Abe likely drew inspiration for the narrative from the songs of factory labourers themselves. The title “Song of a Dead Girl” (more literally “The Dead Girl Sang”) likely references the documented practice among young factory workers of creating songs to express their experiences of factory life as well as to sustain the repetitive rhythms of their labour.71

Indeed, at the end of the story, M and several other ghosts of women from her factory begin to dance and sing: “we joined hands in a circle around the scary guard, all of us dancing and singing about him as he dozed. In the manager’s room, we took turns leaping over the hat that the manager had left behind on his desk” (1986: 239). The title may be an even more specific reference to a prewar factory worker’s ballad called “Ikeru shikabane no fu” (Song of the Living

Corpses), which was transcribed by Hosoi Wakizō in Jokō aishi (The Sad History of Factory

Women, 1925).72 Several verses of “living corpses” would certainly apply to M’s own stark experiences working in the factory:

We are factory girls With no sound but the pattering of Light falling rain in spring When will the sun come out The pillow soaked from shedding tears endlessly

We are factory girls Small frail birds We have wings but cannot fly Though we see the sky we’re in a cage Small birds with wings broken

71 For more on the songs composed by women factory workers see Tsurumi 1984.

72 I owe the discovery of this ballad to Patricia Tsurumi, who includes part of it in her article on female textile workers in Japan (1984: 13). 136

[…]

Since our families were poor I was sold to a factory When I was a young girl of twelve Though I do work for cheap My spirit is not muddied As a lotus blooms in the mud So too will my spirit one day bloom Like a tall flower.73

Taken in by sweet words Our money was taken and I was thrown away Unaware of the hardships of the future I was like reeds blown in all directions.

Since my parents were worthless Or maybe since I was worthless While they were worth something Deceived by a fox with no tail.

Woken at four thirty in the morning By the first bell, I make myself up By the second bell, off to the cafeteria By the third bell, to the factory Glared at by the chief engineer If I return to my room,

73 The expression used here is takane 高根 (though the correct characters are 高嶺), which in context carries the implication of marrying beyond one’s station (thanks goes to Atsuko Sakaki for reviewing my translation and providing this insight).

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I am chastised by the caretaker I don’t think I can make it in this world

[…]

I was sold to the textile company A bird caged in brick tiles Of the textile company Our three meals are like bird feed

If the machines break down The engineer or the director will glare at me I cannot stand it In the middle of the night around 1 am I sneak out the Kurogane gate To flee to Minatogawa To pick up rocks from the foot of the mountain And put them in my sleeves so I can drown myself in the river

I was determined to die Yet if I die I become the shame of the company And if I return home I become the shame of my parents Tears well in the eyes before anything.

(Hosoi 1925: 428–38)

The way M describes her recruitment, her long and arduous working conditions, her meagre daily rations and salary, her constant scrutiny under the eyes of her employers (“you’re wearing lipstick again, after you’ve been warned so many times?” [Abe 1986: 238]), her resentment towards them, and her ambivalent feelings concerning her family (who seem less concerned by

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news of her suicide than overjoyed by the 50,000 yen money order her employer sends them) are all reflected in this “living corpse’s” lament.

Abe’s interest in depicting the lives of textile factory workers in Japan was likely precipitated by the secession of the textile workers’ union Zensen Dōmei from the predominantly socialist Sōhyō trade union council the year before he published the short story, in 1953.74 The leader of Sōhyō, Takano Minoru, was firmly opposed to the dismantling of worker’s protections in the 1950s and believed private unions were becoming too amenable to corporate interests and losing their sense of class solidarity (Gerteis 2009: 69). Certainly, given that Song of a Dead Girl was composed at this particular juncture in the history of labour rights in Japan, we can see similar anxieties reflected in the narrative.

The text explores several concrete facets of the social and economic displacement experienced by female textile factory workers—workers who made up one third of wage-earning women in postwar Japan (Gerteis 2009: 6). Abe is detailed about M’s earnings as well as those of her family, which would no doubt have struck contemporary readers as far below the average national as well as average male incomes of the 1950s. M breaks down her family’s meagre household earnings as follows: “My father’s income was about 2,300 yen per month. My mother and sister made 4,000 yen. That made a total of 6,300 yen. With the 2,000 yen I made from the factory work, that made 8,300 yen for a family of seven to survive on” (Abe 1986: 231). For comparison, the average household income in 1954 was 28,283 yen (Statistics Japan 2018b:

Table 20.2.b), which means M’s family of seven brought in an income of less than thirty percent

74 The Zenzen Dōmei or Zenkoku Sen'I Sangyō Rōdō Kumiai Dōmei (National Federation of Textile Industry Workers Unions) was the only major union of female workers in the postwar period (Gerteis 2009: 69–70).

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the national average for a family of roughly five. Indeed, M’s family made less than the national living expenditure for food alone, which was 10,995 yen (Statistics Japan 2018b: Table 20.1a).

M’s salary is also far below the national average when compared to male employees.

Since M’s father suffers from a chronic illness (tuberculosis) and is unable to work full time, M is forced to leave home to live and work in the textile factory. Her salary at the factory is, as she mentions above, 2000 yen, and when she is let go and begins working in the shop in Tokyo she is given a wage of 5000. Like many women workers, she resides in a dormitory, and much of her wages are deducted for lodging and other expenses. For example, her employer at the Tokyo shop deducts 4300 in total out of her 5000-yen salary, leaving little in the way of extra income

(Abe 1986: 230). M’s remaining savings are expected to be sent home to support her family, and to pay off the 10000 yen loan that the shop owner fronts to her desperate parents as a recruitment incentive—creating a vicious circle where work to support her family also incurs them more debt. Her meagre salary was not out of the ordinary for a young woman at the time. The average for women 17 and under in 1954 was 5107 yen, only slightly below the national average for female workers of all ages, 7637 yen. These figures, however, were vastly discrepant from the average male salary at the time of 16937 yen (Statistics Japan 2018a: Table 19.42). On average, a woman working full time in the manufacturing sector could expect to make only 41 percent of a male worker’s salary (Gerteis 2009: 82–83).

Song of a Dead Girl is therefore salient and unique in Abe’s oeuvre for addressing how

Japan’s reverse course policies in the 1950s created specific problems for women of the lower classes. It illustrates the vast discrepancy between M’s economic conditions and what was considered ‘normal’ levels of wealth at the time. It is important that this fact be historicized within the reality of women’s labour rights in Japan in the 1950s. The ‘return to normal’ was a

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motif for women’s issues in 1950s Japan, specifically with the return to ‘normal’ gender roles and to the domestic realm, as women’s economic and social freedoms were framed from their

‘natural’ position as mothers (haha) and housewives (shufu). This normalization of women’s domesticity defined work outside the home as an extension of domestic labour—practical and moral preparation for their future roles as housewives, rather than fully gainful employment justifying a living wage. As Christopher Gerteis explains, “managers often justified low wages on the grounds that a woman employee could be expected to leave her job upon marriage or the birth of a child” (2009: 85). This was the case despite the fact that only a small percentage of women from privileged households could afford not to work outside the home (Uno 1993: 302).

We see this domesticizing of women’s labour reflected in the emphasis on domestic education in M’s factory: “In the first hour we had home economics; everyone had to do their laundry […] The first half of the second hour was for cooking; we had to wash dishes and cut up the dinner vegetables. The last half was sewing; we had to mend our bedding” (Abe 1986: 236).

Moreover, when M is let go from the factory, the foreman tells her she can go to Tokyo to “get a job as a maid, learn home economics, send a lot of money back home, and get ready for marriage” (1986: 239). The workers are also encouraged to express gratitude towards management as they would to their “Father and Mother” (1986: 236). Throughout the narrative,

M’s labour is framed as an extension of (private and non-gainful) domestic labour, her own interests superseded by the duty to support the family and receive a domestic education, with the final expectation that she will exit the workforce upon marriage.

Indeed, Kathleen S. Uno’s description of how the interwar ideology of “good wife, wise mother” (ryōsai kenbo) influenced company policy regarding female factory workers could apply just as easily to M’s situation in the 1950s:

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First, as young women rarely lived on their own, parents raised few objections to factory dormitories that facilitated exploitations of young, single female operatives. Second, because young women were not expected to be self-supporting, female employees did not necessarily receive a living wage. Companies deducted portions of workers’ earnings to pay for living costs and fines and sometimes sent additional sums directly to their parents in the countryside. Third, company education slated women for the home. […] In these ways business enterprises, too, upheld official models of womanhood and gender. (Uno 1993: 300–301).

The ideology of “good wife, wise mother” 75 persisted in postwar Japan, especially in the celebration of motherhood (Uno 1993: 303). Though postwar constitutional reforms ostensibly promised equal rights for male and female workers—reflected for example in the Japanese

Communist Party’s 1945 General Plan for Women’s Activities (Fujin kōdō kōryō), which proposed the radical goal of liberating women from domestic life “to participate fully in the world outside the home” (Uno 1993: 311)— it remained difficult for women to escape from the logic that equated their agency with concepts of the maternal and domestic, and the female workforce was still consistently subjected to prewar ideologies of gender that imagined the workplace as an extension of the family with company management as its patriarchal head

(Gerteis 2009: 32). Julia Bullock explains that “prewar models of femininity persisted into the postwar era, as high economic growth from 1955 to 1973 was underwritten by a strictly gendered division of labor that required women to take full responsibility for the domestic sphere”

(Bullock 2010: 2). Indeed, the defining feminist movement of the 1950s—the “Mother’s

Convention” (Haha oya taikai)—absorbed this rhetoric and promoted a vision of domestic

75 For a history of how the “good wife, wise mother” ideology developed in Japan see Koyama Shizuko’s “Domestic Roles and the Incorporation of Women into the Nation-State” (translated by Vera Mackie in Germer 2014: 85–100).

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citizenship that essentialized women’s value as maternal protectors. In the manifesto to the 2nd annual Mother’s Convention in 1956, the Japanese mother is represented in essentializing terms as one who, “by nature or natural law, ‘bears, brings up and protects life’” (Wöhr 2014: 243, 249 n.21). As such, the Motherhood Convention celebrated the reconstruction of normalized gender roles for women in Japan that put them back into the domestic, household sphere as guardians of the family. This retrenchment of women’s economic freedoms dovetailed into the American ideological apparatus of the nuclear family, which subordinated the collective interests of women labourers to a patriarchal hierarchy of labour value that allowed women to be more easily exploited as a precarious, cheap, and expendable work force.

It becomes evident in the narrative of Song of a Dead Girl that the celebration of women’s domestic citizenship works to obscure a relation wherein Japan’s postwar economic growth was at least partially sustained by the exploitation of women factory workers—women whose lives were vastly discrepant from the image of social and economic freedom that accompanied the rationalized democratic ideology of the nuclear family. M’s identity in the narrative is represented as out of place and alienated from reality, suggesting a profound disconnect between the self-image of 1950s capitalist democracy and M’s own experience. Her actions are consistently contorted to conform imperfectly to a logic of democratic individualism that does not entirely fit: the shop owner laments the “free will” and “independence” with which his employees resort to prostitution to afford clothing and money for their families (Abe 1986:

230), and wonders why M’s parents would let her come to Tokyo to “pursue her own cleaning hobby” (1986: 230), and at the factory M is “forced to sign her resignation papers” rather than simply be laid off, “freeing” her to “look for work without worry about anyone else” (1986:

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239). Put in Miyoshi’s words, this “ironic” postwar sense of shutaisei embodied in Western liberal individualism doesn’t represent her own experience of powerlessness.

The narrative works in this way to question the ‘return’ to conventional gender roles and interrupt this return’s cooperation in the normalized, taken-for-granted narrative of contemporary

Japanese economic and social recovery by exposing the discrepant realities of women textile workers—discrepancies that are mapped onto the very bodies of these textile workers as a form of a physical dislocation or ghostliness of the body, a body that is here but not recognized as present. At the centre of M’s reality is a crisis of representation wherein her experience does not align with the political, economic, and social structures through which her everyday life is regulated, a fragmentation that is even reflected in the labour process itself: the explicit representation of rationalized factory labour regulating the bodily actions of workers into discrete and regular increments by the measure of the stopwatch—the factory workers even nickname their foreman “Watch” (uocchi) for his ruthlessness in regulating their time (meals, study, free time, and “even the time it took us to go to the bathroom” [Abe 1986: 235]); and all the shop floor girls in M’s factory wear roller skates to travel between spinning machines with greater efficiency76—finds its analog in the dislocated spectral bodies of M and the other factory workers. Indeed, M’s very first impression of being a ghost is one of literal self-alienation:

“When I [watashi] regained consciousness I realized that I had become a spirit and was sitting next to my corpse [jibun no shitai]” (1986: 227). In this way, M (watashi) articulates the physical

76 The detail that factory workers wore roller skates was likely drawn from the real practice used in a textile factory in Okayama beginning in 1948. See the NHK archives: https://www2.nhk.or.jp/archives/tv60bin/detail/index.cgi?das_id=D0009100269_00000

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separation from her own corpse (jibun no shitai), a separation that is also expressed later in her references to “I” (watashi) and “my dead self” (shindawatashi) (1986: 228).77

It would not be going too far to suggest that M’s articulation of her own “shindawatashi,” the contradictory persistence of the “I” enunciating their own death, is not merely analogous to her subjective fragmentation but also encapsulates the limitations of conventional realism— where M’s dislocation of herself from her personal pronoun (I/watashi) problematizes the self- sameness and naturalness of the watashi upon which the rhetoric of the personal novel

(wataskushi shōsetsu) is based. In order to respond to the conditions of 1950s Japan, whose crisis was one of subjective dislocation, it was not enough to merely represent the conditions of women’s factory labour in a conventional realist mode where the parameters of the self in its relation to reality were taken for granted.

M’s literal self-dislocation expresses a lived experience that exceeds realistic representation—that is, in effect, impossible within the confines of realist language, which is reliant upon a transparency of expression positing, in Jameson’s words, that the relation between the sign and its referent be “unproblematical” (Jameson 1991: 94–95). What could be more

‘problematical,’ from a realist perspective, than to literally be present to articulate one’s own death—to become, in effect, a ghost? As Roland Barthes says of the phrase “I am dead,” shinda watashi is a radically “impossible utterance” that cannot be true “to the letter” (“à la lettre”

[quoted in Derrida 2001: 65]). Song of a Dead Girl, however, represents that impossible utterance as possible, literalizing the fragmented experience of postwar subjectivity in a way that

77 Original Japanese is referenced from Abe’s Collected Works (1997c: 293).

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problematizes both realist language as well as the capitalist-realist reification of everyday life and the democratic individual subject.

Abe criticized realism as a disconnect between individual and collective structures of meaning (practice and theory), arguing that the representational logic of realism in its various conventional forms could only sustain its authenticity, its ‘transparency’ (as we discussed in

Chapter 1), by repressing its contingency in a way that reduced experience and material practice to individual expression, and representation to a passive recording of ‘what is.’ Abe felt that this rhetoric was inadequate at representing the reality of postwar Japanese society, which had alienated those who did not experience it as a ‘return’ to economic and social equilibrium after the chaos of wartime but rather as a displacement, wherein the everyday reality of social life expressed in the form of the homogeneous middle-class consumer subject did not coincide with the experiences of repatriated and disavowed remnants of wartime colonial empire and the working class. He framed this in terms that were spatial and geographical, a fragmentation and decentering of spatial relations. Certainly, this manifests in Abe’s work in literal terms as the fragmentation of the ghostly body, its decentered phenomenology, which is never fully here yet present, one who is literally out of place.

Return ‘To’ and Return ‘From’ War in 1950s Japan

While Song of a Dead Girl mainly concerns the dislocation of labour in 1950s Japan, it also gestures towards a fracturing of 1950s Japan’s continuing relation to its wartime history and the disavowal of its colonial project. Compared to the anti-patriarchal and anti-establishment feminist critiques of the following decades, the feminism that developed in the 1950s was relatively conservative, and arguably complicit in the nation-state’s Cold War goal of establishing economic dominance over East Asia. Hence, though the domesticization of

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women’s labour in the 1950s should be connected to prewar or interwar Japanese conservative notions of femininity, this domestic return needs also to be understood in the context of what

Mire Koikari calls “Cold War imperial feminism” (Koikari 2008: 5), where the adoption of

American notions of femininity, domesticity, and heteronormativity was in turn mobilized to serve the politics of Cold War communist containment (2008: 23).78 The return to motherhood was a move that aligned with the economic rationalization policies of the 1950s, whereby, for example, the laying-off of many women workers like M under the premise of rationalization was justified as a return to their natural domestic responsibilities (Uno 1993: 311).

Though Song of a Dead Girl does not foreground the critique of Japanese colonialism, M does encounter several spirits in her room early in the narrative that likely belong to war dead:

a student in uniform, a soldier with what seemed to be a piece of beef in place of a jaw, a man who was wearing a bloody shirt and who had lost his legs from the knees down, a skeleton-like tramp, and what appeared to be another soldier with his limbs connected to his body in random fashion, creating an ugly impression indeed. (Abe 1986: 228)

As such, M shares physical space with persistent ghosts of the war dead in a way that suggests that her fragmented bodily experience possesses its own decentered geography of postwar imperialism.

78 It is important to acknowledge Koikari’s point that the narrative of the reverse course as moving from positive reform to negative repression is overly simplistic and that “American democratic reform in Japan, especially its feminist intervention, was from the very beginning deeply informed by American racism, sexism, and imperialism” (Koikari 2008: 9). Moreover, it is worth noting that the practice of using women for forced sexual labour during the war (the system of military comfort women or jūgun ianfu seido) did not end in 1945, but that many women continued to be sent to sexual comfort facilities (sei-teki ian shisetsu) for US occupation forces (see for example Iijima Aiko’s account in Germer et. al. 2014: 294–95). Christopher Gerteis’s study of gender and unions in postwar Japan also makes it clear that left-wing union programs in postwar Japan were often male dominated and that their politics often obscured women’s interests (Gerteis 2009).

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The existence of such an overlap in 1950s Japan between feminism and Cold War imperialism was argued by Iijima Aiko, who was at the forefront of the woman’s liberation movement in the 1970s. Iijima explains that the celebration of women’s domestic purpose in the

1950s was complicit in Japan’s remilitarization and its continuation of imperialist violence. In particular, she questioned whether the discourse of ryōsai kenbo adapted by the Motherhood movement positioned the family, and by extension the Japanese nation, as victims of nuclear violence in a way that exculpated them from any guilt or responsibility for Japan’s wartime past and obscured the connections between Japan’s economic growth beginning in the 50s and continuing acts of imperialism abroad against the rest of Asia (Iijima 2014: 296). Scholars, such as Lisa Yoneyama, have similarly explored how Japan’s postwar anti-nuclear rhetoric created a reified discourse of “nuclear universalism” that obstructs remembrance of Japan’s wartime atrocities and postwar acts of imperialism (Yoneyama 1999: 15). Indeed, this aligned with a trend beginning in the 1950s towards “narratives of victimhood” where there was little “self- criticism of Japanese aggression,” as Philips Seaton explains, claiming that this period constituted a “second postwar phase of memory […] characterized by a swing to the right in the domestic political environment and popular representations of the war” (Seaton 2007: 39–41).

The displacement of imperial wartime history in postwar Japan is also connected to the displacement of Japanese decolonization in official memory of the war. It is noteworthy that in official postwar records of Japanese who died attempting to flee the colonies, nothing is written about the circumstances of their deaths, and “they are simply remembered as the collectivity of

Japanese who contributed to the peace and prosperity of postwar Japan” (Tamanoi 2009: 63).

Indeed, Japan’s postwar official histories of the war were largely preoccupied with recovery rather than with addressing the realities of violence, disease, and neglect that characterized the

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experiences of those left stranded in the chaos of Japan’s collapsed empire.79 Or rather, they were preoccupied with recovery as a means of avoiding those realities. Mariko Tamanoi argues that a nostalgia for lost empire functioned ‘strategically’ in postwar Japan as a way of consolidating the fragmentation caused (to the individual, to the nation) by Japan’s abrupt and externally-mandated decolonization process: “The sense of nostalgia in contemporary Japan does not simply represent the nation’s yearning for the landscapes, lifestyles, and spectacles of the lost empire; it also represents the nation’s ‘strategy,’ which has enabled its citizens to forget the existence of ‘the rupture of history’ (rekishi no danzetzu): the abrupt dissolution of the Japanese

Empire” (Tamanoi 2009: 6). The process of Japanese decolonization and mass re-patriation was thus framed as one of many ‘returns’ in postwar Japan—a return to the homeland from the colonies, return to reconstructed cities levelled by air-raids, return to furusato, a return to the image of ethnic homogeneity and to the prewar utopia of Japan ‘proper’ (naikoku)—that could suture the wound of Japan’s traumatic loss of empire.

It is, nevertheless, more accurate to describe Japan’s relationship with colonial empire as one of displacement rather than return. As Seiji Lippit explains, postwar narratives of recovery were structured around “democratization and demilitarization” in a way that “displaced any consciousness of decolonization” (Lippit 2010: 290). Those who survived to return home from the colonies found that their repatriation was articulated as a form of closure, a step in the

‘unmaking’ of Japanese empire—as Carol Gluck says, “the nation, which had roused them to do

79 While this section of my thesis focuses on the experiences and victimization of repatriated Japanese civilians, it is necessary to note that Japan’s displacement of the decolonization process also entailed a lack of engagement or dialogue with its victimization of colonies and colonial territories such as Korea, China, or Taiwan. As Leo Ching has explained, “abrupt dissolution of the Japanese Empire by an external mandate [in other words, the United States Occupation Forces] instead of through prolonged struggle and negotiation with its colonies has enabled Japan to circumvent and disavow its colonial question” (Ching 2001: 20).

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the work of empire, now repudiated the entire endeavour, leaving their personal pasts beside the postwar point” (Gluck 1993: 77).

Lippit explains that the displacement of decolonization replaced empire with a

“discursive return to the nation,” a postwar revision of Japan’s identity that was discrepant from the vast imperial geography of Japanese empire and that worked to erase the “rupture” of its collapse by creating a “phantasmatic continuity with the past” (2010: 290–91). Those who were sent to the colonies were thus made to reconcile their personal experiences of Japanese colonialism with the celebration of a “mythic postwar new beginning” for Japan in which there was no place for colonial histories (Gluck 1993: 77). In this way, the discrepant personal memories of Japanese colonial subjects were erased by Japan’s own displacement of imperialism and the revision of its postwar identity. Nevertheless, without any definitive “end” to repatriation, no “last Japanese national” to reclaim, they also served as perpetual reminders of the permeability of wartime history—a “ghosts from its past” (Tamanoi 2009: 61) whose personal memories often conflicted with official channels of remembrance.

Japan also worked to repudiate the existence of colonial literary voices, erasing the colonial literatures that emerged out of Japanese empire. Kawamura Minato thus explains in her book Showa Literature in a Foreign Land: ‘Manchuria’ and Modern Literature (Ikyō no shōwa bungaku—‘Manshū’ to kindai bungaku) that new forms of decentered Japanese literature emerging out of Manchuria (the then-Japanese-controlled puppet state of Manchukuo) were immediately abandoned after the collapse of the Japanese empire. Manchurian literature was touted during the war as a kind of “pioneering” or “continental literature” that went “beyond the framework of Japanese literature” as defined in the Meiji and Taishō periods (Kawamura 1990:

220). Nevertheless, “the Manchu literature that was born [in Manchuria] also disappeared with

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the collapse of the nation” (Kawamura 1990: 220). Despite the seminal role of Japan’s colonies in its modern history, the literary expression of colonial subjects has been given, at best, a marginal acknowledgement in histories of modern Japanese literature.

Abe himself was a subject of colonial empire, and had spent his childhood in Manchuria, his father having been appointed to teach at the Medical University of Manchuria (Manshū ika daigaku).80 He lived in the city of Mukden (now known as Shenyang) from the age of one to twenty-one, from 1925 to 1946.81 Assisting his father in tending to infected patients at a refugee camp in Mukden after an outbreak of typhus in 1945, Abe witnessed first-hand the effects of malnutrition and disease on refugees of war. Kimura Yōko describes the piles of dead that amassed in Abe’s camp during the outbreak:

During a period of three months, between December 1945 to January of the following year, the number of dead in Abe's ward of Wahei-ku (formerly Yamato-ku) alone had climbed to 20,000 people. Under such conditions, the first task for doctors visiting refugee camps was to separate the living from the dead. (Kimura 2013: 67–68)

Abe’s whole family in fact contracted typhus and his father succumbed to the disease, dying in

December 1945 (Kimura 2013: 67). Moreover, Donald Keene describes how after the surrender of Japanese forces “[Abe] felt such disgust on witnessing the crimes perpetuated by Japanese soldiers on Japanese civilians as to make him wish to renounce his identity as a Japanese”

(Keene 2003: 73). When Abe repatriated back to Japan in 1946, his experiences abroad as a

80 Currently the China Medical University (Zhongguo yike daxue)

81 Abe split his time between Manchuria and Japan during the war years. He attended Seijō High School in Tokyo from 1940–43, though those studies were interrupted when he returned to Mukden to recover from a lung infection. Abe also started studying medicine at the Tokyo Imperial University (now University of Tokyo) in 1943, but returned to Mukden a year later, where he resided until the end of the war.

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Japanese colonial subject likely coloured his understanding of postwar Japan and its approach to repatriation and ‘return.’82

The displacement of Japanese colonialism and its subjects in postwar Japan is something that Abe represents explicitly in several of his ghost stories. In fact, it is the most common theme of these narratives, as in Record of a Transformation (1954), The Uniform (1955), and The Ghost is Here (1958), all of which follow ghosts who are in one way or another displaced as unwanted, unseen remnants of Japanese colonialism. For example, the short story Record of a

Transformation83 follows the ghost of a soldier, only identified as K—, who has died in

Manchuria immediately following Japan’s surrender in 1945. K— contracts cholera, is deserted by the rest of his unit, and is executed by another passing unit of Japanese soldiers.84 However, he returns as a ghost and surreptitiously tags along in the truck of his executioners, led by a

General who intends to make one last stand against the allies despite Japan’s official surrender.

Soon K— is joined in the afterlife by others, such as a Lt. Minami, who is shot when he refuses to go along with the General’s mission. They pass through a Chinese village, killing a lone surviving Chinese woman, and K— and Minami witness hordes of Chinese ghosts, the village’s dead, cursing and throwing equally insubstantial objects at the truck of Japanese soldiers in a futile act of retaliation. In the end, the General dies and forces his spirit into the body of a dying

Japanese child—facilitating through this spectral possession the perpetuation of militarism in

82 Labeling Japanese colonists as victims of the Japanese state’s colonial project was also the official approach of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (Tamanoi 2009: 6).

83 Henkei no kiroku (Record of a Transformation) was first published in April 1954 in a special bumper issue of the literary magazine Gunzō, with a mention that it was from Shisha no machi (City of the Dead), a proposed collection of ghost stories that never made it to print.

84 Fear of Japanese returnees spreading foreign “germs” to Japan—cholera, typhoid, typhus, malaria, tuberculosis, etc.—was a real national concern in postwar Japan (see Tamanoi 2009: 63).

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postwar Japan. The ghosts of K—, Minami, and the child then decide to follow the General until the day he dies so that they may then confront his spirit.

The events and setting of this narrative explicitly concern Japan’s history of colonialism in Asia, in particular the chaos that followed Japan’s surrender in 1945. The rupture produced by the abrupt collapse of Japanese empire materializes in the fragmentation of K—’s own ghostly body; yet even before his ‘transformation’ the narrative describes a reality that has lost coherence, for example in the description of the contents of the truck:

As on any moving day, odds and ends had been thrown in pell-mell: a heater, a tent, a teakettle, a large water-filled drum that could double as a bathtub, a large bottle of saké . . . oh, and yes, a small bronze statue of Emperor Jimmu. There was also a hot- water bottle. (Abe 1991: 81)

The disordered clutter strewn about the base of the military truck includes a statue of Japan’s legendary first “Emperor Jimmu,” whose descendance from the sun goddess Amaterasu established a mythos of Japanese national identity that was ruptured with the collapse of empire after the Second World War.

The whole empire system is disrupted by an excess of descriptive detail in which the meaning of the emperor is lost amongst the clutter. This could also be read as a parody of realistic prose, a parody of the ‘record’ or kiroku. Roman Jakobson describes realistic writing as fundamentally concerned with digressive attention to particulars, producing realistic description through a successive “metonymic” chain of ever-expanding digressions and partial, fragmentary linkages that disintegrates the unity of the whole: quoting Anatolij Kamegulov, he explains that with realism “the reader is crushed by the multiplicity of detail unloaded on him in a limited verbal space, and is physically unable to grasp the whole, so that the portrait is often lost”

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(Jakobson 1971: 257). This aesthetic of the extraneous partial detail, whose crushing multiplication frustrates the production of a meaning-making frame through which one might exert control (understanding) over the whole, asserts itself in the indiscriminate, fragmented description of the truck’s contents—a recording of fact without any structural intelligibility, no theoretical or historical armature to give meaning to the description.

Indeed, Abe frequently argues that realism is incapable of representing the changing conditions of a postwar material reality in flux (Abe 1997a: 244). The way in which the

‘transformation’ is to be ‘recorded’ must be altered. On a structural level, the narrative of Record of a Transformation thus challenges the realistic reduction of reality to given actualities by resisting the particularization, the realistic rhetoric of the partial detail, so literally displayed in the truck bed. Indeed, there is a noticeable absence of proper names, places, and times in this narrative (as is typical of much of Abe’s writing) that seems counter-intuitive to a ‘record.’ The narrator is simply K–– and many of the other characters are unnamed; places are merely “P––,” the “Y–– junction,” “K–– River,” “a small Chinese village,” and so on; and we are given a month and day, August 14, but no year. Everything in Record of a Transformation is, as Abe said in his later novel Tanin no kao (The Face of Another, 1964), “like some algebraic equation that does not include such diverse items as name, occupation, and address” (Abe 1967: 190).

The deployment of specific dates, locations, and names are often included in abundance in realistic texts in order to produce authenticity through detail. However, by refusing to give things the specificity of a name, Abe instead furnishes his text with what he calls, in the essay

“Theory and Practice in Literature,” “types.” Types constitute a form of perceptual knowledge that cannot be defined as either concrete or abstract, but rather as “concrete abstractions” (Abe

2013: 28)—echoing Marx’s definition of the commodity as a “ghostly concreteness” or

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“gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit,” a material embodiment of abstract labour (Marx 1872: 13), literary expression ‘typifies’ abstract truths through concrete realities—it literalizes its metaphors. A ‘type,’ he explains, is neither purely concrete nor purely theoretical, consisting instead of a dialectical relation between “the form and content of knowledge” (Abe 2013: 28).

For example, within the narrative content of the story, K–– is an actual, literal soldier who has been killed in Manchuria in 1945 and turned into a ghost, but he also in a formal sense ‘typifies’ a certain significance, namely the silencing of Japan’s subjects of colonization and the disavowal and repetition of war’s traumatic closure (or lack thereof). “The type,” Abe thus explains,

“contains both the form and the content of knowledge” (Abe 2013: 28). It thus signifies something beyond a descriptive reality while at the same time remaining embedded in the text in a literal way that sustains the text’s narrative integrity. As such, ‘types’ are the execution in literature of Abe’s theory of reality as a dialectic between practice and theory, material and structure.

Where this becomes perhaps most significant is where the thematics of haunting intersects with that of the historical record or kiroku. Reality manifests in this story neither in the form of concrete, given historical fact nor in the absolute deviation from the historical in the form of theory. History itself is ‘typified’ in a way that produces an abstract concreteness, a ghostly reality where the phantom-like fragmentation of the subject in the postwar is embedded in a concrete reality. The story begins by giving a date, August 14, the eve of Japan’s declaration of defeat; however, what is significant about this date, more than the date itself, is what is omitted from it, namely the year. It is as if Abe has lifted August 14th out of its historical specificity, transforming it into another type, another abstract concreteness. August 14th becomes the less historically specific and more ambiguously located signifier of an event, ‘the

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end of the Second World War’ ––an event without the lucid clarity of a neatly defined beginning, middle, and end.

Were the story to have begun with the specification of the year 1945, what we would have instead of this event is a date that is situated in what Benedict Anderson, drawing on Walter

Benjamin, calls homogeneous, empty, universal time, time measured by clock and calendar—a temporality that organizes events as linear, isolated moments, related only to other incidents transversally, in the same synchronic plane, other events of the same year, same time, the same contiguous plane—in other words, a record of events happening in Manchuria at the same time as Japan’s surrender, just days after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ‘August 14th,

1945’ as such is squarely placed in the past, in 1945, delineated apart from other times. However,

‘August 14th,’ along with other “odds and ends” of the narrative, has been wrested from its historically specific context to some extent, and is not confined to the strictures of a homogeneous, empty time. It resists the impulse to be given a fixed chronology. In effect, what is suggested by this is that this event, August 14th, the end of the war, outstrips its own ending— producing in this way a “present tense” that, as Mary A. Favret says of war-time, “is always permeable to other presents, other wartimes […] [an] unlimited present, sentient of a war without limits” (Favret 2010: 30).

Rather than a simple realistic record of the ‘present,’ Abe’s record of the end of the war and the decolonization process is a ghost story in which the ‘end’ is not so clearly delineated.

The narrative establishes a rhetoric of return, one that challenges the very past-ness of the events relayed by the narrative by countering the neat separation of past and present produced by the watershed of the ‘end of the war’ with a more permeable return of the displaced ghostly body. It is no coincidence that the year in which Record of a Transformation was published (1954) also

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marked the establishment of Japan’s Self Defense Forces and the signing of the mutual self- defense assistance agreement with the United States. Indeed, Record of a Transformation, The

Uniform, and The Ghost is Here were all written during or after 1954 and can be read as commentaries not only on wartime guilt but also on Japan’s postwar remilitarization. At that time, the US had begun stationing military troops in Japan and encouraging Japan's own rearmament––a proposal that came into conflict with Japan’s American-drafted 1945 constitution, wherein Japan vowed to permanently renounce the use of military force. Renewed militarization aligned perfectly with the United States’ Cold War agenda. Japan in 1954 was a front-line Cold War state, abutting the PRC as well as the NPRK, and we need to understand

Abe’s story not only in the context of the immediate end of the war in 1945 but also in its relation to remilitarization in the face of the perceived crisis of the Cold War, whereby immediate postwar policies of demilitarization and democratization had begun to shift towards rearmament and economic development. Indeed, Cold War remilitarization and economic growth were intimately connected, as was addressed in earlier references to Iijima Aiko’s critique. The

Korean War significantly helped boost the Japanese economy in the 50s, as Japan became “‘one huge supply depot’ serving US aims on the Korean peninsula” (Schaller 1997: 49).

What is suggested by the rhetoric of haunting in Record of a Transformation is that the

‘end’ of the war cannot be so simply delineated, and that the overt militarism and imperialism of the Asia Pacific War, with its capitalist motivations as an opportunity for war profiteering and ideological control, persisted as a spectral history of postwar Japan. Several critics such as

Marilyn Ivy and Wesley Sasaki-Uemura have theorized the senses in which the ‘post’ has

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continued to return in ‘postwar’ Japan,85 suggesting that the war has not yet been fully resolved in the historical consciousness of the present. The lack of closure that is postwar Japan continued

(and continues) to reassert itself in a protectionist policy that, as was referenced earlier in Lisa

Yoneyama’s work, justified renewed militarism in the name socio-political and economic stability, concealing the imperialist and capitalist motivations of Japan’s Cold War politics.

Japan’s postwar dissociation from imperialism is also addressed in Abe’s play The Ghost is Here (1958).86 Its protagonist, Fukagawa, is a war veteran ravaged by guilt who switches identities with a friend, Yoshida, who he left for dead while fighting in the South Pacific (“I should really have died, and he should really have lived, not me” [Abe 1993: 197]). No longer himself (and, consequently, repulsed by mirrors, because, as he says, “I’m only living in place of him, nothing more than a substitute” [1993: 198]), he believes that he can communicate with

Yoshida’s ghost—and, through him, communicate indirectly with other dead spirits as well, many of whom are also war dead (for example “a student during the war or possibly a civilian air-raid warden” who died during air raids on Tokyo and whose “upper half of body has gasified . . . Right half of face missing . . .” [1993: 167]). Fukagawa is soon approached a shady con-artist named Ōba who convinces him that he should buy photographs of the dead from their living relatives to construct a database or census, the professed purpose of which is to help ghosts identify who they are. The true purpose of Ōba’s plan, however, is to turn a profit by re-

85 See for example Sasaki-Uemura who writes that “the Japanese still continue to place themselves, perhaps anachronistically, within the postwar framework despite the government’s proclamation in its 1955 Economic White Paper that the era had passed” (Sasaki-Uemura 2007: 315).

86 The Ghost is Here was first performed in 1958 (June 23–July 22) at the Haiyūza Theatre in Roppongi, Tokyo, and published later that year (August) in the Shingeki magazine.

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selling the photographs at a mark-up to those who, after realizing what the photographs are being used for, do not want the dead to return to find them.

In this way, Ōba’s business model exploits a postwar desire to forget the dead and a collective amnesia concerning wartime memory. Ghosts, as literal returnees of the war dead, have had their own personal histories repressed even by themselves. Yoshida’s ghost laments this, saying, “Who am I? That’s something I can’t remember. But I do remember how once a certain woman was weeping for a man who was dead, and I thought, ‘Maybe she’s weeping for me.’ Then I realized she was weeping for herself. Everybody looks the other way . . .” (1993:

202). Fukagawa was like many returnees who struggled to reintegrate into a Japanese society and had their personal histories, unwelcome reminders of Japanese empire, silenced.

The effect is similar to that which Adorno and Horkheimer describe in their postscript to the “Theory of Ghosts” in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. Therein they interpret emigrants as

“spectral intruders” that manifest an uncomfortable reminder of displaced of trauma:

The disturbed relationship to the dead—who are forgotten and embalmed—is one of the symptoms of the sickness of experience today. […] The threateningly well-meaning advice frequently given to emigrants that they should forget the past because it cannot be transplanted, that they should write off their prehistory and start an entirely new life, merely inflicts verbally on the spectral intruders the violence they have long learned to do to themselves. They repress history in themselves and others, out of fear that it might remind them of the disintegration of their own lives, a disintegration which itself consists largely in the repression of history. (Horkheimer and Adorno 1993: 178–79)

This “repression of history” and its “disintegration” of emigrant experience manifests in postwar

Japan through a “lack of engagement with the end of empire” (Lippit 2010: 290). Lippit explains that “many Japanese, ‘completely cut off from the voices, from the personal experiences, of the

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massive numbers of people who had experienced colonial rule,’87 were able to dissociate themselves from the history of empire, from the experience of those under colonial rule, and from the ongoing effects of empire’s collapse” (2010: 290). If postwar Japan can be characterized by this historical rupture, a dissociation of the present from the colonial past that has enabled the collective reframing of Japanese identity as a phantasmatic ‘new beginning’ and return to the normal boundaries of the nation, then what the ghosts embody in these narratives are a reopening of this historical rupture and a literalization of the subjective disintegration produced by the forgetting of empire and its colonial subjects. The very presence of ghosts in

The Ghost is Here is explained as a kind of problem for official remembrance, which is itself an attempt at closure: Yasukuni Shrine, which commemorates the war dead,88 is “already full” (Abe

1993: 176). This causes many ghosts to spill out beyond the official, stable boundaries of remembrance into the fabric of everyday life.

As concrete examples of the dissociation between individual experience and collective meaning characteristic of 1950s Japan, these ghostly colonial subjects, like the labourers in Song of a Dead Girl, put Abe’s own theory of literary representation into concrete practice. We recall that his theory of literature was similarly rooted in the crisis dislocating collective meaning from

87 This quote is a translation from Komori Yōichi’s Posutokoroniaru (Postcolonial, 2001). The full passage is as follows: “空襲による焼け野原のなかで、食糧難に直面しながら、日々の生活に追われる、新しく枠づけられた「国内」の人々に入ってくる情報は、旧植民地からの引き上げ者たちと復員兵による、一方向的なものでしかなかった。旧植民地において植民地的支配をされた莫大な数の人々の、体験と経験とをめぐる声から、全く遮断されているところに、日本「国内」の人々はおかれたのである” (Komori 2001: 84).

88 The official website for Yasukuni Shrine explains that it enshrines the souls of more than 2,466,000 people who died in “domestic battles starting with the Boshin war, then in the Saga Rebellion that followed, and in the Seinan War,” as well as in “external conflicts such as the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, the Manchurian Incident, the China Incident, and the Greater East Asian War (World War II)” (see http://www.yasukuni.or.jp/history/detail.html.)

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individual experience—individual experience confined to the immediate present cannot perceive the structure that organizes it, and collective structure, divorced from experience, reifies the laws of reality into natural constants, paralyzing individual practice. This is analogous to the dislocation these ghostly returnees experience in postwar Japan, wherein everyday reality, confined to the individual, is dissociated from the shared suffering of Japan’s colonial subjects, and the abstract discursive structure of postwar society, organized around the rebuilding of the nation, dehistoricizes the present, separating it from its connection to Japan’s wartime past. This is similar to the sense in which Jameson articulated the modern crisis in realism, wherein the decentring of the capitalist centre from its colonial base produced a gap between “individual and phenomenological experience and structural intelligibility” (Jameson 2007: 240). Indeed, like

Jameson, Abe recognized that this dissociation needed to be mapped in spatial and geographical terms—and hence these narratives are populated by dislocated bodies, ghosts that are literally out of place within their physical coordinates.

It is significant in this context that the narrator of Record of a Transformation describes his own ghostly displacement:

The truck rolled over my body, crushing it, and went on, leaving my left arm torn half off and my left leg standing up backward, broken, like a signpost marking the boundary between past and future. The past receded swiftly, growing steadily smaller until it disappeared and was swallowed by a rise in the ground. Yet it lingered on, in me. Watching the incessant eddies of sand swirling up from beneath the wheels of the truck, I knew that the memory of that erect leg, a signpost in the middle of nowhere, would follow me wherever I went. (Abe 1991: 81)

As with M’s encounter with her own corpse in Song of a Dead Girl, in this passage K— describes his ghost’s dislocation from his own body. This dislocation both disorients and disrupts

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the stable parameters of the subject while also serving as a kind of “signpost,” a temporal reorientation through which he traces a new kind of historicity. His remains articulate a division in the fluid momentum of time, disrupting its smooth flow and serving as a “signpost” of the present, dividing past and future. The act of haunting becomes a simultaneous disruption of time and persistence of the present, a lingering of the present that follows us in its afterlife. By disrupting the smooth flow of time, the ghost’s ‘leg’ embodies a material history that remains unregistered in the historical memory of postwar Japan. Only he can see what remains; the other characters are blind to the spectral history of violence they have inflicted, and continue to inflict, not only on Japan’s dissociated repatriates but also on the subjects within their wartime colonies.

What I wish to emphasize here is that this narrative of the very immediate postwar outstrips the specificities of a historical record within which it has been displaced. It challenges the neat ordering of beginnings, middles, and endings typical of linear historicism and engages instead with complex anachronisms of a fractured historical memory. The dead are evoked as a collection of temporally disjointed specters, dislodged from the teleological progression of a fluid historicism, frozen in what Benjamin called “a messianic zero-hour [Stillstellung] of events, or put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the suppressed past” (Benjamin 1968:

263). “For every image of the past,” Benjamin wrote, “that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (1968: 255). In this context, it makes perfect sense why Abe would be writing this text, about a last-ditch jingoistic effort to continue a dehumanizing imperialistic war, almost ten years after its supposed conclusion.

Something, the story suggests, remains of the events of August 14th, a receding “signpost” that has not been properly registered or acknowledged in the present moment.

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Conclusion

Record of a Transformation and the other ghost stories discussed in this chapter worked to ‘record’ the unacknowledged and undocumented ‘spectral history’ of the 1950s. Yet Abe was all too aware of the complicity between documentary realism and historical repression to simply engage in what James Clifford has called “salvage ethnography”—the naive “desire to rescue something ‘authentic’ out of destructive historical changes” (Clifford 1989: 78). Instead, for Abe the solution was to write texts that rejected straightforward conventional realism and challenged the authenticity of postwar official narratives of national and subjective rebuilding.

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Learning to Listen to Ghosts: A Politics and Aesthetics of Counterpoint

In this thesis, I have been attempting to articulate different facets of a central metaphor— the ghost—in order to better understand the aesthetics and politics of 1950s Japan. In the first chapter, the ghost was discussed in terms of ‘transparency.’ In chapter two, it was discussed as

‘return.’ In chapter three, I will focus on the ghost as a kind of relation that operates as

‘counterpoint.’ Counterpoint, generally described, involves a relationality that is neither entirely comparative, nor entirely contrasting—neither fully overlapping nor fully distinct. The central characteristic of counterpoint is that it forms connections or harmonies wherein each part is heard without being overshadowed by the others. This is essential to my understanding of the ghost, as the ghost forms connections by operating through difference and dislocation.

Many contemporary critics of various media have turned to music—specifically the dialectical structures of fugue and counterpoint—to challenge problematic forms of historicism and essentialism and to reject “both linear causality and simple binary opposition” (Everett 2008:

7–8). Edward Saïd, Roland Barthes, and Sergei Eisenstein are especially influential in establishing a relation between contrapuntal musical structure and theory. First of all, Saïd developed a reading technique that was influenced by Glenn Gould’s predominantly

“contrapuntal” repertoire, which Saïd defined as “the simultaneity of voices […] continuing to sound against, as well as with, all the others” (Saïd 1993: 5). He argued that a text, like a musical composition, can be read non-linearly as a polyphony of overlapping ‘melodies,’ as surface-level narratives within which there exist traces of a hidden counter-narratives and “discrepant experiences” (Saïd 1993: 31). If we are attuned to the counterpoint in a text, we can “think

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through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of external relationships, all of them co-existing and interacting with others” (Saïd 1993: 32). By enabling us to “think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant,” counterpoint makes connections while avoiding some of the trappings of binary comparative analysis: it resists essentialization of the Other’s experience—“exclusions that stipulate, for instance, that only women can understand feminine experience, only Jews can understand Jewish suffering, only formerly colonial subjects can understand colonial experience”—without, on the one hand, appropriating that experience or, on the other, relegating it to some essentialist representation of

Otherness (Saïd 1993: 31–32). In this way, Saïd developed a method of reading alterity, where each text is ‘haunted’ by traces of other overlapping histories. Put differently, he argues that far- flung histories and cultures are not autonomous but interconnected, hybrid entities: our present contains traces of our own, as well as someone else’s, past, and the colonizer’s narrative contains traces of the colonized.

Barthes similarly adapted contrapuntal musical structure to produce what he calls a “truly revolutionary” form of contemporary interpretive practice that is “unthinkable in the terms of the old aesthetics” (Barthes 1977: 153). Barthes, inspired by Beethoven much as Saïd was inspired by Gould, argues in his essay “Musica Practica” that counterpoint requires that the relation between audience and composition be collaborative, an active and shared experience rather than the passive transmission of meaning from artist to audience. Beethoven’s music exemplifies this,

Barthes explains, as it is fundamentally “orchestral”—it escapes “from the fetishism of a single element (voice or rhythm)”—and as such frustrates the “mimetic impulse” that would position the listener as the passive receiver of an intimately transmitted message (1977: 152).

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Beethoven’s listeners must “displace, assemble, combine, fit together” the structure of the work in an active, practical way (Barthes 1977: 153)—and a text, similarly, must be actively inscribed and re-inscribed by its readers: “Just as the reading of the modern text […] consists not in receiving, in knowing or in feeling that text, but in writing it anew, in crossing its writing with a fresh inscription, so too reading this Beethoven is to operate his music, to draw it (it is willing to be drawn) into an . In other words, meaning is inscribed, rather than received, over the text, as a kind of palimpsest that must be actively produced—like “a music that is not abstract or inward, but that is endowed, if one may put it like this, with a tangible intelligibility, with the intelligible as tangible” (Barthes 1977: 153). In this way, the self in the act of interpretation becomes implicated in the interpretation as a co-conspirator in the construction of meaning89—a sentiment that Saïd also expresses when he writes that the “contrapuntal view of things” gives “additional enrichment to the idea of process, to carrying on more or less forever” (Saïd 2008: 9–10).

Finally, Eisenstein’s application of the musical theory of counterpoint to film form has also been influential. In his essay “A Dialectical Approach to Film Form,” he defines cinema itself as contrapuntal. Cinema, he writes, is grounded upon the superimposition of still images to produce movement and as such counterpoint is “the nerve of cinema” (Eisenstein 1977: 48–49), just as in music counterpoint is “the basic factor for the possibility of tone perception and tone differentiation” (1977: 52). He goes on to identify several contrapuntal forms of conflict inherent to film form, in particular “montage” (“the collision of independent shots—shots even opposite

89 “We know that today post-serial music has radically altered the role of the 'interpreter', who is called on to be in some sort the co-author of the score, completing it rather than giving it 'expression'. The Text is very much a score of this new kind: it asks of the reader a practical collaboration” (Barthes 1977: 163).

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to one another” (1977: 49)) and “audio-visual counterpoint” (the conflict between the “whole optical complex” and “acoustical experience” (1977: 54)).

Each of these definitions of counterpoint provides a crucial part of the picture needed to understand what a theory of ‘haunting-as-counterpoint’ entails. First of all, for Saïd counterpoint is a kind of historical and cultural hybridity without hegemony. For Barthes, counterpoint necessitates a re-configuration of the roles of composer, performer, and listener, where all are involved collaboratively in the construction of the piece, which must be assembled an in active, and practical way. Finally, for Eisenstein, counterpoint is a dialectical synthesis of visual as well as audio-visual elements. Each of these aspects of counterpoint can be applied to the films I will focus on in this chapter, Pitfall and Hiroshima mon amour.

1950s Avant-Garde: Totality (Sōgō) and Counterpoint

The theme of ‘counterpoint’ is also crucial to Japan’s avant-garde discourse in the 1950s.

It manifested in the shared interest among many artists and intellectuals in collectivity and collaboration. In Japanese avant-garde movements in the 1950s,90 the desire to break with established conventions and to represent the dislocation of postwar experience coincided with a strong imperative that the arts should become collaborative in a way that would disrupt traditional divisions between art mediums as well as instill the arts with a sense of collective consciousness and responsibility. Abe’s interest in the 1950s in exploring the dialectical relation

90 Though this thesis does not present a comprehensive survey of the key avant-garde artists operating in the 1950s, it is important to recognize that Abe, Teshigahara, and Takemitsu were joined by many others such as Hanada Kiyoteru (Abe’s mentor), Noma Hiroshi (author), Okamoto Tarō (painter/sculptor), Sasaki Kiichi (literary critic), Haniya Yutaka (author, founder of Kindai Bungaku), Shiina Rinzō (author, playwright), Ono Tōzaburō (poet), Hani Susumu (director), and Takeda Taijun (author), among others. Rather than working in isolation, these artists and critics operated within collaborative artistic assemblages, groups such as Yoru no Kai, Seiki no Kai, Genzai no Kai, and Kiroku Geijutsu no Kai.

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between practice and theory aligned with this interest among other avant-garde artists in exploring the aesthetic and political possibilities of cooperative art forms whose collaborative arrangement exploited a tension between individual and collective inherent to 1950s Japan. In this way, ‘cooperation’ as an aesthetic and a political goal was mobilized as a correlate to the specific historical, subjective, and structural disarticulation of this period.

The Sōgō Bunka Kyōkai (Total Culture Organization), created by literary critic (and

Abe’s mentor) Hanada Kiyoteru in 1947, established many of the concerns that would later be applied to cooperative art forms in the 1950s. The manifesto published in the July 1947 inaugural issue of their journal, Sōgō Bunka, states: 91

We strive to form a human being who possesses total vision [sōgōtekina shikaku o motta ningen].

The human being that we form has been divided.

Social materials [shakai busshitsu] must be unified. Which is to say, self and collective, individual and society, the unification of politics and culture, soul and body, criticism and creation, and the mediation of art and science—in other words the creation of an entirely new way of life, the greatest task of the 20th century. (Republished in Sekine 1959: 55)

While the organization was short-lived (1947–49), its dedication to the creation of a “total vision” that unified various aesthetic and social “material” categories carried over into the interests of art collectives in the 50s (that Abe, who belonged to Sōgō Bunka Kyōkai, advocated for a dialectical approach to theory and practice, as well as individual and collective, then comes as no surprise).

91 Sekine Hiroshi explains that this manifesto was written by Noma Hiroshi (Sekine 1959: 54).

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‘Cooperation’ was understood in a couple of related ways by artists in the 1950s. First, it referred to a synthesis of different media (literature, radio, television, painting, etc.) that aimed to create a ‘total work of art’ or sōgō geijutsu. This concept of sōgō geijutsu, like sōgō bunka, was central to avant-garde art movements in the 50s such as Hanada Kiyoteru’s Yoru no Kai (Night

Society), Abe’s Seiki no Kai (Century Society), and Teshigahara’s Sōgetsu āto sentā (Sōgetsu

Art Centre). As Margaret Key explains, the idea of sōgō geijutsu “was based on the belief that in order for art to advance, there must be collaboration among artists in different genres” (Key

2011: 77). Therefore, these movements drew together filmmakers, musicians, painters, writers, as well as other intellectuals and members of the sciences, to create inter-medial and interdisciplinary collaborative art projects. Second, in addition this understanding of cooperation as intermediation and collaboration between artists, cooperation also signified a concern among

1950s avant-garde artists with art for ‘the masses’ or for ‘everyone,’ art that was accessible to the common people and that represented their everyday experiences, which were often discrepant from celebratory official narratives of postwar Japanese economic growth and progress.

These two concerns—intermediation and art that represented the life of the masses— ultimately coincided in the context of sociopolitical changes in the 1950s, such as remilitarization, rationalization, curtailment of labour rights, and the rise of mass media: bringing art to the masses involved challenging the boundaries of pure (junsui) art by incorporating popular (taishū) cultural forms such as radio and television, and thereby producing art with

“‘actuality’—by which was meant art that had relevance to contemporary political and social reality” (Key 2011: 77–78). In this way, for example, literary groups such as Genzai no Kai

(Now Society), which was formed in June 1952 (in other words, two months after the creation of the US-Japan Security Treaty, seen by many intellectuals as a return to remilitarization and an

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extension of US imperialism, and one month after the labour protests that came to be known as

Bloody May Day) aimed to awaken the political consciousness of the masses, by disseminating various media such as literature, film documentaries, and radio programs dealing with contemporary social events to working class communities, such as factory workers.92

However, as collective arts became important to artists in the 1950s, so too did skepticism towards various contemporary forms of collective belonging. This was a crucial difference between the agenda of early postwar manifestations of ‘total art’—namely the Sōgō

Bunka Kyōkai, for which the need for comprehensive vision was a response to the fragmentation of the postwar subject. As their manifesto states, “our starting point is the life we discovered at the bottom of [Japan’s] defeat” (Sekine 1959: 55). For artists in the 1950s, the starting point was a critique of a newly emerging mass culture. Since mass culture in Japan, as elsewhere, arose in conjunction with industrial capitalism and its concomitant modern technologies of mass dissemination such as the newspaper, radio, and television (Ivy 1993: 240–41), the ‘collectivity’ of mass media is often associated with a homogenizing ‘culture industry’ leveling class distinctions and standardizing both private and public life (see Horkheimer and Adorno 1993:

94–136). This necessarily complicated the concept of sōgō and the relationship between individual and collective. Nevertheless, with the emergence of commercial radio broadcasts in

1951,93 followed by television broadcasts in 1953, intellectuals and artists in Japan turned to new ways of appropriating mass media to produce resistant forms of social realism. Abe, like many artists in the 1950s, mobilized mass media as a way of “helping fiction catch up to reality” (Abe

92 See Margaret Key for more on Genzai no Kai (Key 2011: 16–17).

93 Prior to 1951, Japan’s national broadcasting organization or NHK held a monopoly on radio broadcasting (Ivy 1993: 245).

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quoted in Schnellbächer 2004: 383), for example creating several documentary radio plays in the mid-50s as well as popular (or ‘mass art’) radio dramas and musicals (twenty seven in total between 1955 and 1964) (Key 2011: 79).

In this way, commitment to art for the masses coincided directly with the emergence of mass media and collective consumer culture in the 1950s, yet this was appropriated by the avant- garde in ways that countered both the elitism of traditional art forms as well as the hegemonic expressions of contemporary mass culture. Indeed, in 1950s Japan the very categories of

‘individual’ and ‘masses’ were characterised by an overlap in meaning rather than as opposed terms. As was discussed in the previous chapter, the ‘subjectivity debate’ or ‘shutaisei ronsō’ that occupied early postwar literary movements was absorbed in the 1950s into the Western capitalist logic of democratic liberal individualism as well as reactionary nationalism and nativism. To the extent that shutaisei was filtered through both the frame of nationalist rhetoric of Japanese exceptionalism (Nihonjinron) as well as the imposed agency of the ubiquitous, naturalized middle-class consumer subject, the distinction established by the shutaisei debates between individual and mass consciousness in the early postwar collapsed. In particular, as capitalism itself produced, through mass media, a democratic consumer subject that was conformist and rigid—an individual that was at the same time both collective and isolated— avant-garde artists in the 1950s moved away from the binary logic separating individual and collective in order to explore instead the sense in which these two poles possessed a complementary function. As Masao Miyoshi suggests, what was necessary was a more dialectical vision of individualism that rejects “shutaisei without at once falling into the suffocating regimentation of conformism and collectivism” (Miyoshi 2010a: 108).

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One of the very words for ‘masses’ in Japanese, taishū, also reflects this overlapping of collectivity and difference. Marilyn Ivy explains that taishū vacillates between meanings of

“masses” as well as “people” or “popular” in a way that points to the opposite valences that mass culture can take: as both a conformist, hegemonizing force as well as a communal space of spontaneous, popular resistance (Ivy 1993: 241). The dichotomy of ‘individual’ and ‘masses’ that structured the early shutaisei debates collapsed in the 1950s with the rise of mass popular culture, as each term signified both a reified space of false consciousness as well as a space of radical transformation. In this way, mass media worked to produce the homogeneous bourgeois middle-class capitalist subject, yet at same time was coopted by avant-garde artists to express a

‘total,’ collaborative work of art that transcended the isolation of individual experience while also resisting the hegemony of mass culture by producing a counter-culture ‘for the masses.’

The point I wish to emphasize here is that the avant-garde responded to the particular history and politics of 1950s Japan with a kind of contrapuntal method in which identity and difference overlapped in various ways, such as in the concepts of totality (sōgō) and masses

(taishū). Hanada Kiyoteru argued in his 1957 essay Eiga to taishū (Cinema and the Masses) that the goal of postwar avant-garde artists was the “bringing together of media/genres [janru no sōgō],” yet he also cautioned that this ‘total work of art’ (sōgō geijutsu) “should be grasped as a continual dialectical tension among mediums and between avant-garde art and mass art” (Hanada

1957: 148; translation from Sas 2012: 139). Rather than an either-or relationship of resistance and collusion, therefore, the two drives of coming together and resisting operated in dynamic tension, working in a dialectical way to break with both established art institutions as well as the conformist individualism of mass culture. Avant-garde artists in the 1950s rejected both individual and universal aesthetic meaning, and resisted both capitalist individualism and

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conservative forms of national belonging, in favour of a collaborative process that was at once both collective and individual, crossing conservative institutional boundaries to experiment with popular (taishū) art mediums and engage in popular forms of resistance. Collaboration to these artists meant something very different from conformity or individualism and was instead much like Abe’s own dialectic of theory and practice, establishing methodologies and collectives that were nonetheless continuously ‘compromised’ by contingent material factors and shaped through negotiations between the plurality of individual agents involved in the creative process of meaning-making.

Abe, Takemitsu, and Teshigahara

Very often these experiments in the arts took the form of audio-visual (shichōkaku) projects, in particular theatre, radio, television, and feature-length film projects. In the 1950s, as televisions and radios were becoming more accessible, various genres such as documentary cinema, radio plays, and musicals started to appeal to artists as forms media that would transcend the institutional elitism and creative isolation of the literary establishment, that would be accessible to (and representative of) a mass audience that was marginalized by the print literary establishment, that were interdisciplinary, and that were all inherently collaborative.

Hanada was especially central in organizing avant-garde interest in audiovisual projects the 1950s, creating the Kiroku Geijutsu no Kai (Documentary Arts Society) in 1959, a society that attempted to move, as literary critic Sasaki Kiichi writes, “from print culture to audiovisual culture [katsuji bunka kara shichōkaku bunka he ]” (Sasaki 1983: 213, translation from Key

2011: 80). It was particularly important for Hanada that audio-visual work de-privilege the visual register, as Yoshida Ken explains: “While others were enthusiastically heralding the coming of eizō bunka (image culture), and even reserving a room for bungei eiga (cinematic adaptation of

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literary classics), Hanada opted for a more rigorous mixture that included the aural as well as the visual media [. . .] Total artwork was meant to mobilize the network of feelings into an operative assemblage” (Yoshida 2012: 47).

A particularly significant relationship in this respect was the one formed between Abe

Kōbō, Takemitsu Tōru, and Teshigahara Hiroshi. These three artists frequently collaborated throughout the 50s and into the 60s in ways that placed audio-visual collaboration at the centre of artistic practice. Abe and Takemitsu were both members of Hanada’s aforementioned Kiroku

Geijutsu no Kai, and the two artists collaborated on a number of television dramas, as well as radio plays in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Key 2011: 80; Grilli 2018: 100).

At the same time, while Abe and Takemitsu were trying to free print from the limitations of traditional print media, Takemitsu was working to liberate the musical arts from the conservative, elitist, and “academic” music establishment (Burt 2001: 40). In 1951, he helped found the group Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop). In the spirit of the 1950s avant-garde,

Jikken Kōbō, like Kiroku Geijutsu no Kai, embodied the idea of sōgō geijutsu through interdisciplinary collaborations between artists working in different mediums such as music, film, dance, theatre, photography, painting, and television, and thus they claimed, in their unpublished manifesto, that their aim was to “synthesize/integrate/consolidate [sōgō] the various disciplines of art” (Takiguchi 1991: 102; translated in Sas 2012: 143). During this time,

Takemitsu himself was not simply composing music, but also writing novels and directing TV dramas. He thus said that it was important to “integrate across art genres” and that “there are things I can’t do with music alone” (Takemitsu in Abe et al. 1998c: 222–23).

Furthermore, Takemitsu and Abe also participated in Teshigahara’s Sōgetsu āto sentā or

Sōgetsu Art Centre, an auditorium which hosted musical performances, lectures, and film 174

screenings. Housed within the Sōgetsu Kaikan, which had been built in Tokyo in 1958 by

Teshigahara’s father Teshigahara Sōfū to serve as the headquarters for his own Sōgetsu school of ikebana (flower arrangement), the Centre placed particular emphasis on international collaboration, and reached out to artists from different disciplines abroad to come to Japan to participate in various projects. In a roundtable discussion held at the Sōgetsu Art Center between

Abe Kōbō, Takemitsu Tōru, Teshigahara Hiroshi, Hani Susumu (filmmaker), and Tōmatsu

Shōmei (photographer)—in other words five artists who were working in and across various media—Abe emphasized the need to address the “conflict” between different genres and find their “common challenges” (kyōtsū no kadai) (Abe et al. 1998c: 222).94

Housed in the same building as the Sōgetsu Art Centre was Teshigahara’s own production studio, Teshigahara Productions. The two organizations shared the same staff (such as acoustic engineer Okuyama Shigenosuke, who also worked on Pitfall’s soundtrack) and many of the same artists operated across both institutions (Hrvatin 2012: 58–59). Three of the four film projects upon which Teshigahara, Abe, and Takemitsu collaborated in the 1960s—Pitfall,

Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another—were produced by Teshigahara’s company (the fourth collaboration, The Man Without a Map, was produced by Masaichi Nagata). The of audio- visual, intersubjective, inter-medial ethos of cooperation shared by these art collectives in the

1950s influenced the fundamentally collaborative nature of these films.

Abe and Takemitsu both explicitly articulate their understanding of ‘collaboration’ in the third issue of the Art Theatre (Āto shiatā) journal published shortly after the release of Pitfall.

94 This roundtable was first published on July 20, 1960 as “Wakaki geijutsuka-tachi no kadai” (Challenges for Young Artists) in Ikebana Sōgetsu No. 30 (Sōgestukai shuppan-bu); and it can be found in Abe’s Collected Works Volume 12 (Abe et. al. 1998c: 222–235).

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Therein, both frame the collaborative, intersubjective relationship between the three artists involved in the film’s production, as well as the relationships formed between the various media in which they worked, as a sort of solidarity of contradictions. Takemitsu writes in his essay

“Tairitsu suru ongaku” (Oppositional Music):

In the case of film, even though it has a profound personal character, it cannot be made without cooperative process. And it is from here that truly new art derives. Apart from the cold concept of film as an integrated art form, how else should one join music to film? Should it really be incorporated with a single function?

If cinema has a personal character, the incorporation of other fields does not hold logically to the extent that it is pure, but instead produces contradictions. However, I do not think that the goal should be to overcome these contradictions, but rather to deepen them through collaborative operation, and herein find cinema’s newness. (Takemitsu 1962: 15)

In this quote, Takemitsu frames the “collaborative process” of cinema as one that is neither conformist nor dissonant, collective nor individual, but rather a “deepening” of contradiction through collaboration—echoing Yamaguchi Katsuhiro’s description of Jikken Kōbō as a collaborative project traveling in “centripetal and centrifugal directions […] an inward movement away from the outer directed teamwork of the group, a return to individual work” that was also an “attempt to combine work in the various fields of art, music, and literature through logically necessary ideas” (Chong 2012: 53).

In line with this emphasis on collaboration, Takemitsu played far more than a supplemental or ‘background’ role as composer for Teshigahara’s films. As a composer of film music—collaborating on more than a hundred film projects in the 50s and onwards, including almost all Teshigahara’s films—he was more than incidentally or peripherally involved in the

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film-making process. Teshigahara himself claims that Takemitsu “immersed himself in the film right from the start […] his involvement paralleled mine” (quoted in Richie 2002: 6).

Abe’s involvement in his film collaborations with Teshigahara was equally substantial, advising Teshigahara on visual design, and of course providing the screenplays and novels for the films—a fact that lead Masahiro Ogi to exclaim that in Pitfall—the first collaboration between Abe and Teshigahara—“Abe’s head started walking with Teshigahara’s feet” (Ogi

1962: 4). Tomoda Yoshiyuki explains that during production of Pitfall, staff (including the scriptwriter Eiko Yoshida) were concerned about the “lack of centripetal force [kyūshinryoku busoku]” from Teshigahara (Tomoda 2012: 96). The number of staff working on Pitfall was small: Tomoda explains that a typical dramatic film would have a crew of 40 to 50 people, whereas Pitfall only had 16 (Tomoda 2012: 97). This meant that “actors would sometimes push camera dollies and hold reflectors,” and that “to compensate for the lack of extras,” Abe played the role of a corpse in the film, Takemitsu played a bus passenger, and producer Ono Tadashi played a site supervisor (Tomoda 2012: 97).

Tomoda also explains that Pitfall was “epoch-making” in that it was produced by

Teshigahara’s own production company and “clearly set out the intentions and claims of the artists without being controlled by movie companies or sponsors” (2012: 95). This was a sentiment echoed by avant-garde composer Takahashi Yūji (b. 1938), who served as one of the pianists for the film’s soundtrack. In an interview with Klara Hrvatin, he claimed that the early

1960s was a different time for film productions where there were fewer financial constraints and less studio production influence—there was “no rejection of new things” at the Sōgestu Art

Centre: “Everyone was young and poor, so there was nothing to lose. There was no commercialization or subsidy required like the current experimental art. Of course, Sōgetsu itself

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may have been a huge sponsor, but there was almost no screening, competition, or regulation”

(Hrvatin 2012: 60). The lack of authoritative control over filmmaking process by studios or sponsors created an environment in which equal, collaborative experimentation was able to flourish. All of these factors speak to the nature of the film as a collaborative art project whose centripetal organization was perpetually put in check by the plurality of creative voices involved in its production—or as Grilli explains, “to say that Abe wrote the screenplays, Takemitsu composed the musical scores, and Teshigahara provided the imagery is too simplistic. Each of the three challenged, provoked, and enhanced the work of the others” (Grilli 2018: 100).

This collaborative ethos extended to the way in which Abe, Takemitsu, and Teshigahara all attempted to decentralize film’s visual register and bring sound into focus. It is perhaps no surprise that sound plays a crucial role in the film Pitfall, seeing as it derived from a radio play.

As Karim Yasar explains, while most film directors in the early postwar period were indifferent to the role of sound-effects in film, “sound effects were a central concern in almost every theoretical and practical tract devoted to radio drama” (Yasar 2018: 188).95 Pitfall’s auditory register does not merely ‘accompany’ the film—if conceived as a primarily visual medium—but works to both contradict and enhance the film’s images. Abe therefore theorized the formal relationship between the auditory and the visual in Pitfall as a sort of counterpoint, a totality produced not through simple complementarity between media but rather through their tension.

His essay in the aforementioned issue of Art Theatre, “Heikōsen no aru fūkei” (Landscape with

95 It is perhaps a coincidence but it is worth noting that the first ‘radio drama’ (rajio dorama) broadcast in Japan, in 1925, was entitled Tankō no naka (In a Coal Mine), a translation by playwright and director Osanai Kaoru of British writer Richard Hughes’ radio drama Danger (1924) (Yasar 2018: 154).

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Parallel Lines), rejects the idea that sound plays a mimetic function in cinema, accompanying images simply as background noise to set the ‘mood’ or produce emotional effect:

In the end, the problem does not seem to be raw materials. Ears that discover nothing other than banality in the sound of the wind, however unique the raw materials are, they of course cannot pick up anything but banality. This wind, or that wind—in a word, wind that all makes the same ‘whooshing’ sound—is from the beginning no more than a general concept.

[…]

I believe that the cause of this conceptualization is hidden where wind is merely tied to emotion. Wind is ultimately a natural phenomenon, and emotions are only the effect of this. […] If you think earnestly about going beyond emotion, rather isn’t it necessary to treat the existence of wind more seriously? Shouldn’t we hope to have the courage to resolutely produce a drama that is only the sound of wind from beginning to end? (Abe 1962: 12)

To make a drama that is “only the sound of wind from beginning to end” inverts the typical audio-visual hierarchy that places emphasis on the image. It gives a central role to a transparent substance that, like Irigaray said of ‘air,’ played a crucial yet unnoticed and unseen role. Indeed, wind plays more than a peripheral role in Pitfall, as Ōtani Shinpei points out in his essay

“‘Otoshiana’ no onsei to katarite no ‘konseki’” (The ‘Trace’ of the Narrator and Sound Direction in Pitfall). Ōtani lists several recurring instances of wind in the film: “the ghost of the first union leader stands in the pond. The sound of wind. (1:32’23”–) […] Two union heads stand facing each other. The sound of wind. (1:32’34”–) […] The boy is coming. The sound of wind.

(1:32’37”–) […] A herd of wild dogs. The sound of wind. (1: 33’31”–1:33’57”)” (Ōtani 2016:

86). Wind, Ōtani explains, becomes a “symbol of emptiness and fear” that works to auditorily

(and also transparently) bring together various disassociated subjects in the film: miners, ghosts,

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children, and wild dogs, all ignored, invisible subjects sharing in an abjection that separates them from the everyday world of the living (Ōtani 2016: 86).

While sound worked to ‘symbolically’ associate disparate subjects in the film, Abe’s above comments on wind also suggest a resistance towards abstraction—sound was not limited to the particular yet could not be universalized, either. The problem Abe highlights in the above essay is that generalizing sound—in other words simply treating it ubiquitously as ‘background noise’—obscures the fact that the ‘reality’ of film is an effect conditioned by its “raw material,” which includes sound. Abe argues that the film’s soundscape, including the sound of wind, is part of the film’s “background” (haikei), and to treat this background as mere window- dressing—a banal, homogeneous “whooshing” of wind—robs the background of its specificity, transforms it into an abstraction that is divorced from the particular, concrete reality of the film’s setting and characters, the mining villages and their occupants: “People who have been cut off from background [haikei] cannot be said to ever have existed. Those kinds of people are, like the abandoned background, no more than the fragment of a stereotyped concept” (Abe 1962: 13). In this way, the wind is part of the particular material-historical context of the film, a sound that emerges from and shapes the landscape of the mining villages.

Takemitsu is similarly concerned with the problems that arise from generalizing and stereotyping the function of sound in the film. He understood film in musical terms and was heavily influenced by his mentor Fumio Hayasaka’s vision of “film as a new expressive medium for music” (Koozin 2010: 11). Like Abe, Takemitsu inverted the audio-visual hierarchy of cinema to foreground its aural aspect, saying that “I often think of movies in terms of problems in sound” (Takemitsu 2000b: 162; translation by Yoshiko Kakudo and Glenn Glasow in

Takemitsu 1995: 36). Moreover, like Abe, he resisted the idea that music has a single, generic

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function, arguing instead in his essay “Tairitsu suru ongaku” that “there is no such thing as a set law [sadamatta hōsoku] for film music” (Takemitsu 1962: 14).96 This resistance to “set laws” extended to a critique of rote counterpoint between sounds and images on screen, which he felt had become ubiquitous in cinema:

It is frequently said that through the contrapuntal [tairitsuteki / kontorapankuto] direct usage of music, film expression gained a synergizing effect. By doing this, it turns out that tracing again over what is drawn does nothing but dilute expression.

[…]

The scene of the murder in Pépé le Moko where a bright-sounding player piano is playing is said to be a typical example of film music. In the conclusion to the film Stray Dog [Norainu], the same means of counterpoint [taiiteki shudan] is used. Hence today this method has become common sense and is used routinely. This counterpoint technique attracts people when it appears abnormally and in that way it produces the effect of tension. However, graphically processed, if you comply with traditional repetition, on the contrary it stops producing the effect of the scene. In this case there is no point in the way music joins with film, since this does nothing but negatively trace the image. (Takemitsu 1962: 14–15)

Here it is important to understand that Takemitsu does not reject counterpoint per se, but rather objects to its mechanical application as an automatic negation of the image. If counterpoint is simply audio-visual dissonance, then not only does this become a kind of conformism that counteracts any estranging effect the scene might produce, but sound also becomes abstracted from image, autonomous, independent from and indifferent to the concrete particularities of the

96 A slightly different version of this essay is published in Takemitsu’s collected works (Takemitsu Tōru chosakushū) as “Eiga ongaku” (Film Music) (Takemitsu 2000a: 158–161).

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film. It becomes an abstract form of ‘common sense’ or a ‘routine’ retracing that fixes meaning in a stereotypical way.

Takemitsu was not against counterpoint, but “common sense” and “routine” counterpoint, paralleling Michael Chion’s distinction between “counterpoint-as-contradiction” and “true free counterpoint” (Chion 1994: 38–39). “Counterpoint-as-contradiction,” Chion explains, “reduces the audio and visual elements to abstractions at the expense of their multiple concrete particularities […] reduces our reading to a stereotyped meaning of the sounds, drawing on their codedness […] rather than their own sonic substance, their specific characteristics in the passage in question” (Chion 1994: 38). “True free counterpoint,” in contrast, elevates the meaning of images rather than negating them (Chion 1994: 39). Takemitsu similarly proposed that counterpoint should strive to create a “more essential contradiction with the screen” and that “it is important for music to join with the total expression [tōtaru (zentaiteki) na hyōgen]” of the film (Takemitsu 1962: 15).

When asked in the aformentioned interview with Klara Hrvatin about Takemitsu’s use of

“counterpoint” (taiihō) in Pitfall, Takahashi Yūji explains that Takemitsu was influenced by

Brecht’s “defamiliarization theory [ika riron]”97 and was also reading Eisenstein’s works at the time of the film’s production (Hrvatin 2012: 60). Indeed, his rejection counterpoint-as- contradiction hinges in part on its lack of defamiliarization, its ‘routine,’ ‘common sense’ application. Moreover, it parallels Eisenstein’s own rejection of mechanical forms of dualist

97 Brecht’s use of Verfremdung (as in Verfremdungseffekt) was formerly translated into English as “alienation” (”alienation effect,”) however it is now more commonly translated as “defamiliarization.” Moreover, it is possible that Takahashi’s use of the term ika riron 異化理論 follows Ōe Kenzaburō’s similar translation of Brecht’s terminology as “ika no riron” in his book Shōsetsu no hōhō (Method of the Novel, 1978).

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montage where elements never converge: counterpoint, he argues in his essay “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today” must evolve beyond simple contradiction to achieve “a unity of a higher order […] an organic embodiment of a single idea conception, embracing all elements, parts, details of the film-work” (Eisenstein 1977: 254, italics in original). Eisenstein elsewhere (in The

Film Sense) called this “vertical montage,” drawing a comparison between film with its many overlapping elements and an orchestral score with many staffs (Eisenstein 1957: 75). An orchestra score, he explains, has diachronic and synchronic planes: it inscribes the horizontal movement of the melody sequentially through time and also graphically maps what each instrument is doing simultaneously along a vertical plane. Similarly, the purpose of vertical montage in cinema is to synchronize the senses, to “remove the barriers between sight and sound

[…] to bring about a unity and a harmonious relationship between these two opposite spheres”

(Eisenstein 1957: 87).

Takemitsu similarly conceived of counterpoint as a form of “harmony” between

“opposite spheres,” a notion that was in line with Jikken Kōbō’s own defining ethos, the ‘total work of art’ or sōgō geijutsu, as an interdisciplinary, collaborative, cross-genre work of art that expresses synchronicity through difference. Totality or ‘sōgō’ was articulated within this collective as a form of dialectic—Miryam Sas explains that ‘sōgō’ translated “the Hegelian concept of synthesis, and that [members of Jikken Kōbō] attempted to retain the term’s Hegelian dialectical nuance” (Sas 2012: 156). Similarly, Takemitsu’s synthesis of image and sound isn’t articulated as opposition but as dialectic, a harmony of differences somewhere in between the totality implied in generalizability and the particularity of absolute contradiction.

Much in the same way that Takemitsu contrasted two forms of counterpoint—rote counterpoint-as-contradiction versus a more radical form of counterpoint striving for a “more

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essential contradiction” that joins with the “total expression”—so too did he contrast two forms of ‘harmony.’ His opinions on “harmony” (chōwa) in jazz music make this clear: two years before the release of Pitfall, he participated in a roundtable discussion on jazz98 along with Abe,

Kijima Hajime (poet), Akiyama Kuniharu (music critic), and Hayashi Hikaru (composer), in which he argued that “conflict” and “complication” that arises from jazz is actually a kind of

“harmony,” but that this “harmony” must be understood in the sense of chōwa rather than sōgō:

Takemitsu: In terms of ‘harmony’ [chōwa], various people have gathered from various genres, such as theater, music, and so on. Logically speaking various pure individualities cannot co-exist. That would provoke something like a contradiction. I think that is true harmony [chōwa] and expression […] ‘Synthesis’ [sōgō] is a little different. There is no resistance in the word ‘synthesis.’ There is no fight […] Without intense, fierce battles, there is no harmony of individual matters. This kind of fierce struggle can be called harmony, or love. (Abe et al. 1998a: 436)

Takemitsu objects here to a harmony that involves mere superficial cooperation without

“resistance” or “struggle.” To complicate matters, despite rejecting sōgō it is clear that

Takemitsu’s understanding of harmony involving struggle is comparable to the postwar avant- garde’s usage of sōgō as Hegelian ‘synthesis.’ Later Takemitsu further clarifies that the contrast between “true” harmony (chōwa) and ‘harmony without resistance’ (sōgō) is that true harmony precedes “conscious purpose [mokuteki ishiki]” or “conscious methodology [ishikiteki hōhōron]”: “I don’t think I can move to a conscious methodology unless I go through the process” (Takemitsu in Abe et al. 1998a: 436). In this way, perhaps, Takemitsu was attempting to reject the idealist Hegelian abstraction of the dialectical, emphasizing instead the primacy of

98 Entitled Jazu ni tsuite (On Jazz)

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the material process (akin to Marx’s historical-materialist dialectic) through which harmony could be achieved—or in Abe’s terms, he was inverting the hierarchy of ‘practice’ and

‘theory.’99 Therefore, ‘harmony’ is not given or accomplished in advance but is created through material process.

How this emerges in practice in Pitfall is clear from the soundtrack—a contrapuntal, collaborative effort characterized by tension, improvisation, and accident. A trio of instruments—two pianos and a harpsichord—produced the bulk of the film’s soundtrack. Their performance was a collaborative effort, as Tomoda illustrates when describing the recording process: “Pitfall was projected onto a screen at the Sōgestu Kaikan Hall as Takemitsu Tōru and

Ichiyanagi Toshi played piano and Takahashi Yūji improvised on the harpsichord while

Teshigahara monitored things in the mixing room” (Tomoda 2012: 97). Moreover, rather than planning the score in advance of recording, Takemitsu simply decided on instrumentation and allowed each musician to improvise during performance, which Takemitsu says was recorded with “limited instructions” and “without any revisions” (Takemitsu 1962: 15). The preparation of the instruments itself worked to intensify the accidental and spontaneous nature of the already improvised performance: Takahashi Yūji played one piano with “rattles, coins, and erasers” inserted in between the strings (Tomoda 2012: 97); and Takemitsu, not himself a pianist, plucked the other’s strings internally (Hrvatin 2012: 59). The prepared piano in particular introduced an element of chance into what was already an improvisational set-up (Figure 14).

99 Marx writes in his preface to the second edition of Capital: “My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea.’ With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought” (Marx 1887: xxx).

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In line with Takemitsu’s ideas of counterpoint as a ‘harmony’ produced through difference, Pitfall’s soundtrack is relentlessly jarring, yet in a way that punctures as well as punctuates what appears on screen. The first ‘music’ heard in Pitfall, as the miner and his son flee at night from a mine, does not simply ‘accompany’ or ‘complement’ the scene as an incidental, unobtrusive, indifferent musical backdrop, but punctures it suddenly and forcefully— a quick, loud grunting noise of a string being rasped (piano strings being manipulated directly by

Takemitsu) followed by several more bursts, interspersed at unpredictable intervals between periods of extended silence.

Besides the rasping noises of the piano, we are also jarred by an absence of diegetic sounds: all sounds whose source is seen within the frame of the camera are removed. The miner opens a heavy, wooden door that clatters back into place as he and his son emerge, yet it makes no sound at all, and we hear nothing until the abrupt rasping of the piano string. As father and son flee, joined by another miner, we do not hear their footsteps, either. In effect, the mimetic association between sound and image is ruptured. We hear extradiegetic sounds (rasping of piano strings) dissociated from the images on screen, and the images on screen are deprived of their diegetic sounds.

As disruptive as this de-synchronization of sounds and images is, we should not interpret it merely as a kind of ‘counterpoint-as-contradiction’ (Chion): Takemitsu, we recall, argued that counterpoint should contribute to the “total expression” of the film and produce a kind of harmony (Takemitsu 1962: 15). Ōtani explains how this operates through sound’s desynchronization: ghosts never produce any sound of footsteps in Pitfall, a detail that emphasizes the separation of the world of ghosts from the living (Ōtani 2016: 82). However,

Ōtani notes, in the first scene (and the last scene where the miner’s son flees alone) it is the

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footsteps of the living that are absent. Rather than the absolute dissociation of the world of ghosts from that of the living, the lack of footsteps in the first scene establishes an association between the two: “the absence of footsteps signifies the ‘theme of wandering’ in this work […] originally, only ghosts should be silent, but in the opening and final scene, the miners and children who were the living are silenced, as if the narrator were saying, ‘these people have a wandering existence’” (Ōtani 2016: 83). In other words, the lack of footsteps doesn’t simply intensify the disconnection of the scene’s soundtrack, but also works to establish a crucial connection between the film’s main subjects and the theme of haunting as a form of alienation.

Equally shocking and unnatural is the abrasive series of dissonant chords, somewhere between noise and melody, when the prepared piano and harpsichord join Takemitsu’s piano during the display of the title card following this first scene. By using a ‘prepared piano,’

Takemitsu explains that he wished to “reduce music to sound” (Takemitsu 1962: 15), foregrounding the musical apparatus in its materiality. “Reducing music to sound” has the effect of disrupting the transparency of the instrument in the act of performance, and transforms the musical apparatus into something present in the film, bringing the film’s structure into the film as content. In this way, Pitfall’s soundtrack operates in between the indexicality of a ‘sound effect’ and the abstractness of a musical score: unlike a musical score, whose material conditions are effectively transparent, the listener cannot ignore the way each sound references its source, like the sound of footsteps or a door creaking would; yet, unlike a ‘sound effect,’ this source of the ‘music’ is not literally synchronized with what’s on screen, remains beyond the frame, and is often unrecognizable.

The effect of this is suitably haunting, a ghostly ‘diegetics’ alternating between location and dislocation, appearance and invisibility, concreteness and insubstantiality, matter and form,

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which is both anachronistic with the images on screen yet also, more importantly, synchronized with the material reality of the miners, who are themselves both asynchronous with and consolidated into modern capitalist Japan. The important point Takemitsu wishes to make about the soundtrack, we recall, was that its contrapuntal effect was not simply to negate the image, but to elevate its meaning: counterpoint between image and sound mirrored the material contradictions of the film’s ghostly subjects. Music was complicit with images in revealing a

“more essential contradiction,” one that is analogous to the ghostliness of modern capitalist labour in postwar Japan. Takemitsu thus explains that the contradiction between image and sound in Pitfall is not a contradiction in the “literal sense” (jigi dōri), not just pure opposition for opposition’s sake, but rather a formal contradiction that is in “discussion” with the contradictoriness of the film’s contents, that works to “make film’s unreal setting something life- like, and to make concrete the realistic fear latent in the movie without keeping it ‘abstract’”

(Takemitsu 1962: 15). Sound therefore does not simply puncture the film’s images, but punctuates them with an underlying materiality.

Speaking more concerning his reasoning for including prepared pianos, Takemitsu writes that he had an “extreme dislike for music of a nature that puts film on a conveyor belt of smooth time” (Takemitsu 1962: 15). We can say that the soundtrack worked to re-historicize sound, disrupting the idea that it unfolds in a predetermined, inevitable sense from the score. Rather, the score is constantly disrupted by the materiality of performance, and shaped by contingent, incidental, and often unanticipated interactions rather than pre-established structural laws.

Both Abe’s and Takemitsu’s essays emphasize the importance of attending to the historical in concrete terms. Abe writes that generalizing background noise would transform the miners in the film into abstract stereotypes, people who could “be said to never have existed”

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(Abe 1962: 12); and Takemitsu argues that contradiction between image and sound brings the listener/viewer into “closer contact” with the “realistic fear latent in the movie” as it relates to a contradictory experience with a concrete reality (Takemitsu 1962: 15). To understand that reality, that ‘fear,’ it is essential that the viewer ‘listen’ directly to the particular characters and be attuned to their historical material reality. Yet, to do so, the film relies on a formal structure as well as a ‘theory’ of the ghostliness of capitalist labour; one that is in turn compromised by the concrete contradictoriness of the film’s soundscape. The “fear” the soundtrack expresses is therefore not an abstract form of ‘existential angst’ but rather an anxiety inherent to the experience of mining labourers who are themselves, just like ghosts, both a part of and apart from postwar Japan.

In this way, artists such as Abe and Takemitsu articulated collaboration as a kind of fugal counterpoint of overlaps and separations—something that was reflected in the very methodology of the 1950s avant-garde, which framed totality or ‘sōgō’ as a tension between difference and identification. Sas thus writes that experimental works of this time (such as Takemitsu’s film soundtracks during his time with Jikken Kōbō) “refuse both purely allegorical-historical interpretations and detached formal analyses, instead asking viewers to consider how the recombination of elements can provoke a more improvisatory reading/viewing experience” (Sas

2011: 140). The imperative to produce collective arts that emerged in the 1950s in groups such as Jikken Kōbō and Kiroku Geijutsu no Kai positioned itself against both collective and individual forms of expression, arguing instead that collaboration involved an act of ‘listening’ to otherness—other mediums, other people, other genres—that was dialectical in nature, acknowledging a complementary relation between different particulars that continues to preserve each of their unique specificities. Pitfall’s audio-visual and collaborative experimentation

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mobilized this contrapuntal logic of simultaneous overlap and difference stemming from the collaborative ethos of the 1950s avant-garde and their dialectical definition of sōgō or ‘totality’ in order to express the political reality of mining labourers in postwar Japan, a group whose contradictory experience was one of being both excluded from postwar capitalist reality and grounding it in a spectral reality of overlapping separations.

Resnais, Duras, and Fusco

The idea of history as a spectral landscape of overlaps and discontinuities is also central to Hiroshima mon amour, which, like Pitfall, was an inherently collaborative project organized between three equally assertive artists, Alain Resnais, Marguerite Duras, and Giovanni Fusco.

An immediate comparison that can be made between Pitfall and Hiroshima mon Amour is that both involved three independently well-recognized artists making substantial contributions to the production of the film. Duras’ screenplay is, on its own, more than just a screenplay, but a stand- alone work of literature belonging to Duras’ own oeuvre. The musical score, composed by

Giovanni Fusco, also possesses its own “proper life,” and was released independently on record and performed in concert in Italy in July 1959 (Colpi 1963: 147). Moreover, Hiroshima was also a collaboration between French and Japanese production studios—Pathe Overseas in association with Como Films, a satellite of Argos films, produced the film and Daiei provided financial support. The international and centrifugal organization of its production shaped the film’s meaning in fundamental yet often contingent, accidental ways: the very decision to turn to a

Japanese studio for financial backing was what led to the necessity to incorporate Japan and

Japanese actors into the film in the first place, transforming it from a film that was ostensibly about the French woman’s memories of Nevers to one that would reflect those memories through

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a Japanese setting that was, Resnais has often claimed, merely a product of chance (see Morin

1962: 27–28; Higgins 1996: 51; Sanos 2016: 732).

Several critics have used Hiroshima’s multiplication of viewpoints as a basis for their critiques of the film. In particular, they have focused on how the separation and incommensurability of (the other’s) experience—the French woman and the Japanese man,

Hiroshima and Nevers, France and Japan—relates to the possibility or impossibility of representation, in particular that of the bombing of Hiroshima (“impossible to talk about

Hiroshima. All one can do is talk about the impossibility of talking about Hiroshima” [Duras

1961: 9]). Lynn A. Higgins has argued, for example, that the film presents a ‘new wave’ challenge to 19th century historiography by alienating the present from history—“no longer is the past part of a coherent cosmogony that leads (chrono)logically to the present”—in a way that renders the transparency of 19th century realism’s recording of history unsustainable (Higgins

1996: 22). For Carol Mavor, Hiroshima represents a “totalizing loss of the referent” that demands we create a “new form of indexicality” that can capture absence or nothingness (Mavor

2007: 18). Kaja Silverman, on the other hand, argues that the film presents a possible “cure” for the “impossibility of remembering” (Silverman 2003: 33) by transferring one’s own experience of loss into the other:

It is our own dead that Hiroshima, mon amour encourages us to find again in the bodies of the lovers, not those killed in Hiroshima in 1945 [. . .] The French woman is our model in this respect. Hiroshima, mon amour shows her arriving at the possibility of seeing Hiroshima not by assuming other people’s memories, but rather by incorporating her own past into contemporary Hiroshima. (Silverman 2003: 38)

What these critics have in common is a concern with the possibility of making Hiroshima

‘present’ for the other. Is the experience of the other something that we can incorporate into our

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own understanding, or should it be barred from us as inscrutability and absence? Hiroshima mon amour explicitly raises this crucial question of how to compare separate personal and collective histories that are arguably incommensurable. I believe that to address this question we must turn to the film’s ‘contrapuntal’ understanding of experience. Hiroshima mon amour explicitly juxtaposes Japanese and French postwar historical experience, overlapping colonial and metropolitan histories, as well as personal and collective traumas, in a form of contrapuntal, non- linear historicism that works to share historical specificities and incommensurable experiences, finding affinities without, I would argue, falling into a binary comparative model of influence or appropriation.

Deprivileging the Visual Register in Hiroshima mon amour

Henry Colpi, the film’s editor, describes Hiroshima mon amour as an “agglutination of image-text-music” (Colpi 1963: 130); yet many critics have placed significant emphasis on the film’s visual register. This is understandable, since the archetypal conflict in the film is often framed through the French woman’s ability to ‘see’ or ‘not see’ Hiroshima. Cathy Caruth therefore analyzes her “insistent grammar of sight” (Caruth 1996: 69) and Silverman explains that Hiroshima mon amour portrays “the process of remembering in […] emphatically scopic terms,” suggesting that “our language of desire is more visual than verbal” (Silverman 2003: 41).

As Matsumoto Toshio summarizes, “it can be said that the whole work really expresses what

‘seeing’ means” (Matsumoto 2005: 142). Certainly, this is an important dimension of the film, and the ways in which the film uses images to dismantle visual authority was an important part of my analysis in chapter one, where I argued that Hiroshima mon amour, like Pitfall, made use of techniques of visual overlap and juxtaposition to disrupt time’s linear, forward trajectory and create a form of historicism that is stereoscopic.

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Indeed, visuals in the film multiply and collide in a process Luc Lagier describes as one of “nuclear fission”:

At the beginning of a nuclear explosion, there is a fission of the uranium atom, in other words a collision between a neuron and a Uranium nucleus, which provokes its explosion into fragments. From the very beginning of Hiroshima mon amour, with its interlaced images, melting the one into the other, but also scorched, cracked in two, there is a cinematographic equivalent to this nuclear fission. (Lagier 2007: 28)

The second scene of the film after the credits opens onto an image—or rather a double image— that resists simple isolation and whose form as such is characteristic of the film as a whole. It is a closeup of two bodies, one dark, one light, just their shoulders and arms visible. They grip each other tightly, as if to share each other’s warmth. Something covers their bodies. We understand that it is ash deposited from the atomic bomb. Another image soon superimposes itself over this first image, and transitions, almost imperceptibly, from bodies covered in ash to those covered in sweat, from two victims to two lovers. Duras describes the film on these bodies as both “the ashes, the dew, of atomic death” as well as “the sweat of love fulfilled” (Duras 1961: 8). There is no chronological, historical, or moral hierarchy to these two aspects, simply a suggestion of overlap: they vacillate between each other, never settling on one or the other side of representation, both atomic death and the dew of lovemaking.

The film begins in this way with an image in the process of fission, as if we are made to witness, rather than the narrative’s ‘ground zero’ (the Hiroshima that the French woman consistently strives to recover), a cinematic trace of its atomic rupture. Lagier points out several other scenes in which the image is split and juxtaposed, scenes he calls “visual echoes” (Lagier

2007: 84–85): for example, the image of the arm of her German lover that flashes onto the screen when she sees the Japanese man’s arm in bed; or her short hair when confined in the cellar in

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Nevers with the bald hibakusha, victims of the atomic bombing. Several less explicit “echoes” exist as well, such as the opening image of the vine growing from concrete that returns later as the scarified skull in stock footage of a hibakusha, and again as the many branches of the Delta estuary. These haunting visual resonances break open the linear movement of the cinematic image, operating like Benjamin’s “dialectics of seeing,” to borrow an apt phrase from Susan

Buck-Morss, to produce ghosts that cut visually across antithetical registers of time and place and ‘blast’ each image out of its continuum (Buck-Morss 1989: 290).

While this scopic register of the film has received much due attention, the aural register has been largely ignored. When one of the film’s only direct visual depictions of an atomic bomb is displayed (a “spiraling atomic cloud” as it says in the screenplay [Duras 1961: 21], which we see at the 0:09:56 mark of the film), the French woman’s voiceover tells us (tells the Japanese man) to “listen” (Duras 1961: 21), yet what we hear isn’t the noise of an atomic explosion, but the continuation of her voiceover and Fusco’s soundtrack—again, like in Pitfall, the sound in the frame (diegetic sound) is removed: in other words, sound does not, in this way, diegetically account for the image. This early scene draws attention to sound (“listen,”) while also pointing to a displacement of sound.

Indeed, musical structure explicitly provides a theoretical underpinning for the film’s many visual counterpoints. Like with Pitfall, Duras, Resnais, and Fusco all privileged the aural aspect of Hiroshima mon amour. Both Resnais and Duras were conscious of the significant role that sound should play, and explicitly approached the film with a musical eye. In general,

Resnais prioritized sound in all of his films, as he explains: “I put musicality above all else, and choose the actors as much for their voices as for their physique” (Resnais, interviewed in Dupont

2013: 44). Moreover, his colleague Jacques Rivette points out that he was largely influenced by

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Sergei Eisenstein (see Jones 2015), and so was likely familiar with Eisenstein’s application of musical theory, in particular contrapuntal structure, to film form.

Sound was also integral to Duras’ aesthetics. In her short essay “Les film de la nuit,” she writes that the most enduring films for her are those that emulate music (Duras 1996: 46). Duras often employs sound as a theme in her works, most notably her film India Song (1975), which

Dong Liang for example refers to as a “sound text” that breaks with conventional use of sound

(Liang 2007: 124, italics in original). Liang explains that the “soundtrack, for Duras, is thus not something that is subordinated to the visual aesthetic, but rather constitutes a primordial form that often precedes the visual” (2007: 123).

Resnais, similarly, did not want a traditional, unobtrusive musical score, one that operated in simple one-to-one correspondences and unproblematically prioritized the visual narrative. Henri Colpi, editor for Hiroshima mon amour and director of Duras’ subsequent screenplay The Long Absence (Une aussi longue absence, 1961), writes that Resnais’ preliminary communications with Fusco thus established that the score “would not stick to strict themes for each character, not systematically emphasize images, [and] would avoid as much as possible the synchronizations that are the ABCs of film music” (Colpi 1963: 131).

When Resnais asked Duras to write the screenplay, he requested that she write “in the rhythm of Moderato cantabile,” her 1958 novel (Morin 1962: 27). As its title suggests, musicality plays an important role in Moderato cantabile’s narrative, which, like Hiroshima mon amour, involves the intersection of two stories from different time periods in the present. Judith

Kauffmann describes this narrative intersection as a “dithematic” structure analogous to the alternation of themes typical of the “forme sonate” (sonata form), a reference to George’s

Matoré’s terminology (Kauffmann 1982: 97): the sonata involves the alternation of two themes, 195

an initial Theme A that is followed by a Theme B with a different tone that, as the work progresses, exchanges importance with Theme A. In this contrapuntal way, Kauffman explains that throughout the novel “two subjects intertwine,” exchanging importance as each one is reprised (1982: 97–98). Moderato cantabile evidently served as an immediate inspiration for

Resnais, who said that Hiroshima was a “dialectical” film (Firk and Resnais 1959: 7), and he no doubt drew upon Duras’ musical approach when he described Hiroshima in a similar way as possessing “a form close to that of a quartet: themes, variations of the first movement, out of which come repetitions, returns that can be unbearable to those who do not enter the film’s game” (quoted in Colpi 1963: 128).

For example, the first ‘act’ of the film, where we hear the French woman’s disembodied voiceover, contains no less than seven different musical themes that weave between images, returning with variations in a complicated network of auditory as well as audio-visual counterpoints. What Colpi calls the “Wounded Theme” (Thème Blessés) accompanies her description of reconstitutions and footage from Fumio Kamei’s It’s Good to Live (Ikiteite yokatta, 1956) and Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima (1953)—the latter, not coincidentally, also starring Eiji Okada, who plays the Japanese man, another variation on a theme, another haunting return—and returns again several minutes later when she describes the return of the disaster (“it will begin again.”) Between these two scenes, stock footage from the documentary The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1946) of the city in ruins after the blast

(discussed in chapter one) is accompanied by two short musical themes, ones that Colpi calls

“Ruins Theme” (Thème Ruines) A and B (Colpi 1963: 131), themes that later return in different orders (A, B, then B, A) and with different instrumentation and arrangement. Other themes in this opening include the “Tourism Theme,” the “River Theme,” the “Theme of Forgetting,” the

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“Theme of the Body,” and the “Lyrical Theme,” themes that often return throughout the film, flowing in and out of focus according to a non-linear rhythm of repetitions and variations.

This first act of the film also makes explicit use of “vertical” or synchronic counterpoint

(Eisenstein), in other words counterpoint between simultaneous audio and visual registers. The museum scene in particular is crucial to understanding the significance of this contrapuntal operation. As the French woman describes her visits to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, accompanied by slow, tracking shots of the displays, we hear what Colpi calls the “Museum

Theme,” a “rapid and unsettling” melody that plays “over the slow images of walkers and photographs” (Colpi 1963: 130). As Colpi points out, this scene juxtaposes fast-paced music with slow camera/eye tracking. Colpi does not elaborate on the significance of this juxtaposition, but, crucially, it emerges in a scene fundamentally concerned with the possibility of bearing visual witness to Hiroshima through its archive, the museum of photographs and artifacts.

The conflict produced through the juxtaposition of the auditory and visual registers in this first act, whose general theme is the French woman’s professed ‘witnessing’ of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, is an example of the way in which the film dismantles conventional historiography and its reliance upon scopic ‘fidelity.’ It presents an alternative to her explicit privileging of sight (“I saw everything”)—a privileging that I have discussed in chapter one in terms of the ‘transparency’ of the cinematic gaze and its ghosting of one’s corporeal, specular distance in the creation/witnessing of images.100 Where the French woman and the Japanese man

100To the French woman, for whom visual knowledge is testament to her grasp of Hiroshima, music often serves as an antagonist: “you will become a song”—“What pain in my heart. It’s unbelievable. Everywhere in the city they’re singing the Marseillaise” (Duras 1961: 62)—“The Marseillaise passes above my head. It’s . . . deafening . . . (She blocks her ears, in this café [at Hiroshima])” (Duras 1961: 55).

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each privilege the viewer’s position as witness to the experience of the atomic bombing, the audio-visual dissonance of the museum theme draws into question the “Cartesian privileging of vision” and its positing of a “detached, objective observer” (Marks 2000: 133, 14).

We might also say that the French woman’s own voiceover provides another audio-visual counterpoint in this scene. Mimicking the emotionless objectivity you might expect to hear in a documentary—paralleling the male voiceover in Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog,

1955) during the slow tracking shots of the ruins of concentration camps—Duras writes that in this scene her voice becomes “impersonal,” paralleling the “coldly objective” gaze of the camera

(1961: 17), yet remaining, nonetheless, a first person account. Through these counterpoints, the scene brings into question her ability to understand and relate to the experience of atomic bombing and, more generally, challenges the ‘fidelity’ with which documentary realism can record such an experience, compelling us “to consider the destructive effects of believing that one can know another culture or another time through visual information alone” (Marks 2000:

134).

Listening Vertically: A Contrapuntal History

The auditory counterpoint in Hiroshima mon amour does not simply work to negate the images on the screen, however. While drawing into question the hegemonic role of the scopic register in the construction of history, it also, at the same time, offer us an alternative form of historiography: to borrow the Einsteinian musical metaphor discussed above, the soundtrack to

Hiroshima mon amour teaches us to listen vertically rather than horizontally—cutting through each ‘melody’ synchronically in order to listen to the affinities between them, rather than simply tracing a single melody diachronically. To listen vertically, in this way, means to listen to what

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Saïd referred to as overlapping histories, an active process of assembly that as Barthes said forms an “unknown praxis” (Barthes 1977: 153).

What do we hear when we decide to actively listen vertically to Hiroshima? Once again, we can turn to the museum scene. Colpi points out that in this scene “a brief, fugitive motif surfaces in which the first measures repeat almost exactly a theme from Night and Fog” (Colpi

1963: 130). Colpi does not specify the theme from Night and Fog to which he refers, however the fast-paced melody played on a piccolo during tracking shots across barracks in concentration camps (beginning at 0:10:30) indeed bears a striking similarity to passages of the museum theme. Colpi argues that this “surprising encounter” produces an “analogy with the world of the concentration camps” (Colpi 1963: 13). As such, the film creates a “vertical” counterpoint between quite distinct, arguably incomparable, historical events that cuts across historical difference.

Duras does something similar, though more extreme, in her later film Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (1976). Rather than a single “brief, fugitive motif,” this film reuses the entire soundtrack from her previous film India Song (1975). Joan Copjec argues that this act of recycling an entire soundtrack with “a new visual track” (Copjec 1981: 43) produces a sense of self-alienation, an “untethering” and “disembodiment” of the soundtrack that ruins the “heimlich notion of historical context” (1981: 43). Copjec’s focus is on describing how the “disjunction of image and sound” (1981: 52) in Duras’ film reproduces the impossibility of direct access that characterizes the psychology of traumatic ‘repetition compulsion,’ paradoxically repeating and returning to the event yet denying immediate access to it through a perpetual act of deferral, repetition, and substitution—much like the French woman’s compulsion to return again and

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again to the museum (“four times at the museum” [Duras 1961: 17]) to ‘see’ what is effectively an archive of deferred history, itself a deferral of her own dead, German lover.

It would be problematic to say, however, that the lyrical structure of the film is entirely an act of alienation, disjunction, and deferral, one that precludes any sort of affinity or overlap.

The recycling of Night and Fog’s sound is at once both an act of alienation as well as of association (Auschwitz and Hiroshima)—a vertical rather than horizontal historicism that simultaneously breaks the linear forward momentum of time and produces new vertical affinities. Resnais became worried while working on the film that he was “constantly falling back on his film Nuit et brouillard” (Morin 1962: 27). He had originally been approached in early 1958 by Pathe Overseas in order to direct what they wanted to be a sequel to Night and

Fog, another anti-war film, however this time on the topic of denuclearization (Morin 1962: 26–

27). Yet he later abandoned the documentary focus, opting to produce a work of fiction instead—perhaps because with Night and Fog “it bothered me a lot to treat a subject I didn’t know” (Resnais, interviewed in Dupont 2013: 44), and indeed Hiroshima mon Amour possesses a heightened awareness of the limitations of documentary. Nevertheless, the furtive motif from

Night and Fog might serve as a reminder of that documentary impulse, and an intrusion into

Hiroshima of another historical melody. Despite moving away from a purely documentary film and escaping from the centripetal force of Night and Fog, the work retained much of the historical research and documentary footage Resnais collected over the first several months of production. The film was, in this way, simultaneously drawing from and repelling the historical.

There were both centripetal and centrifugal effects, vertical synchronicity even where horizontally the historical is negated, and this is reproduced in the structural counterpoint of each film’s soundtrack, suggesting that each is not a solitary totality, and can be occupied by others,

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discovering affinities and relations despite their disparate subject matter and structural differences.

This form of counterpoint is integral to Hiroshima’s logic of historical overlap, where disparate narratives are not simply compartmentalized and isolated but communicate with one another in a kind of configuration of simultaneity. Kent Jones writes in his essay Hiroshima Mon

Amour: Time Indefinite that Duras and Resnais had D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance in mind when composing Hiroshima mon amour, a 1916 silent film that interweaves four parallel storylines across several centuries (Jones 2015). In an interview with Joan Dupont, Resnais explains that

“Marguerite Duras and I had this idea of working in two tenses” in which “the present and the past coexist” and are narrated ambiguously through individual memory: “you might even imagine that everything that the Emmanuelle Riva character narrated was false; there’s no proof that the story she recites really happened” (Jones 2015). Rather than a linear historical plotline narrated by an authoritative voice, in which history unfolds teleologically to produce and justify the present moment as the fixed and inevitable outcome of historical progress, the film instead expresses history as an untethering not only of sound from image, fracturing the unitary totality of film, but also of the present from itself, allowing for the coexistence of historical moments cutting across historical time. “In all ways,” Resnais explains in a 1959 interview in Les Lettres

Françaises, “it’s a dialectical film, one where the contradiction” between France and Nevers, the

French woman’s German lover and her Japanese one, “is perpetual” (Firk and Resnais 1959: 7).

If film, as Duras says, should “emulate the condition of music,” then what it emulates in

Hiroshima is this kind of non-linear, dialectical association, which is akin to the operation of a musical score, a lyrical historiography that is, in turn, akin to that of memory—a fact that is made explicit in the scene in the café “Dome.” Matsumoto Toshio explains that in this scene the

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connection is made between Nevers and Hiroshima, the French woman’s German lover and her

Japanese lover—a connection that was blocked earlier by the directness of her insistence upon the documentary or documentary-like image as a source of hard fact. By interrupting the linear ordering of time and space, Matsumoto explains that this scene interrupts “the so-called chronology (chronological time sequence) of history—in other words, the everyday order of time and space is dismantled, and the meaning of the experience is explored in terms of a montage of time and space” (Matsumoto 2005: 136). Matsumoto explains that this connection is as much an affirmation of the “illogical,” montage-like experience of time and space as it is a denial of the image as a source of objective fact. As he explains, the scene in Café Dome “is qualitatively different from the consciousness of Hiroshima at the beginning of the film, the ‘I saw Hiroshima’ of the opening scene” (2005: 138). The images through which the French woman professes to have seen Hiroshima in her opening monologue capture the event with “the directness of keloid

[keroido to iu chokusetsusei]” (2005: 133), but here the connection is not done “linearly

[chokusenteki-ni]” (2005: 135)—past and present experiences “overlap [kasanariai]” and the past becomes alive in the “here and now” (2005: 137). This, Matsumoto argues, constitutes a

“new documentary method,” one akin to “surrealism’s method of dépaysement, which paradoxically combines dissimilar things” (2005: 134–35).

Matsumoto’s analysis draws attention to the way in which sound in this scene contributes to this non-linear overlapping of past and present experiences: through the use of J cuts, diegetic sounds heard inside the café Dome—city noises, songs, frogs by the riverside—carry over into images of Nevers (2005: 136-7). This is explicitly contrasted to the earlier scene where she recalls Nevers for the Japanese man as they lie in bed in his house. In that scene, in which there are no diegetic sounds either from Nevers or Hiroshima, the discrete borders between past and

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present and the chronology of recollection are sustained. In the café Dome, however, it is “not a form of ‘recollection’ immersing you into the past from the present, but rather the past mercilessly intrudes into the present, and the past is ‘present-ed’ in terms of consciousness”

(2005: 137).

The records being played in the café Dome scene also play an important role in triggering this kind of revival of the past for the woman: “someone, a solitary man, puts a record of French bal-musette music on the jukebox” and it brings back “the miracle of lost memories of Nevers” that she says she has forgotten (Duras 1961: 59). Colpi explains that the first song put on the jukebox is a waltz composed for the film by Georges Delerue (Colpi 1963: 131). The purpose of this song, Colpi explains, is to “recall for the heroine her youth” (1963: 131). As it plays, she recounts to the Japanese man her tragic love affair with the German soldier during the war. In a sense, the song serves as her ‘madeleine,’ the corporeal, synaesthetic experience of smelling, hearing, and tasting of madeleines and tea in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time that precipitates, through chance encounter rather than conscious recollection, what Walter Benjamin would call a

“memoire involontaire” or “involuntary memory” (Benjamin 1968a: 158). This waltz is then followed by a Japanese enka song, one of only two pieces of Japanese music in the film (the other being the song that is chanted while they are filming the protest scene for the French woman’s ‘peace’ film [0:32:54])101 It comes on after he slaps her to bring her out of her

“delirious” spiral into memories of the past (Duras 1961: 65). She is drawn back into the present, back to Hiroshima and her Japanese lover, accompanied by this song. The music in this way

101 The Japanese song played on the jukebox is a recording of the wildly popular singer (and actress) Misora Hibari’s Sore wa naisho (It’s a Secret, 1957), written by poet Saijō Yaso and composed by Manjōme Tadashi, who is incidentally a prolific film score composer.

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engages in a associative counterpoint linking past and present, French and Japanese, places and people that overlap in a fluid association of disparate, heterogeneous elements: something

‘resonates’ between these elements, a kind of memory that is “heard” in the Proustian sense: “I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed” (Proust I 53). Put differently, this scene is the aural equivalent to Barthes’ photographic punctum, an accidental, contingent sound that punctures the objectivity of the historical record with a subjective, internal memory resonating across time, coming into surprising, previously unacknowledged synchronicity with the present.102

Yet this memory is not merely internal, subjective: it is a “time and space of consciousness” that approaches the surrealist “dépaysement” of experience (Matsumoto 2005:

136, 134–35), however is perhaps closer to the “sub-realism” of Abe’s documentary method—a method that resisted the interiority of surrealism and remained concretely invested in uprooting the substrata of material reality (Toba 2010: 54). The overlapping that occurs in Hiroshima is not simply between the French woman’s largely repressed personal trauma of Nevers and the collective remembrance of the Hiroshima bombing, but also between a largely repressed French and Japanese colonial history and the public, documented official histories of France and Japan.

Counterpoint in the film has a political dimension, and we could say that the film is anti- colonialist in its challenging of objective channels of remembrance and documentation in both

1950s Japan and France.

102 Given the importance that both Proust and Barthes give to their mothers, it is appropriate that one verse of the Japanese song reads, “in the past, I saw my mother’s dreams every night / Now the dreams I see are yours.”

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Caruth explains that the musical counterpoint between Hiroshima mon amour and Night and Fog (an unintentional effect, according to the composer, Fusco—another ‘involuntary’ memory) reflects a “relation between the other events of World War II and the events in

Hiroshima” and also draws attention to the attempts by French authorities to silence both films due to their politically sensitive natures (Caruth 1996: 126). For one, both films, as Daniel Just explains, were indirect indictments of the Algerian war (1954–62) (Just 2015: 123) and were therefore both rejected from the Cannes festival, in 1955 and 1959. Edgar Morin points out that while ostensibly the reasoning for Hiroshima’s rejection was that it would offend Americans

(just as the reasoning for rejecting Night and Fog was that it would offend Germans), it was also evidently rejected because it possessed a “political character” that was “incompatible with the

Fifth Republic” (Morin 1962: 28). Indeed, while it is possible that Hiroshima’s anti-nuclear message would offend American audiences, Higgins points out that the film’s release was also politically sensitive to French authorities because of its contemporaneity with the ongoing

Algerian war. Duras was deeply involved in the protests against the Algerian war, and supported the National Liberation Front (NLF), and Just argues that for French readers at the time the

French woman’s statement condemning “inequality set forth as a principle by certain people against other people […] certain races against other races, […] certain classes against other classes” would have immediately read as an indirect indictment of French colonialism (Just

2015: 123).

Higgins explains the dilemma concisely: authorities wished to isolate present-day France from a war-time that was positioned as in the past and over with:

France’s wartime position as an occupied territory, and thus the implied ironies and reversal of the Algerian situation, made it particularly imperative that the French government (through its ministry of culture) maintain a clear separation between the two. 205

While Hiroshima was being filmed, and when it was excluded from Cannes, France was on the brink of civil war, and French international prestige was at its lowest ebb since World War II. In this climate of crisis, the minister of culture […] must have been especially dismayed to see the collective mythology and accepted categories in which that war was officially remembered brought into question. Hiroshima mon amour thus played at Cannes the role of another surrogate victim, excluded from public view in order to maintain the safe distinctions between past and present history. (1995: 52–53)

The film’s contrapuntal historicism disrupted this strict separation of past and present, as well as colonizer and colonized, a separation that characterized official remembrance of the war in

France. In this way, the film allowed France’s colonial ghosts to occupy the colonizer’s narrative and communicate in an overlapping synchronization of historical pasts and presents.

Counterpoint and Colonialism

When reading the film this way as a comparative, dialectical historical text, there is a risk that one melody might overwhelm the others, in other words that the setting of Japan/Hiroshima might fall away as merely a medium through which Resnais and Duras indirectly denounce continued colonialism in postwar France. Rey Chow, for one, criticizes the film’s Eurocentric organization, which “dislocates” and dehistoricizes Hiroshima as a historical referent in order to use it as a radical site of ‘difference’ where the French woman, around whom the film centres, can perform her subjectivity and express her Eurocentric humanist views (Chow 1999: 158). The

Eurocentrism of the film seems to be reinforced by the last scene. In this scene, the French woman has returned to her hotel room and the Japanese man follows her there. He has become drowned in “universal oblivion,” he becomes Hiroshima itself—she says he is “Hi-ro-shi-ma.

That’s your name”—and she becomes France—he says she is “Nevers in France” (Duras 1961:

83). Matsumoto points out that the last shot—a closeup of the Japanese man’s face—is unusual for a film that is supposedly about the French woman’s experience. His interpretation is that in 206

this last scene, Hiroshima itself addresses her, and by extension the camera/audience, saying

“your name is Nevers, Nevers in France,” emphasizing France in a way that positions not only the French woman but also the film’s audience as fellow compatriots who are “on the same side as the woman and Resnais” (Matsumoto 2005: 142). In other words, the film positions itself in relation to France and a French audience in a way that decenters Hiroshima and the Japanese.

Interesting in this context is Japanese-American playwright Chiori Miyagawa’s 2009 play

“I Have Been to Hiroshima Mon Amour,” a play she states is “a rebuttal to Hiroshima 50 years later” (Miyagawa 2010, 75–91).103 In one scene of the play a young woman asks the poignant question, “in Hiroshima Mon Amour, why is the French woman the only one with memories?”

(Miyagawa 2010: 84). Her question makes explicit one of the limitations of the original film:

Japanese characters serve as a foil for the French protagonist. Martin Harries, commenting on

Miyagawa’s play, concisely expresses the problem:

[Hiroshima mon amour] divides the experience of suffering according to a racial logic that allows an anonymous French woman (Elle) the luxury to mourn a past that it does not grant a Japanese man (Lui). […] [P]erhaps no postwar art-house film performed the Hollywood trick of setting the angst of a white protagonist against the backdrop of the alienated suffering of Asians to the same accolades. (Harries 2010: 74)

In her play, she gives the Japanese architect a backstory—he was captured by American soldiers, and had his own affair with a girl from Hiroshima who was killed during the bombing. Her ghost returns throughout the play to offer solemn reminders of the horror of atomic bombing.

Miyagawa thereby inverts the racialized economy of suffering and history in a way that

103 The play ran from May 8–30, 2009, at Ohio Theater in New York, NY.

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condemns the original film’s erasure of Japanese history and subjectivity. The ghost encounters his French lover and echoes his denial of her vision: “I burnt up at such a high temperature, my body left only a black shadow on the concrete pavement. Nothing else. Not even a strand of hair.

You saw nothing. You know nothing” (Miyagawa 2010: 84).

Nevertheless, the film does draw our attention to political contradictions specific to Japan in the 1950s, for example the complicity between peace demonstrations, the establishment of the self-defense forces, and Cold War remilitarization. I have discussed this contradictory overlapping of official history and its opposite in the previous chapter, however I would like to revisit the topic here to examine the role that counterpoint plays in its expression. The expression of a complicity between peace discourse and imperialism in the film is mostly, as with the connection to France’s persistent culpability in colonial violence, indirect, and expressed through counterpoint and overlap. Matsumoto Toshio brings up one notable example of this in the scene where the Japanese man finds the French woman on the set of the film in which she is acting.

She tells him that the film is an international film “on peace,” yet as several extras carrying photographs, including victims of the bombing (0:30:35) she explains they still need to film lots of “commercials to sell soap” (Duras 1961: 40). The dichotomy between everyday commercialism, passionate political protest, and nuclear holocaust is almost humorous, and certainly ironic (as the Japanese man says immediately afterward, “we don’t joke about films on

Peace,” and more disturbing photographs of radiation victims pass [1961: 40]); an irony that is then reinforced when shots of the demonstration procession are accompanied by a Japanese chant more appropriate to an omatsuri (festival) procession—and indeed, the demonstration does turn into a festival soon after. Speaking of this transition between protest and festival,

Matsumoto explains that “Of course Resnais is not confused. Obviously he is consciously

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criticizing the inevitable limits of the peaceful publicity event that has become an everyday festival, and there is a sharp criticism of the inevitable limits of ‘peace movies’ that are made with such intentions” (Matsumoto 2005 : 133–34). The effect of reducing the political urgency of an anti-nuclear demonstration into an everyday street festival, and juxtaposing a film about peace alongside commercials for soap, is akin to the French woman’s own fear that her lover’s memory will become trivialized, an ordinary “three-penny story,” or will “become a song”: “oblivion will begin with your eyes […] it will encompass your voice” (Duras 1961: 80). It is also an indictment of her own humanist emphasis on peace and its limitations in the context of postwar

Japanese politics—in particular the complicity in the 1950s between peace movements, remilitarization, and capitalism.

In this way, the film simultaneously displaces particular histories and discovers alternative historical connections by juxtaposing images on screen with the French woman’s narration in contradictory ways. This is also evident in the first scene of the film, when we hear her voiceover over top of footage of atomic bomb survivors and newsreels of a demonstration in

Japan. As images of a demonstration are shown, her voiceover frames it in universalist terms as an expression of the “anger of entire cities,” an anger directed at ambiguously defined forms of

“inequality set forth as a principle by certain people against other people” (Duras 1961: 22). This non-specific denouncement could easily be read as an indictment of French politics (as I suggested above), yet it is made over top of several historically specific images of demonstration footage containing slogans and banners from a May Day protest in 1952 (0:11:03; Figure 6). One of many May Day demonstrations held internationally in 1952, the “Bloody” May Day Riots in

Japan nevertheless need to be interpreted in the context of postwar developments in Japan in particular. In September of 1952, at the end of U.S. occupation and after the signing of the first

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Bilateral U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo), Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru made a party speech calling for a break with the “reckless” abuses of military power witnessed during the war and a return to the national prosperity of the Meiji-era, setting the terms for official public memory in a way that clearly disassociated Japan’s wartime history from the present and, in a sense, inoculated the present-day discourse of military rearmament from the possible contamination of wartime (Gluck 1993: 71–72). At the same time, however, labour unions began to organize demonstrations, most significantly the aforementioned “Bloody” May Day Riots of

1952, which protested Japan’s Cold War remilitarization. By the time of the film’s release in

1959, the LDP had already forced the establishment of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (in

1954), though their constitutional grounding had yet to be entirely accepted by the general public, and Japan was on the verge of renewing the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, once again sparking mass protests. In other words, the break with wartime history in institutional memory, along with the repositioning of Japan as a victim of wartime and an international model for peace and denuclearization, was entirely discrepant with a reality in which military colonialism continued to insinuate itself into present-day Japan. While the French woman’s own voiceover works to denounce war, conflict, and inequality in unequivocal and universalist terms, echoing the rhetoric of Japan’s own anti-nuclear peace movement, the images displayed alongside the voiceover of demonstrations point to a more complicated local history in which a rhetoric of peace was complicit in continued imperialist aggression.

Equally discrepant with the material reality of postwar Japan was the discourse of

‘nuclear universalism’ that centered on Hiroshima. Silverman notes how Hiroshima in the film is represented as a thoroughly international ‘modern city’: it is “emphatically a metropolis from

1959” and “consists of International-style architecture” and “neon lights,” whereas Nevers is “a

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city untouched by modernity” (Silverman 2003: 45). Unlike Nevers, therefore, which remains for the French woman an entirely internalized “memory, the past,” Hiroshima becomes a universal

“perceptual present” that has thoroughly shed off Japan’s colonial past—“to see Hiroshima thus necessarily means to see it as it now is, rather than as it once was” (Silverman 2003: 45). The

Japanese man is himself an “’international’ type,” a “Western-looking Japanese” who “would not feel out of place in any country in the world” (Duras 1961: 109); and he is an architect, a symbol of rebuilding and reconstruction rather than the ‘archaeological’ unearthing of memory that the French woman engages in. Therefore, Hiroshima (and the Japanese man, who, at the end of the film she names “Hi-ro-shi-ma” [Duras 1961: 83]) is geopolitically non-specific, a stage for an international discourse of universal humanism and peace—she says “what else do you expect them to make in Hiroshima except a picture about Peace?” (Duras 1961: 34)—where the film can stage a rejection of colonialism and the outdated principles of “inequality” against “races” and “classes” that she denounces in her voiceover (1961: 22).

Yet, as Lisa Yoneyama explains, this discourse of ‘nuclear universalism,’ which framed

Hiroshima as monument to “peace” shared by a “transcendent and anonymous position of humanity,” needs to be read against a nationalistic agenda that obscured many “discrepant” memories as well as colonial continuities into present-day Japan (Yoneyama 1999: 15). The discourse of de-nuclearization and peace (discussed in the previous chapter) worked to depoliticize and universalize Hiroshima, disassociating Japan’s postwar capitalist prosperity

(which was equated with peace) from ongoing acts of imperialist violence performed in the very name of peace—the contradictory association of Hiroshima as a cite of nuclear destruction and subsequently a cite of peace provided the missing link in the U.S. policy of deterrence during the

Cold War, which relied on military accumulation as a condition for peace.

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On the one hand, therefore, we can argue that Resnais and Duras are complicit in this process of depoliticizing Hiroshima, since they mobilize it as a site of recovery upon which to stage a humanist anti-war message. On the other hand, the film expresses several contradictory meanings that undermine this depoliticization and dematerialization of Hiroshima and bring into focus alternative problematic histories of modernity in which Eurocentric narratives of progress and humanism coincide with ongoing acts of violence, oppression, and colonialism. The film can be read, in other words, as an overlapping of colonial and colonized narratives, yet in an especially complicated arrangement where both France and Japan are at once both colonized and colonizer; where Japan threatens to become a peripheral object upon which to project European fantasies of universal humanism, yet also appears as a remilitarizing force complicit in U.S. Cold

War imperialism in Asia; and where France is at once both occupied by Germany during WWII and also a colonial aggressor during the postwar, first in Indochina then Algiers.

Certainly, it is impossible to ‘replace’ each unique, irreplaceable event with any other, replace Hiroshima with Auschwitz, Japan with France, the nuclear annihilation of cities with the loss of a single lover; yet it is possible to listen to Hiroshima mon amour contrapuntally, like a musical composition, as a non-linear polyphony of overlapping ‘melodies,’ narratives within we can hear traces of counter-narratives and “discrepant experiences” (Saïd 1993: 31). Hiroshima mon amour, as such, is a kind of response to the “historical amnesia” that forgets the haunting resonances that cross linear historical time, and a counterbalance to the indifferent forward progress of history. Yet the film also brings into focus several of the problematic aspects of historical comparison, the danger that overlapping histories can become oppressive and one- sided. As such, Hiroshima serves both as a warning not to forget, but also warning to be careful of remembering.

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A Reflection on the Discipline of Comparative Literature: Counterpoint and Comparativity

Pitfall and Hiroshima mon amour both re-configured historical consciousness through a process of collaboration and counterpoint that allowed ghostly resonances of other times and places to coexist in dialectical tension. This reconfiguration permits us, in Saïd’s words, to “think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant” (Saïd 1993: 32). There is, however, always the danger of falling into the trap discussed above of universalizing themes that were particular to postwar Japanese geopolitics. Certainly, the simultaneous reading of a French and Japanese film can be framed as a sort of counterpoint, which, as we recall, Takemitsu argued was a unity of contradictions—or as Saïd said, a simultaneity of nonetheless distinct,

“discrepant” voices. Indeed, this contrapuntal view provides a method of reading difference, where comparison is not a matter of influence or assimilation but a kind of ‘haunting’ that possesses the film or text with traces of other overlapping histories. It is in the very spirit of

‘total’ art expressed by the collaborative projects of the 1950s avant-garde in Japan that I believe we should listen for the ghosts that cross between these disparate works and form connections between specific geopolitical contexts. Ghosts do not only cross between spaces and times but also texts—they work as a form of what Catherine Brown calls a “fulcrum” of comparison, a lever which can be applied to different objects of comparison to bring one or the other into better focus (Brown 2013: 81). We can therefore reflect on how the contrapuntal comparative mode of the ghost applies to our own methods as scholars of Comparative Literature.

It is important to acknowledge that a fine line exists between counterpoint and colonization, totality and hegemony—haunting and possession. It has always been important in my thesis that the ghost function comparatively, as a fulcrum upon which to connect and discuss different histories and subjectivities; yet it has also been important that it not become abstract or 213

generalizing. Similarly, while many artists in the 1950s such as Hanada and Abe advocated sōgō geijutsu, others, such as Sasaki Kiichi, expressed skepticism, advocating instead for the prioritization of specific media best suited to the present historical moment (for Sasaki, this was film). Sasaki expressed his concerns during a roundtable discussion 1959 with Abe Kōbō,

Hanada Kiyoteru, Hani Susumu, Nakahara Yūsuke, Sato Tadao, and Masaki Kyōsuke on the

“Totalization [sōgō-ka] and Purification [junsui-ka] of Genre.” While not disagreeing with the need to “break [kowasu] fixed genres,” he argued that externally (artificially) breaking and combining them risked becoming “a kind of decadence”; rather, he argued that “we must examine the specifics of the genre [janru no tokusei] to see if it can withstand the present age, and how to use those specifics to express the present age” (Sasaki in Abe et al. 1998b: 122). In other words, particular historical moments demanded particular genres. Applying ‘the ghost’ as a common term across various concrete examples with different historical and subjective contexts runs a similar risk of descending into “decadence,” colonizing and homogenizing diverse creative practices under a univocal generic category (this is indeed the risk addressed in my introduction that the ghost might become a universal critical tool to be applied ubiquitously to all kinds of thought). While expanding its inclusivity, is it not possible that the concept continues to assert an original and socio-historically specific discursive power, one that then colonizes what it compares?

It is important, therefore, that ‘the ghost’ allow for differences and avoid the appropriation of any one case by any other. As concepts, they should be thought of as “traveling concepts,” a term used by Mieke Bal to refer to concepts that “travel––between disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods, and between geographically dispersed academic communities,” and that transform as they travel (Bal 2002: 11): Taishō-era Japanese

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political concerns return in the 1950s but they are not synonymous; the ghostliness of Japanese mining labourers, repatriated soldiers, and women factory workers each share similarities but also have their own particular histories and concerns; the historical present of postwar France and Japan are imbricated but not in a tautological sense. Therefore, the ghost is a general, guiding metaphor, but one that is ‘literalized,’ that in other words is always embedded in particular, concrete subjectivities and historically contingent realities: it is a structural framework as well as a material reality, a comparative model that is flexible and allows for the variability that emerges out of particularities. In this way, the logic of the ghost itself models how we should use it to make connections: as a suspension of proximity and distance.

The crucial concern when discussing the contrapuntal logic of the ghost is understanding exactly how it directs us to make connections, to ‘listen’ in a contrapuntal way. This has important implications not only for how intellectuals and artists interpreted postwar Japan—as not simply one but many overlapping realities—but, as was suggested by my explanation of

Saïd’s use of the term, also for how we as comparative theorists should ‘listen’ across cultural and historical differences. How do we compare geopolitical specificities while avoiding the twin problems of appropriation and essentialization? To elaborate on what this means, we can look at the senses in which English-language criticism has categorized Abe’s work.

Recent critical responses to Abe’s work have turned towards the question of whether to approach his work from a standpoint of Japanese history or more transcendental themes. For example, in Beyond Nation: Time, Writing, and Community in the Work of Abe Kōbō, Richard

Calichman resists both impulses to essentialize or appropriate Abe: he refuses, on the one hand, to pigeonhole Abe as a ‘Japanese’ author, actively avoiding “any Orientalist projection that would find satisfaction in uncovering a link, grounded in some spurious ‘asian’ identity,’”

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between Abe’s work and essentializing markers of Japaneseness (Calichman 2016: 113); and, on the other hand, also refuses to interpret Abe within a binary model of Western influence, as a

Japanese writer influenced by, and best understood through, Western ideas. Rather than read Abe as either an exoticized ‘Eastern’ writer or a derivative ‘Western’ one, he argues that Abe himself has provided an alternative model for how to interpret his work by consistently challenging the very logic of East and West as stable geographic coordinates and the reduction of identity to national belonging that is reinforced by these problematic readings. Calichman argues that in

Abe’s work identity is “produced retroactively at the level of fantasy,” and is structured through a more originary concept of “spatiotemporal difference” (Calichman 2016: 71).

Calichman’s interpretation of Abe’s philosophy as fundamentally concerned with a universal structure of subjective ‘displacement’ and ‘difference’ somewhat marginalizes Abe’s commitment to material history, however, rendering his empirical analysis of postwar Japanese society secondary to a concern regarding more ‘originary’ universal structures of alterity and concepts of identity and difference that align with a deconstruction of Western metaphysics, downplaying Abe’s own professed interest in Marxist or materialist thought. Calichman sees as problematic Abe’s attempt to locate difference “within history, tracing its origin to a determinate moment in time and space,” when it should instead be understood as “a general feature of any historical occurrence” (Calichman 2016: 70–71). However, some of Calichman’s most compelling analysis of Abe’s work comes from passages in which he highlights Abe’s sensitivity to actual, historical instances of state violence against real people—such as the forced relocation of Koreans living in Japan in 1959, and the Harlem riots in 1943 and 64 in the United States

(Calichman 2016: 144–45). Nevertheless, here again Calichman argues that Abe can only compare these disparate empirical realities because they are circumscribed by a single formal

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process: the “structural necessity” of the nation-state’s minoritization process (Calichman 2016:

146).

Nina Cornyetz similarly writes against interpretations of Abe’s work (in particular

Woman in the Dunes) that frame it “almost exclusively within Western existentialism as theorized by Jean-Paul Sartre” (Cornyetz 2007: 60). However, though she shares with Calichman the dislike of criticism that would interpret Japanese works entirely through Western influences, or that forms spurious links to Orientalist aesthetics, she arrives at very different conclusions.

Secondary sources on Abe, she argues, are “virtually severed from any specific Japanese context,” because critics lack a “modern Japanese aesthetics” through which to interpret thoroughly modern Japanese artists such as Abe (Cornyetz 2007: 5). Other modern Japanese artists such as Mishima and Kawabata, she explains, are more easily (yet equally problematically) interpreted in relation to premodern Japan, for example by relating their work to

“transhistorically conceived” notions of Buddhist detachment—“contemplative disengagement” and “transcendental resignation to ‘what is’” (2007: 157). Yet Abe is often framed as a Western artist. Between the two, there is no room for modern Japanese aesthetics—in other words no room for a modern “ordering of the sensate world” (2007: 3). Rather than prioritizing a “trans- historical” structure that would dehistoricize Abe’s work, therefore, Cornyetz argues that she will

“unbracket” her analysis and “reinterpret [Woman in the Dunes] as a comment particular to coterminous Japanese ideology and community […] in the context of Japanese postwar intellectual debates on modernization, capitalism, subjectivity, and relation to the other”

(Cornyetz 2007: 60).

To summarize, while Calichman attempts to show Abe’s universal value in expressing a transcendental politics of human subjectivity, Cornyetz reorients Abe’s work back into the

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specific historical context of a critique of postwar Japan in particular. Calichman argues in his foreword to The Frontier Within, his collection of Abe’s non-fiction essays, that “to read Abe as a Japanese thinker of the social, or as one whose writings can better teach one about various matters particular to the geopolitical entity of Japan, is to in effect not read Abe" (Calichman's forward to Abe 2013: xvii–xviii); and in Beyond Nation he intensifies this claim, stating that the very inclusion of Abe in the canon of Japanese literature “must also be acknowledged as a form of violence” (Calichman 2016: 178). Cornyetz’s analysis, however, suggests an opposite tendency in Western criticism to bracket Abe’s Japanese geopolitical origins. Indeed, Abe has been recognized since at least the 1960s, when his writing and films were first made available to a Western audience, as an ‘international’ writer—and one who is considered, as Calichman himself remarks, “the most un-Japanese of writers” (Calichman in Abe 2013: viii). This aligns with the conventionally accepted trajectory of Abe’s maturation as an artist, whereby a disillusionment with communism in the early 1960s led to a shift in his work away from domestic politics towards more ‘universal’ existential themes, with Woman in the Dunes generally considered the watershed work.104 However, not only does this narrative sever Woman in the Dunes from its particular political and historical context in postwar Japan and dehistoricize

Western existentialism by framing it as a universal signifier, but it also diminishes the significance of Abe’s work in the 1950s by reducing its political and theoretical insights to mere dogmatism.

I believe Cornyetz is correct to hypothesize that the problem is a “dearth of theories of modern Japanese aesthetics” (Cornyetz 2007: 5), a problem which has led critics to either form

104 Cornyetz cites Motoyama Mutsuko’s work “The Literature and Politics of Abe Kōbō: Farewell to Communism in Suna no Onna” (see Cornyetz 2007: 41; Motoyama 1995: 306).

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links between modern Japanese works and premodern Japanese aesthetics or rely instead on modern Western aesthetic models. However, Calichman is also correct in warning against how this might reinforce notions of national belonging and national exceptionalism that Abe himself rejects. Calichman wants to read Abe in comparative contexts, without reducing his work to

Japanese essentialism, whereas Cornyetz wants to preserve the specificity of Abe’s attention to postwar Japanese geopolitical concerns, and not bracket its very real and important historical context. Both drives—towards connectivity and difference, universality and individuation—have valuable, yet often conflicting, goals, and I believe that neither should be entirely discarded. We must listen across both voices, contrapuntally, to find what is valuable in their relation. To do so, we cannot position ourselves as neutral and universal observers, unbound by the limitations of particular subjective approaches. It is necessary to remain sensitive to the limitations inherent to comprehension. Nevertheless, we cannot entirely abandon the act of apprehension entirely, positioning different texts not simply as different but radically different, beyond relation. Peter

Grilli, talking about Pitfall and other Abe-Teshigahara-Takemitsu film collaborations, articulates the essence of this dilemma:

How is the viewer of these films to respond to such characters, in such situations? Are they real, we ask ourselves, or are they mere devices in a larger allegorical universe? Are they flesh and blood or ghosts from another time and place? […] Are they Japanese or somehow universal? Is the environment of their lives any recognizable place? Or is it the tortured mental landscape of Sartre or Kafka or Camus? And where, ultimately, does the viewer stand in relationship to these spectral figures? (Grilli 2018: 102)

And of course, this same dilemma is crucial to Hiroshima mon amour, whose protagonist endeavors to reconcile two impossibly incomparable traumas. As demonstrated above, the film is torn between the individual and universal, not only in reference to the intertwining of personal and collective traumas, but also in in the way that universal (read: Western) humanism and 219

associated discourses of ‘peace’ and ‘nuclear universalism’ run up against particular postwar politics in Japan.

Indeed, reconciling these two aspects has been crucial throughout this thesis: its goal has been to pay due attention to the particular ghosts of 1950s Japan, yet ghosts by definition also link this geopolitical conjuncture to other particular histories, places, and people. Moreover, the ghost itself has been employed as a theoretical, general mode typifying and connecting diverse particular ghosts—in other words, haunting functions as an abstract system of knowledge, yet one applied to listen to literal ghosts, concrete particularities. It should be evident, also, that reconciling these two drives—universal and particular—also mirrors the dialectical method that

Abe articulated in his theory of literary interpretation, an act he situates between broader structures and individuality, between methodology and practice. By critiquing the “transparency of expression” and “self-awareness of knowledge” posited by literary realism (Abe 2013: 25),

Abe claims that audiences and artists are not simply passive observers or objective recording devices, but co-operators in the production of reality and its ‘objective’ laws—certainly, we must be aware of how our subject position as readers and critics frames our viewpoints or methodologies, which are never as such ‘absolute’ or ‘universal’—yet by critiquing the myopic introversion of personal novels and surrealism he also acknowledges the need for the individual to nonetheless organize things around “broader social laws” and “external force[s]” (Abe 2013:

25). Perhaps, therefore, in Abe’s own contrapuntal overlapping of identity and difference, collective and individual, we can find a ‘modern (Japanese) aesthetics’ that would allow us to reconcile these opposing drives.

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Conclusion: 1950s Politics of Haunting

In this thesis I have been working to develop a theory and practice that mobilizes realism, return, and relation in order to bring into focus discrepant experiences of 1950s Japan. For Abe, recording these experiences required a new knowledge system, a new consciousness that involved a relationship with the dead:

What is consciousness, anyway? One important property of consciousness is that beyond its individual or internal aspect, more than that it possesses a group or social aspect. Like Auguste Compte said, “human nature is composed more of the dead than the living.” We think through the ‘words’ [kotoba] of the dead, and of strangers, and it is through those words that social space and time are made stable as a collective. In this way consciousness can expand to an unknown space beyond experience of space and time, opening a window to the past or the future, drawing out the reality [genjitsu] of phenomena and revealing their unseen [me ni wa mienai] nature. (Abe 1997a: 245)

Consciousness here means being haunted by the words of the dead. The three crucial aspects of haunting (realism, return, and relation) are each addressed in this passage. First, it portrays consciousness as a collective, a communion with otherness, that privileges social and historical reality over the isolation of the individual and the present (the reference to moving “beyond experience” is no doubt a critique of contemporary Japanese naturalist-realist authors and their focus on individual, ahistorical experience). Second, though he communes with ghosts, Abe remains invested in the objective recording of the concrete conditions of reality—a focus that explicitly borrows from Marxist historical-materialism and is critical of the hegemony of democratic individualism, while also, at the same time, remaining critical of proletarian literary convention and its investment, along with naturalist realism, in ‘realistically’ or ‘empirically’

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documenting everyday life (Abe 1997a: 244). Third and finally, it equates reality (genjitsu) with imperceptibility (me ni wa mienai) in a way that deconstructs the hypervisibility of the here-and- now by being attuned to the “unseen” overlapping realities of the present, without abandoning its focus on realism—this being the crucial difference between ‘realism,’ with its taken-for- grantedness of the given conditions of the present as a transparent, unproblematic reality, and

‘spectral realism,’ which goes beyond the surface appearances of the present to represent the relation between the present and what it disavows, its inherent blind spots and self- contradictions.

To “think through the words of the dead” as Abe describes it in this passage displaces the division between interior and exterior reality, moving consciousness away from its individual, solipsistic aspect, while also resisting empirical realism. It instead makes relation central, linking personal subjectivity to collective identity, and individual reality to a structural whole—without, however, disavowing or displacing individual experience or the particularities of being and time: it remains, as such, practical and invested in the present. Cultivating this idea of consciousness involves actively holding one’s own self in relation to otherness—it is, at once, both an internalization of difference and externalization of self.

The way in which we parse the division (or the relation) between collective and individual, external and internal, is important. The division that is often turned to when discussing the 1950s is the largely abstract, internationalist separation between Eastern and

Western blocs, communism and capitalism—in other words the configuration of the ‘two world’ problem. This problem was central to Japan’s postwar discourse of peace. It is exemplified in the imperative set by Japan’s most prominent postwar peace group, the Peace Problems Discussion

Group (Heiwa Mondai Danwakai), a group led by political theorists Maruyama Masao, Tsuru

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Shigeto, and Ukai Nobushige. In December 1950, shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War, this group prepared a statement that was signed by 52 members and published in Sekai magazine under the title of “Mitabi heiwa ni tsuite” (The Third Statement on Peace).105

Possessing an urgency spurred on by increasing international tensions between communist and capitalist world powers, the looming possibility of nuclear war, as well as

Japanese remilitarization, this statement (hereafter referred to simply as the Third Statement) asserted the necessity of peaceful coexistence between the ‘two worlds’ of the Eastern and

Western Cold War ‘blocs.’ Rather than accepting the inevitability of armed conflict between these parties, the authors appealed to the importance of deconstructing polarized ideological absolutes and finding common ground. To this end, the Third Statement argues that Japan is uniquely suited to serve as a neutral ‘third party’ to moderate between the ‘two worlds’: they were the only nation to have experienced nuclear devastation, and thus had experienced first- hand the unbearable reality of nuclear war; and moreover, as victims of wartime ideological conformism, they had learned the importance of resisting conformity to dogmatic ideology and embracing individual, autonomous thinking. This statement, and Sekai magazine more generally, served as a catalyst for the pacifist movement that developed in the 1950s, setting the terms for

Japanese unarmed neutrality, individual liberal democracy, and ‘nuclear universalism’ that came to define the political and ideological contours of the decade to come.

105 “Mitabi heiwa ni tsuite” was later reprinted in Sekai in July 1985 (Heiwa Mondai Danwakai 1985, 118–51). A partial translation into English was published in 1963 as “On Peace: Our Third Statement” in the Journal of Social and Political Ideas in Japan (Peace Problems Discussion Circle 1963, 13–19). A more literal translation into English would be “On Peace for the Third Time” (as in Kersten 1996: 186).

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Though the Third Statement privileged Japan as a representative of international cooperation, in another sense Japan itself was largely a marginal voice within this discourse, which was part of an international peace movement. For example, the 1952 Vienna Congress of the Peoples for Peace parallels the Peace Problems Discussion Group’s statement in many ways.

The Congress served as a meeting place for people from 85 different countries to share a message of peaceful coexistence in the face of growing international tensions.106 One notable speaker at the Congress was Jean-Paul Sartre.107 He opens his speech by claiming that “the world has been cut in half and each half is afraid of the other” and that “under these circumstances only one position is possible, summarized by a consummate piece of madness—if you want peace, prepare for war” (Sartre 1953: 21). To avoid this “utterly imbecile enterprise,” he argues for

“coexistence,” not merely “juxtaposition”—a mutual understanding and “collaboration of all the peoples of the world” (Sartre 1953: 23). As such, he opposed the division of world powers into capitalist and communist blocs, and called for Western Europe to function as a “mediator”, a

“meeting-place of the currents flowing from capitalist America and the socialist Soviet Union, where these currents must meet and mix” (Sartre 1953: 24).

The sentiment shared by these two statements is admirable, but also problematic—in large part due to the oversimplicity of the ‘two world’ problem, which displaces many other

‘worlds.’ The paradigm of East and West, or communist and capitalist opposition works to displace internal, domestic oppositions—hence Western Europe and Japan able to de-westernize

106 The Vienna Congress of the Peoples for Peace was held in Vienna between December 12–19, 1952. The proceedings of the congress were published in a supplement to the New Times journal on January 1, 1953.

107 Sartre was one of several opening speakers, the others being Yves Farge, Kuo Mo-Jo, J. D. Bernal, Ilya Ehrengurg, Saifuddin Kichlew, A. Y. Korneichuk, James Endicott, Elisa Branco, and Guiseppe Nitti.

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or de-asianize themselves as a neutral representatives of universal humanism. Without acknowledging the particular tensions and blind spots of their own historical contexts, something remains missing here. In this chapter, I will revisit the motifs established in this thesis—the naturalization of contemporary sociopolitical reality, the process of historical forgetting that accompanied Japan’s return to ‘normal’ in the 1950s, and the stark polarization of differences, motifs I have organized as three aspects of haunting, realism, return, and relation—in order to re-emphasize the importance that ‘listening to ghosts’ has to the creation of a radical cooperative paradigm.

Realism

Sartre’s statement and the Third Statement both organize their appeals around the topic of

‘realism.’ As Sartre writes, “current politics and ways of thinking lead us to massacre because they are unreal” (Sartre 1953: 21). It is unreal, he explains, because it abstracts human subjectivity: “In this perspective men themselves become unreal. Everyone becomes The Other

One, the possible enemy: he is not trusted. It is rare in my country, in France, to meet men: you meet above all labels and names” (1953: 21). Human beings become, along with their national identities, pure abstractions rather than “living, working, loving and dying” individuals (1953:

22). As for reality, Sartre writes, “just as one can say that unreality leads to conflict, one can say that what is reality unites: because that which is real is the sum of ties that bind men together.

And if we but think of the sum of the ties that bind us together, we shall see that our making war would be an utterly imbecile enterprise” (Sartre 1953: 21–22). Sartre similarly rejects the notion of ‘peace through war’ or nuclear deterrence as an unreal peace dictated in terms of absolutes, in the abstract, disconnected from human agency: people must be “ready to construct peace as the peoples must, that is, beginning with real life, practically” (1953: 23). Sartre, in other words,

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rejects the reality of the Cold War—its premise that coexistence between capitalist and socialist states is unthinkable—as unreal, disconnected from a reality that he associates with individual, concrete experience.

The Third Statement authors similarly rejected the rationalization of nuclear war as

‘common sense’ or ‘self-evident.’ Mirroring much of what Maruyama Masao would publish in

Sekai two years later in the essay “Defects of ‘Realism’” (‘Genjitsu’ shugi no kansei, 1952), the first two chapters of the Third Statement focus on refuting those who posit a pre-established, one-dimensional, and authoritative reality.108 To be specific, what Maruyama and the other writers of the Third Statement resist is the acceptance of the “Two World Opposition” as a fait accompli (Heiwa Mondai Danwakai 1985: 124). The error, they explain, is to accept that “there is no possibility for common peace or love for humanity in this world” (1985: 124) and that the escalation of conflict between ideologically-polarized world superpowers was an “objectively recognized” (genjitsu no kakkanteki ninshiki) and “inevitable” (hitsuzen) reality (1985: 123–24).

Indeed, as Rikki Kersten explains, “Maruyama challenge[d] the ‘reality’ of the Cold

War”:

The arguments in favour of a partial peace and a military alliance with the United States cited power politics and ‘reality,’ but to Maruyama they were merely reincarnations of the closed-society mentality founded on the passive acceptance of ‘nature’. Pacifism in independent Japan was the opportunity for social autonomy to claim Japan’s political fate from ‘established reality.’ (Kersten 1996: 186)

108 Maruyama Masao. 1952. “’Genjitsu’ shugi no kansei [Defects of ‘Realism’]” in Sekai 77 (May): 122–30.

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Thus, the first few chapters of the Third Statement established the main problem of the Cold War as a problem with ‘realism,’ with perceiving the conflict as “self-evident [jimei]”: the reality of the Cold War was “very easily accepted as such [sore wa sore] and [did] not serve as a living criterion for judging real international issues” (Heiwa Mondai Danwakai 1985: 121). Much like

Abe wrote in his own 1952 essay “For a New Realism” (Atarashī riarizumu no tame ni), the

Third Statement argues against conventional realism, and implies that reality is therefore not passive but actively changed through praxis. Common-sense ‘realism,’ they argue, does not function as a “living criteria for judging the reality [genjitsu] of international problems” (1985:

121). “There is no such thing as an ‘objective recognition’ unrelated to one’s independent position,” the authors claim: “the way in which one sets up the problem changes the direction in which reality is processed” (1985: 124). Thus, their critique of ‘realist’ thinkers centers on problematizing objectivity, inevitability, and self-evidence—the assumption that reality should be simply “self-evident,” free of ideological mediation or technical apparatuses (an expression that immediately calls to mind the naturalist-realist literary discourse of ari no mama).

The importance that realism and more specifically self-evidence-as-ideology has both to the politics and aesthetics of postwar Japan was the focus of my first chapter, where I connected it to the way in which the films Pitfall and Hiroshima mon amour deal with various transparent ghostly figures produced by the postwar. Indeed, ghosts, the organizing concept in this thesis, are a literalization of transparency, which is essentially the precondition for taken-for-grantedness or self-evidence: transparent objects are, by definition, present but passed through as if they were not there, a quality that enables the appearance of an unfettered process of passing-through, a presence-ing that appears independent, self-generating, unmediated, and absolute. What is most essential about transparency is that it sustains the illusion of immediacy by projecting the

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appearance of a binary opposition between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence.

However, what is most crucial to transparency is that it does so only by inconspicuously contradicting this very opposition, by conditioning visibility upon what is invisible.

This logic is central to my interpretation of the historical processes of de-ideologization

(ideological ‘transparency’) that occurred in the 1950s around the perceived crisis of the Cold

War. Japan in the 1950s normalized remilitarization as well as socially regressive economic austerity policies under the depoliticized and dehistoricized rubric of “rationalization” (gōrika), concealing their very function as ideology and positioning them as the most natural, common sense, or realistic response to a taken-for-granted political and social crisis. Rather than merely one system of organizing and understanding history, rationalization-as-ideology positioned itself as the only de-ideologized, reasonable means of managing the Cold War threat of communism— all other systems and ideas were clouded by ideological baggage and delusional fantasies about how the world should be.

Pitfall dismantles this de-ideologization by estranging rationalization from its own pretense of normalcy and exposing the transparent ground enabling it—namely Japan’s itinerant mining population, a mass workforce of disposable labour produced by and supportive of Japan’s postwar economic and social revival through its own disavowal, alienation, and dispossession.

The film accomplishes this by challenging the simple opposition between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, where the ghosts of mining labour work as an example of what Marx called ‘ghostly concreteness’ or “gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit” (Marx 1872:13), the material reality of labouring bodies that is made invisible by the ghostly abstraction of labour. Capitalism, despite its rationalist and instrumentalist pretences, is founded upon this objective fantasy of the abstract commodity separated from human labour. This is literalized in

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the film as ghostly laboring bodies, the spectres of labour’s commodification made concrete as an objective reality. Therefore, more real than the realism that capitalism posits as its ground, the film suggests, is this illusion of labour’s invisibility that enables capital to freely circulate.

A similar illusion of seamless circulation and transmission is enabled by transparency in the film Hiroshima mon amour: the illusion of historical intimacy through hypervisibility. Like

Pitfall, Hiroshima works to destabilize a dichotomy separating reality and fantasy, in this case framed as the opposition between vision and invisibility: either the French woman sees everything, or she sees nothing. However, what is made clear by her experience in the Hiroshima

Peace Memorial Museum, where she goes to ‘witness’ what happened during the bombing of the city, is that her facility in witnessing the event is conditioned by the transparency of various apparatuses: glass cases and picture frames, acrylic and liquid suspensions, and other mediating objects that inconspicuously frame her vision of the historical archives suspended within/by them. Rather than opposing vision and invisibility absolutely, the film brings these peripheral media into focus, illustrating how invisibility (of the apparatus of vision) is the very thing that conditions visibility—following once again the logic of transparency whereby that which conditions the possibility of visibility does so by remaining invisible. In order to absorb history, the film suggests that it is necessary to question the unmediated self-sufficiency of vision, foregrounding the limits of specular memory by shifting focus on to the very frames through which it is conditioned.

The apparatuses of archival history are transparent barriers that when foregrounded draw attention to the French woman’s compromised ability to witness absolutely. This point is carried home by the way in which both films, Pitfall and Hiroshima mon amour, challenge the neutrality of the film apparatus as a medium whose transparency of operation typically conditions the

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process of documenting history. Both films feature documentary and newsreel footage, yet rather than using it to bolster each film’s authenticity as a document by referring to the indifferent,

“ideology-less, objective pose” of authoritative scientific or objective recordings (Nornes 2003:

191), the contingency—the materially and corporeally-embedded nature—of the stock footage is foregrounded in a way that challenges its absolute authority as an objective record of historical reality. In this way, the opposition between fidelity and distortion of history is displaced by an acknowledgment of the historical record as always compromised by a materiality that holds our gaze in a particular frame.

The first chapter in this way set the groundwork for a critique of the realist logic that, as illustrated by the Peace Problems Discussion Group, was central to the discourse of postwar

Japan. Its positivist understanding of the taken-for-granted ‘natural laws’ of postwar capitalist

Japan failed to acknowledge the existence of internal opposition: the blind spots, differences, and self-delusions that enabled its very own naïve sense of autonomy, self-sufficiency, disembodied objectivity, hypervisibility, or clarity of operation. Abe Kōbō’s work in the 1950s was particularly poignant in its use of ghosts to re-situate the borders of realism and expose these blind spots of the ‘realists’ who posited capitalism and the free market system as an absolute reality, projecting otherness onto an outside threat, an encroaching ‘Red Peril,’ rather than acknowledging their own internal contradictions and differences, embodied in the more dialectical concept of an ‘objective fantasy,’ an abstract, ghostly commodification disembodied from its labourers. Abe employed ghost stories in order to present an alternative politics of realist fiction that challenged the universality and taken-for-grantedness of both conventional realist fiction as well as ‘capitalist realism’ in the 1950s.

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Return

As I indicated above, however, the internationalist rhetoric of the Third Statement was limited by its positioning of Japan as a neutral, non-partisan representative of an international peace movement. This displacement of domestic tensions illustrates in several contradictory ways the sense in which voices on both sides of the political spectrum distanced postwar Japan from continuing associations with war and imperialism, reminding us of the ubiquitous process of historical forgetting that accompanied Japan’s postwar socioeconomic revitalization. The authors critique ‘realists’ for their complicity in Cold War remilitarization and economic reversal; however, they also link their own message of peace to Japanese victimhood in a way that failed to criticize the connections between Japan’s contemporary socioeconomic and democratic progress and the continuing consequences and expressions of imperialism. John

Dower's critique of this Third Statement notes that it promoted pacifism by “appealing to the personal experiences of Japanese in the war just past—essentially appealing, that is, to the

Japanese sense of victimization” (Dower 2012: 155). The sentiments of these authors—pacifism, non-alignment, democracy, and economic stability—were typical of postwar left-wing intellectuals, and indeed characterized the defining ethos of the Sekai journal—whose editors,

Laura Hein argues, “did not frame their self-criticism to include examination of the ways that intellectuals such as themselves had used their sophistication and modern expertise to justify the war” (Hein 2004: 116). In other words, the statement grounded its authority as a voice calling for demilitarization and pacifist, neutral stewardship on Japan’s status as the sole victim of (nuclear) warfare, a position that disavowed both Japan’s wartime responsibility for colonial and imperialist projects in East and South East Asia as well as the continuing acts of imperialist violence that were interconnected with its economic and social recovery.

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Chapter Two addresses this problem of historical forgetting in 1950s Japan by examining the discourse of ‘return’—a postwar form of naturalist realism that worked to dehistoricize the dominant narrative of national and subjective ‘rebuilding’ surrounding policies of rationalization and remilitarization. In that chapter, I examined the assertion that the everyday life of capitalist imperialism was framed as a ‘return to normal’ (to ‘natural’ gender roles, to economic and social stability, to the homeland for citizens repatriated from the colonies, etc.) This discourse of return worked as a form of closure, isolating the reality of the present from its associations with colonial empire and displacing lived experiences that were discrepant with the idea of a return to equilibrium. For example, I referenced Iijima Aiko’s critique of the anti-nuclear politics of victimhood that had been mobilized by the Motherhood Movement in the 1950s, which, like that of the Peace Problems group, expressed a discourse of peace that had little self-awareness of

Japan’s own role as wartime aggressor, or of the connection between postwar Japanese economic recovery, gender roles, and continuing acts of imperialism. There was little awareness of the sense in which this return also aligned with Cold War politics, in particular its role in enabling

US imperialism in Asia. The movement attempted to legitimize women’s roles as anti-nuclear advocates by celebrating a return to conservative gender norms wherein their primary and natural responsibility to the nation was as mothers and housewives (ryōsai kenbo)—natural protectors of life who were, as such, opposed to nuclear war.

The return to normative gender roles was one of many expressions of social, economic, political, and geographic ‘return’ and ‘recovery’ that worked to distance the 1950s both from the imperialism of the war and the progressive critiques of the immediate postwar by naturalizing and depoliticizing the economic and social reforms of the present day. Put differently, the logic of a ‘return to normal’ worked to inoculate the present from the contingencies and contradictions

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of historical process. Rather than a historical conjuncture composed of tensions and conflicts, the rapidly changing reality of the postwar was reframed in the 1950s as a natural constant, without dialectic or negative space—without ghosts—in which time had moved towards a fixed, reified capitalist present defined by a hegemonic middle-class mass consumer subject.

The crucial argument in this chapter was that this reification of the capitalist structure of postwar Japan created a crisis in meaning where the concrete reality of lived experience did not correspond to the dominant narrative of national and subjective recovery and return. Put more generally, the abstract discourse of recovery was discrepant with the specific historical reality of the Japanese postwar. Abe Kōbō’s ghost narratives attempted to bring this discrepancy into focus, not only by representing the ghostly alienation of factory workers, miners, repatriated and colonial subjects, and other subjects whose experiences of the postwar were vastly discrepant from the economic, social, and political structures that regulated their lives, but also by attempting to give concrete form to that experiential rupture itself, and challenge the transparency of capitalist-realist representation. Much of this was accomplished by countering the realist discourse of a ‘return to (normal)’ with that of a haunting ‘return of (alterity).’ Where

‘return to’ solidified the dominant narrative of national and subjective rebuilding into a self- evident natural state of affairs, the ‘return of’ fractured that reality into a network of dialectical relations—the past within the present, possibility within the impossible, imaginary within reality, collective within the individual. The coherence of the discourse of ‘return’ was in this way undermined by showing that it relied on various internal contradictions, most notably the normalization of the democratic individual subject that was rationalized and regulated through a homogenous commonly-experienced everyday life conforming to capitalist ideals of the bourgeois individual that were nonetheless alienating and isolated.

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Relation

The Peace Problems Discussion Group statement, like Sartre’s appeal to international unity, reflected the urgency that the concept of ‘relation’ had in the context of 1950s politics, as an ideal of peaceful “coexistence” between the eastern and western blocs (1985: 124).

Ultimately, the authors of the Third Statement viewed the Cold War as a “problem of coordination” (1985: 125). To this end, they proposed a “paradoxical truth [gyakusetsuteki shinri]” (1985: 123) based on the principle of consolidating irreconcilable opposites. This

‘paradoxical truth’ referred to a displacement of the simple division of Cold War politics into

‘realistic’ and ‘idealistic’ approaches: they claimed that their so-called impossible idealistic goal of coexistence was more ‘realistic’ than the assumed reality of inevitable conflict—that nuclear war was more ‘unrealistic’ a solution than the idealism of mutual understanding. “To be realistic,” they claimed, “we need to be idealistic” (1985: 124). This ‘pragmatic idealism’ was presented as an alternative to the common-sense received understanding of the present crisis informing Cold War realism; and it aligned in several respects with the interests of contemporary avant-garde art collectives, who similarly wished to remain grounded in concrete reality and the political and social urgency of the present moment, while also appealing to idealistic goals of internationalism and cooperation.

Nevertheless, this “paradoxical” approach to truth was largely compromised by the group’s lack of confrontation with its own internal paradoxes. Its deconstruction of dogmatism and of intractable and mutually opposed ideologies shifted responsibility onto the individual as an autonomous agent and creator of historical change; yet there was no recognition of the sense in which democratic individualism was itself, as we have explained, a mass, hegemonic, ideological apparatus imposed upon the individual by the state and by American occupation

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(returning again to the paradox of the shutaisei debates of the early postwar, within which

Maruyama himself played a large role, interpreting the war as a consequence of the state’s betrayal of individual autonomy and democracy).109 In this way, the relation and the mutual compromise of individual and collective consciousness that Abe articulated as a ‘communion with the dead’ remained unexplored by the ‘paradoxical’ logic of the Heiwa Mondai Danwakai.

Moreover, their focus on the global crisis of the ‘two world’ problem displaced many problematic aspects of Japan’s domestic postwar historical reality. In a sense the focus on this

‘external’ crisis, shared by both sides of the debate illustrated in the Third Statement, displaced various ‘internal’ crises experienced within Japan, creating new divisions despite the emphasis on convergence and coexistence, and reinforcing the rupture between individual and collective reality that we have characterized as a ‘crisis of realism.’ In other words, their focus on reconciling the ‘two world’ crisis (Western and Socialist blocs) displaced another ‘two world’ crisis: the disconnect between domestic/individual experience and global/collective structures of reality.

As Dower has explained, Cold War politics in the 1950s cannot be understood through a single frame of reference but needs to be recognized as operating within two “systems”: namely the “San Francisco System,” so called because of the San-Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951, and the “1955 system,” so called because of the consolidation of socialist and conservative parties into two camps, the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), in

109 For more on Maruyama’s role in the shutaisei debate see Kersten 1996: 90–93.

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1955.110 Dower explains in his essay “Peace and Democracy in Two Systems: External Policy and Internal Conflict” that the San Francisco system is defined by the contradiction between

Japan’s simultaneous commitment to international cooperation and its capitulation to US Cold

War policy, and the 1955 system involved domestic tensions between a “hegemonic conservative establishment and a marginalized but sometimes influential liberal and Marxist opposition”

(Dower 1993: 4). In this way, Dower positions international tensions on one side of a dialectical pairing consisting of international and domestic poles. On the one side, there is the tension between Cold War imperialism and international cooperation; and on the other, the struggle between socialist and conservative parties over issues such as the growing ‘rationalization’ of postwar Japan and the validity of the US-Japan security treaty (Masumi 1988: 286–87). Put differently, we can say that the dichotomy of East and West (communist and capitalist) is replaced by a dialectic of international and domestic; and more than this, each pole

(international, domestic) contains within it its own tensions. In this way, the paradigm is similar in structure to that which Karatani Kōjin provides in his essay “The Discursive Space of Modern

Japan.” In that essay he maps a “discursive space” that is divided into four quadrants, not only along axes of East and West but also along the axes of internal and external relations (Karatani

1991: 200).

Applying this model to Dower’s dialectical paradigm of international and domestic politics, we can divide postwar Japan’s discursive space into axes of international and domestic, and collective and individual, and thus into four quadrants of collective-international, individual-

110 The coining of the term “1955 System” or “1955 taisei” is credited to Masumi Junnosuke, who first used it in his 1964 essay “1955 nen no seiji taisei” (Masumi 1964: 55–72). See also Postwar Politics in Japan, 1945–1955 (Masumi 1985) and “The 1955 System in Japan and its Subsequent Development” (Masumi 1988: 286–306).

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international, collective-domestic, and individual-domestic.111 The collective-international quadrant consists of the international peace discourse, which was, appropriately, spearheaded by socialist thinkers such as those who organized and participated in the Vienna Congress—indeed, the internationalist peace over war was in large part a reproduction of Stalin’s own Cold War approach to “peaceful coexistence” (as Sartre notes in his speech that confronted with the possibility of nuclear war “the proletariat turns with hope towards the Soviet Union and the

Eastern democracies” [Sartre 1953: 24]). The individual-international is this peace discourse’s displaced other, its inversion—what Karatani might call its conversion or tenko (1991: 199): the

US Cold War agenda and its division of the world into individual, autonomous, incompatible

‘blocs.’ Indeed, as we have seen these two internationalist impulses are not divisible, and universal humanism frequently bled into imperialism—what Dower describes as the San

Francisco System’s contradictory tension between ‘peaceful coexistence’ and US imperial Cold

War policy. The re-positioning of Japan as international representative of peace and denuclearization—what Karatani described as the de-asianization of Japan’s postwar discourse

(“postwar ‘space’ consists of a domain that has discarded Asia” [1991: 199]) was also an erasure of Japan’s own history of colonialism and imperialism—the annexation of Korea (1910–1945) or war with China (1937–45) and the U.S. (1941–45). Dower divided the domestic-collective and domestic-individual quadrants into Japan’s own socialist party (JSP), and its opposing conservative LDP, yet more generally we can divide it into domestic mass versus individual identity—the contradiction between which was, as we have said, what galvanized Abe and his

111 Incidentally, Justin Jesty points to a parallel between Japanese and British Cold War discursive formations: “In The Battle for Realism, James Hyman (2001) traces a similar conflict between two ideologies in early postwar Britain. Just as in Japan, both laid claim to realism as the basis for their positions, but went beyond aesthetic or stylistic preference to encompass a series of dialectics between ‘internationalism and nationalism; liberalism and Communism; politicization and artistic autonomy; individual genius and collective action’ (p.2)” (Jesty 2014: 510).

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colleagues in the 1950s to develop alternative ‘spectral’ subjectivities that complicated the very division between individual and collective identity, overlapping mass culture and individual identity.

In large part it is the contradictory relations between and within these discursive frameworks that defined Japan in the 1950s, yet the authors of the Third Statement articulated the conflicts to a space that was largely confined to the international, i.e. within the ‘San

Francisco System’—asserting the commitment to global peace and criticizing the passive acceptance of rearmament as a given reality—in relative isolation, displacing the domestic conflicts referred to by the 1955 System to position Japan as a neutral ‘third party’ with a unified supra-ideological message of peace. This limited the group’s ability to connect various aspects of

Japan’s postwar history and make the connections that needed to be made between economic growth, democratic individualism, imperialism, and continuing acts of oppression. What’s more, it also obfuscated the Heiwa Mondai Danwakai’s own internal ‘1955 system’ rifts, between the socialist, revolutionary position of the Kyoto branch of the peace movement, and the more humanist democratic position of the Tokyo branch of which Maruyama was a part.112

The irony, therefore, is that the concerns of postwar Japan illustrated in the Third

Statement, with a slight shift in valence, took on values that entirely inverted their meaning: the

‘idealist’ authors of the statement appealed to a discourse of international neutrality that would overcome the particular differences between (liberal democratic) individualism and (communist) collective consciousness, yet they did so through an undialectical appeal to an absolute,

112 For more on the internal divisions within the ‘Heidankai’ movement see Kersten 1996: 190–91.

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international discourse of ‘peace’ that universalized democratic individualism and glossed over the contradicting particular domestic realities of postwar Japan. Conversely, their ‘realist’ antagonists appealed to the need to give attention to concrete reality and the practical demands of the present, yet used this to justify a totalizing, abstract discourse of capitalist socio-economic rationalization and remilitarization in a way that actually did more to obscure the material reality experienced by postwar subjects. Therefore, each ideology missed what was of value in the other: namely the fidelity to particular real-world conditions, and the need for collaborative relationships that overcome particular differences.

Abe and his colleagues in the 1950s approached collaboration in a similar way, yet they incorporated this mutual blindness directly into their method by internalizing difference. Chapter

3 described avant-garde collectives of the 1950s (such as Jikken Kōbō and Kiroku Geijutsu no

Kai) that organized their work around the concept of sōgō geijutsu or ‘total art,’ which worked to deconstruct totality by framing it as a kind of relationality: sōgō (synthesis, coordination) signified a dialectical relation between self and other that moved beyond the binary logic that divided communal and individual approaches—a binarism that not only defined the contours of international politics, but that also divided early postwar leftist thinking into camps supporting the cultivation either of individual or collective narratives of experience. ‘Total’ art neither disavowed nor surrendered to identity or difference, seeing the two as overlapping to produce a work of art that was: at once both international and historically grounded in the issues relevant to

Japan’s present day social and political reality; that was accessible to the masses yet also resistant to the dominant ‘mass culture’ of liberal democratic postwar Japan; and that was collective without sacrificing the individual autonomy of the artists involved in the production of the work or the audience as interpreters. In this way, they mobilized a politics and aesthetics of

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intermediation, interdisciplinarity, and collaboration that was analogous to Abe’s own dialectic of theory and practice: cooperative acts of resistance against hegemonic narratives and dogmatic ideologies, with collective interests in mind and a formal method guiding them, that were nonetheless contingent upon material history, individual agency, and concrete praxis.

In chapter 3, I described this method as ‘contrapuntal’: vertically cutting through already established ‘normalized’ (historical, subjective, ideological) relationships in order to uncover new connections or harmonies. The collaboration between Abe, Takemitsu, and Teshigahara on inter-subjective and inter-medial works such as Pitfall stemmed from this contrapuntal ethos.

Composer Takemitsu Tōru expressed this literally through the use of counterpoint in his musical scores: counterpoint, he explained, was not simply dissonant for the sake of dissonance, but also for the sake of uncovering deeper underlying relations. In this way, Pitfall’s musical scoring intervened in the film, interrupting the disinterested and concealed transparency of its artifice, yet it did so in a way that not only undermined the authority of (documentary, as well as capitalist) realism, but also brought the dominant postwar discourse of return and recovery into contact with unrecognized aspects of its own disavowed material history—mining workers, the invisible agents of its own growth and success. This collaborative work thus illustrated a contrapuntal approach to history, based on charting new contexts and connections (between subjects, across times). History in this way manifested as a simultaneous location and dislocation, a ‘ghostly concreteness’ in which the present in its particular, concrete conditions, or the individual as an autonomous subject, would be suspended in a relation to other times and other individuals.

Duras, Resnais, and Colpi’s collaboration on Hiroshima mon amour operates somewhere in between the problematic universalism of the Third Statement and the more cooperative and

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dialectical understanding of subjectivity and historical form expressed by the 1950s avant-garde in Japan. In chapter 3 I discussed how the French woman’s film within the film was about

‘peace’ in the abstract in a way that dissociated it from real historical and political conflicts both in France and Japan. Her ‘peace film’ was in this way a kind of echo of the early 1950s internationalist peace discourse as expressed in the Vienna Congress. There are echoes, also, of the contemporary cinema in France in the 1950s, in particular Nicole Védrès’ film La vie commence demain (released in September 1950). The film stars Jean-Pierre Aumont as a young provincial who feels out of sync with his time. He goes to Paris and meets with various contemporary intellectuals, with whom he discusses his concerns about crime, changing mores, and, penultimately, the ‘atomic bomb.’ In one sequence of the film, he visits Sartre, who, discussing the atomic bomb, says that “there have perhaps never been so many threats to mankind, yet men have never been so clearly aware of their freedom. If you could bring all human anguish and awareness together in yourself, would you be tempted?” (Védrès 1949:

0:17:19–0:17:32). As Sartre speaks, Védrès shows three shots, an atomic cloud, flames, and finally flames overlaid so as to engulf a model of the earth.

The film was clearly an expression of anxiety regarding nuclear war and as such is a clear reflection of France’s contemporary Cold War concerns. In a scene close to the end of the film, the protagonist goes with André Labarthe to the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, where Labarthe gives an impassioned speech about the dangers of nuclear technology: “What can we do before this disaster? What can we do to guarantee that nuclear science doesn’t lead to nuclear war?”

(1:17:58–1:18:11). What is interesting here is not simply the film’s obvious expression of anxiety regarding nuclear technology (as Labarthe says after his speech, “what could I say? It’s the sole problem of our epoch”) but also the use of montage in this scene: as Labarthe reminds

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attendees of the UNESCO talk about the suffering endured by those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

Védrès again displays several images, this time archival footage of hibakusha being treated for radiation burns, aerial footage of the aftermath of Hiroshima, and images of the shadows burned onto stones (1:19:25–1:19:52)—much of which is exactly the same footage we recall was later used by Resnais in Hiroshima mon amour during the French woman’s monologue in the opening scene of the film.113 Seeing as Resnais was trained by Védrès and had worked as her assistant director on the film Paris 1900, the parallel is not likely by accident. Indeed, Resnais seems to have embedded into the Hiroshima a 1950s Cold War nuclearization discourse and a documentary approach that was then deconstructed by the film’s larger project.

Hiroshima mon amour navigated a problem that, much like the ‘Two World’ crisis, could be summarized as a “problem of coordination” (1985: 125)—of incompatibility between individual and collective narratives of the present or idealistic and realistic approaches. The

French woman’s peace film, like the Third Statement, and like Védrès film, illustrates the sense in which politics in the 1950s was global politics. Yet this threatened to erase the particularity of postwar Japanese politics and its own specific, local crises. In the film, Hiroshima largely serves as a stage for an international drama where haunting resonances of French postwar colonial politics come to the surface, and it threatens to become overwhelmed by an internationalist idealistic discourse of universal humanism and peace (nuclear universalism), one voiced by the

French woman and more generally expressed within the postwar narrative of progress and return.

Indeed, her interest in Japan is confined largely to the museum, a literally ‘museified’ expression

113Labarthe had reported on the US atomic bomb testing at Bikini Atoll. He also produced a short journalistic film in 1949 for the newsreel distributor Les Actualités Françaises on “Le problème de la bombe atomique” that discussed the worrying speed at which the Soviet Union had developed their own bomb, and also returned to the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, again using archival footage.

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of Japanese history that threatens to remove it from its historical, political, economic, and cultural living context.

It is necessary therefore to listen contrapuntally to the film to uncover geopolitically specific challenges to this museification: contrapuntal histories of the present, in the form of references to May Day protests, or in the film’s indirect critique of modern France—histories that worked to undermine dominant discursive formations positioning Hiroshima as a symbolic space of peace and recovery and the West as the measure of progress, and ground the film in concrete historical reality. Indeed, paralleling Japan’s own erasure of the wartime colonization of

Korea and its continuing effects on postwar Korea,114 in France in 1950s direct criticism of continuing colonial projects in Indochina and Algeria in mainstream cinema was largely (state and self) censored. As Philip Dine explains, “the only way in which the war was made present for the vast majority of French cinema-goers was as a troubling ‘air du temps,’ referred to by allusion or implication in the feature films of the day” (Dine 1998: 60). Dine refers to Godard’s

A bout de souffle (1960) and Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (1957) as films with colonial subtexts criticizing the wars in Algeria and Indochina (1998: 60) but Hiroshima mon amour is also a good example of this. In Hiroshima, narratives of progress, humanism, and recovery coincide with their own deconstruction, and with ongoing particular overlapping traumatic material histories of violence, oppression, and colonialism (much in the same way as

114 Bruce Cumings explains, for example, that the Korean War had a “Japanese gestation, a colonial integument of long standing that burst asunder with stunning abruptness” (Cumings 2004: xxi).

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Japanese and French narratives of progress and civilizing missions coincided with colonial violence in Korea and Algeria).115

The comparative analysis of Hiroshima and Pitfall also gave me an opportunity to reflect on the role that relation or counterpoint plays in my own method of analysis as a comparativist. I believe it is important to remain grounded in historical specificity, even (or especially) while performing inter-national and comparative-historical analyses across literatures and regions.

Hence my interpretation of Calichman and Cornyetz’s different approaches to Abe, as a Japanese versus universal author, and how he must be read as both: his works are both ghosts of other times and places that are not bound in any essentialist view of Japanese identity, and they are

‘flesh and blood’ historically-bound works of Japanese fiction that must be read on their own terms, without bracketing the very real and important historical context within which they are produced. As readers, I argue that it is crucial to position ourselves in between these two frames of reference: neither as neutral and universal observers, whose own apparatus of observation is rendered transparent, ahistorical, unlimited in scope; nor as entirely limited to our own ‘reality,’ our own singular histories and subject positions, through which any attempt to understand what is outside our scope, which is rendered radically different and beyond relation, can only be an act of violence. The limitations that define what is possible or impossible within our own reality, in other words, should be broken, should be open to new possibilities, new realities, but not in a way that positions us as boundless colonizers of other realities—always, then, with an

115 Several scholars are beginning to consider the overlapping colonial histories of the West and East Asia. See for example Lionel Babicz’ “Japan-Korea, France-Algeria: Colonialism and Post-Colonialism” (Babicz 2013).

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acknowledgment that we are never beyond being compromised and conditioned by certain limitations.

Comparison and collective identification must always incorporate an awareness of difference into the very act of relation, while nonetheless sustaining the idea that relation, collaboration, or collective purpose ought to be privileged above individuation, autonomy, or difference simply for their own sakes. It should be evident that all the texts explored in this thesis have privileged communication, understanding, collective action or experience, and communion with other histories and other pasts, above isolated identarian politics, deconstruction, separation, difference, or (like Derrida’s spectre) out-of-jointness. If the aporia of the ‘spectre’

(which is not the ghost I have been chasing) is that it dismantles the present into particular and contradictory ‘joints’ and yet is, paradoxically, generalizable—caught in a “generalized economy of haunting” (Luckhurst 2002: 534) that gives it its metaphorical and abstract equivalency—then the aporia of the ‘ghost,’ on the contrary, is that it asks us to listen across the limitations of our own identities and particularisms to hear what it has to say, and yet is nonetheless grounded in particular and material contexts and singular experiences that are not our own—that it is above all a figure that exists not simply in a weakened relation to the world but in a relation that brings into the forefront our own weak spots, altering our experience of the present by demanding that we recognize its very real presence and its need to re-join with the present.

In this way, comparing the avant-garde approach to ‘counterpoint’ with the Third

Statement’s approach to ‘paradoxical truth’ brings into focus a crucial difference that defines what relation means to the politics of haunting. Both eschew individualism and identarian isolation to open up one’s experience of reality to otherness, yet the politics of haunting does so by emphasizing the specificity of the other, not the equivalency of one’s own experience with

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that of the other’s. Both privilege communication and mutual relation, yet the politics of haunting does not simply assume a position of ‘universality,’ but rather frames relation as a recognition of a particular presence that works to compromise one’s experience of reality by bringing what was in one’s blind spot into view.

Conclusion

As we have seen, the concepts of realism, return, and relation were key to the way in which postwar capitalism solidified and naturalized itself and erased its opposites, yet with a slight shift in valence, realism, return, and relation were also used by the avant-garde to re- historicize postwar life and produce alternative ‘spectral realities’ of the present—realities that allowed for new forms of understanding and collaboration. These artists denounced ‘realism’ or

‘common sense’ as a political and aesthetic framework, without, however, abandoning the urgent necessity of attending to the historical present in its reality and listening to the concrete, everyday lives and experiences of those agents shaping it. They critiqued imperialist militarism and colonialism, without, however, relegating it to the past or projecting it onto the international sphere in a way that disavowed its continuing presence in present-day liberal democratic capitalist Japan. Finally, they remained skeptical of abstract, absolute dogmatic ideologies removed from material history, without, however, reducing reality to individualism or abandoning the necessity for collective understanding, organization, association, and action— both within aesthetic ‘reading’ strategies as well as political methods of organization. In this way, they challenged the entrenchment of capitalist realism into everyday life in 1950s Japan by presenting an alternative to individualism, maintaining a fidelity to real-world conditions, and opening up the present to alternative overlapping realities and subjectivities.

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The often contradictory and overlapping relationship between idealism and realism, repression and return, collective and individual, that characterized 1950s Japan collapsed in the

1960s, where resistance to ‘theory,’ the failure of utopian projects, as well as the consequent de- ideologization of ‘neoliberal’ reality, gradually began to produce a flattening and homogenization of the ‘practical’ ideology of liberal democratic individualism—one that culminated in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union, an event that marked, in Francis

Fukuyama’s infamous words, a perceived “end of history” and universalization of liberal democracy (Fukuyama 1992). As Masao Miyoshi has explained, the 1960s was characterized by a “profound disillusionment with collectivism” and a turn towards difference and multiplicity that, while inspiring both academic and popular forms of counter-narratives, also problematically paralleled the expansion of economic globalization (2010b: 230–31). The radical protests that erupted in the early 1960s, ostensibly against the renewal of the Japan-US Security Treaty in

1960, were guided by the realist ‘idealism’ of the Heiwa Mondai Danwakai (Maruyama and others who contributed to the group continued to be guiding voices in the Anpo movement that began in 1960); yet despite the popularity of these protests and their success in toppling the government (forcing Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi to resign), they did not succeed in their goal of stopping the renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty. This failure was in a sense foreshadowed by the limitations of the Heiwa Mondai Danwakai and by liberal democratic thought more generally. Its resistance to the passive acceptance of Cold War realism was tied to a celebration of individual freedom in a way that “precluded,” as Kersten explains, “autonomous action on the part of politically-involved citizens (that is, social autonomy), and forced democratic action into an apolitical, private sphere” (Kersten 1996: 194). This failure of the revolutionary left in the 1960s was also perhaps aggravated by the fact that, as Andrew Barshay states, “the actual masses [in the 1960s] were not revolutionary either” (Barshay 1998: 329). The

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staggering economic growth of the 1960s was an ‘economic utopia’ (an ‘economic miracle’) for the middle class, and this could be interpreted as a failure of the left to mobilize against capitalist mass culture. In any case, the depoliticized reification of the democratic, private individual

(representing the ‘masses’ of 1960s Japan) was anathema to the artists in this thesis, who saw this as a forgetting of the collective histories upon which reality was conditioned. Abe himself, as we know, cut ties with the Japanese Communist Party after the Soviet military occupation of

Hungary in 1956, and while he did not abandon his commitment to politicizing his work in the

1960s, he also largely abandoned the ghost as a political and aesthetic category. I would venture to say that this was in part a response to what Miyoshi describes as a shift in thinking in the

1960s towards difference and individuation (the ghost is fundamentally dialectical figure).

We recall that Adorno and Horkheimer defined the “sickness of experience today” as a

“disturbed relationship to the dead,” a dissociation of the individual from historical consciousness (Horkheimer and Adorno 1993: 178–79). Indeed, the narratives of haunting explored in this thesis have insisted on the importance of communing with ghosts and exploring ways in which our reality is haunted by, or possessed by, the presence of ghosts. The ghost is the effect of historical alienation on the individual body. The reality of postwar Japan was one in which this historical alienation continued to haunt the celebratory official narratives of a burgeoning liberal, democratic, capitalist society in contradictory ways—where the agents of production and of growth and return were disavowed by the very process of postwar recovery they enabled. The artists discussed in this thesis turned to new forms of ‘spectral realism’ in order to represent this reality and challenge the givenness of postwar Japan’s successful recovery.

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Figures

Figure 1: Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959. Three stills showing the transition from footage of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum to footage from Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima (1953).

Figure 2: Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959. Three stills showing examples of glass and acrylic surfaces at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

274

Figure 3: Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959. Closeup on a framed photograph in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

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Figure 4: Teshigahara Hiroshi, Pitfall, 1962. Newsreel footage of a mining accident.

Figure 5: Teshigahara Hiroshi, Pitfall, 1962. Newsreel footage of a mining accident.

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Figure 6: Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959. Footage of a May Day protest in 1952.

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Figure 7: Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959. Footage from the documentary The Effects of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1946), directed by Itō Sueo.

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Figure 8: Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 1952

279

Figure 9 : Teshigahara Hiroshi, Pitfall, 1962

Figure 10: Teshigahara Hiroshi, Pitfall, 1962

280

Figure 11: Teshigahara Hiroshi, Pitfall, 1962

Figure 12: Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959. Two stills.

281

Figure 13: Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959. Six stills.

282

Figure 14: Charlotte Zwerin, Music for the Movies: Toru Takemitsu, 1995. Tōru Takemitsu with an unnamed assistant preparing a piano for Pitfall.

283