Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film Barbara E

GEOCRITICISM AND SPATIAL LITERARY STUDIES

Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film Barbara E. Thornbury Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies

Series Editor Robert T. Tally Jr. Texas State University San Marcos, TX, USA Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a new book series focusing on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years, and geocriticism, broadly conceived, has been among the more promising developments in spatially oriented literary studies. Whether focused on literary geography, cartography, geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more generally, geo- critical approaches enable readers to reflect upon the representation of space and place, both in imaginary universes and in those zones where fiction meets reality. Titles in the series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series disclose, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15002 Barbara E. Thornbury Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film Barbara E. Thornbury Temple University Philadelphia, PA, USA

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies ISBN 978-3-030-34275-3 ISBN 978-3-030-34276-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34276-0

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland For Don Series Editor’s Preface

The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship. Spatially oriented literary studies, whether operating under the banner of literary geography, literary cartography, geophilosophy, geopoetics, geocriticism, or the spatial humanities more generally, have helped to reframe or to transform contemporary criticism by focusing attention, in various ways, on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. Reflecting upon the representation of space and place, whether in the real world, in imaginary universes, or in those hybrid zones where fiction meets reality, scholars and critics working in spatial literary studies are helping to reori- ent literary criticism, history, and theory. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a book series presenting new research in this burgeon- ing field of inquiry. In exploring such matters as the representation of place in literary works, the relations between literature and geography, the historical transformation of literary and cartographic practices, and the role of space in critical theory, among many others, geocriticism and spatial literary studies have also developed interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary methods and practices, frequently making productive connections to architecture, art history, geography, history, philosophy, politics, social theory, and urban studies, to name but a few. Spatial criticism is not limited to the spaces of the so-called real world, and it sometimes calls into question any too-facile distinction between real and imaginary places, as it frequently investigates what Edward Soja has referred to as

vii viii SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE the “real-and-imagined” places we experience in literature as in life. Indeed, although a great deal of important research has been devoted to the literary representation of certain identifiable and well-known places (e.g., Dickens’s London, Baudelaire’s Paris, or Joyce’s Dublin), spatial critics have also explored the otherworldly spaces of literature, such as those to be found in myth, fantasy, science fiction, video games, and cyberspace. Similarly, such criticism is interested in the relationship between spatiality and such different media or genres as film or television, music, comics, computer programs, and other forms that may supplement, compete with, and potentially problematize literary representation. Titles in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the series reveal, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world. The concepts, practices, or theories implied by the title of this series are to be understood expansively. Although geocriticism and spatial literary studies represent a relatively new area of critical and scholarly investigation, the historical roots of spatial criticism extend well beyond the recent past, informing present and future work. Thanks to a growing critical awareness of spatiality, innovative research into the literary geography of real and imaginary places has helped to shape historical and cultural studies in ancient, medieval, early modern, and modernist literature, while a discourse of spatiality undergirds much of what is still understood as the postmodern condition. The suppression of distance by modern technology, transportation, and telecommunications has only enhanced the sense of place, and of displacement, in the age of globalization. Spatial criticism examines literary representations not only of places themselves, but of the experience of place and of displacement, while exploring the interrelations between lived experience and a more abstract or unrepresentable spatial network that subtly or directly shapes it. In sum, the work being done in geocriticism and spatial literary studies, broadly conceived, is diverse and far reaching. Each volume in this series takes seriously the mutually impressive effects of space or place and artistic representation, particularly as these effects manifest themselves in works of literature. By bringing the spatial and geographical concerns to bear on their scholar- Series Editor’s Preface ix ship, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series seek to make possible different ways of seeing literary and cultural texts, to pose novel questions for criticism and theory, and to offer alternative approaches to literary and cultural studies. In short, the series aims to open up new spaces for critical inquiry.

San Marcos, TX, USA Robert T. Tally Jr. Acknowledgments

First, I would like to thank Robert T. Tally Jr., editor of Palgrave Macmillan’s Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series, for his interest in my work. I would also like to express my appreciation to all of the Temple University students in my courses who have thoughtfully and enthusiasti- cally studied and discussed with me the texts that I talk about in this book. For stimulating my thinking about cultural representations of Tokyo, my special thanks go to Evelyn Schulz, my fellow co-editor of and con- tributor to Tokyo: Memory, Imagination, and the City (2018), as well as to our co-contributors—Jeffrey Angles, Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt, Mark Pendleton, Bruce Suttmeier, Angela Yiu, and Eve Zimmerman. A sabbatical leave granted by Temple University and funding from Temple’s College of Liberal Arts supported my research—for which I would like to say thank you. I am grateful, too, to Benjamin Fraser, editor of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, for permission to use (in revised form in Chap. 3 of this book) an article that was previously published in Volume 1 of the journal. Finally, my gratitude goes to Evelyn Schulz, Angela Yiu, Michael P. Cronin, and the anonymous reviewer for their very helpful suggestions and to the librarians at Temple University, Princeton University, and Waseda University for all of their help in tracking down the materials I needed.

xi Japanese Names, Terms, Titles, and Dates of Publication/Release

All of the novels and short stories used in this project, originally published in Japan, are available in libraries and bookstores in English- language translation. And, all of the films, originally released in Japan, have been commercially distributed on DVD or via streaming services with English-language subtitles. Throughout this book, novels, short stories, and films are generally referred to by their English-language translated titles. When a literary work is mentioned for the first time, the publication date of the translation is given, followed by the title of the work in Japanese and the original date of publication in Japan. For films, the Japanese title and the date of release in Japan are given. Citations of translated literary material include the date when the text was published in translation followed in brackets by the date when the work was published in Japan. For the sake of consistency and to avoid confusion, I have followed the Western naming convention (given name followed by family name) found in most of the translated texts. Macrons mark long vowels in Japanese names and terms. The exceptions are when material in which macrons were not used is directly quoted and in the case of common place names (such as Tokyo), unless the place name appears in quoted Japanese- language material or in the Japanese-language title of a work. In addition to the material in the list of references at the end of the volume, the Appendix provides information on the Japanese-language editions of the novels and short stories and on the Japanese release of the films discussed in Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film. In the case of short

xiii xiv Japanese Names, Terms, Titles, and Dates of Publication/Release stories, the original Japanese publication date used in citations sometimes refers to the appearance of the work in a literary journal. The Appendix supplies the title and issue date of the journal while also including biblio- graphic information that will enable Japanese-language readers to access the original work in published book form. Praise for Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film

“Mapping Tokyo presents an astute selection and brilliant analysis of the international explosion in literature and cinema featuring Tokyo in recent decades. By deploying the metaphor of mapping, understood as both a cartographic negotiation of the city and a tool for analysing literary and cinematic texts, Barbara Thornbury has provided a significant intervention into how we understand the representational space of Tokyo.” —Mark Pendleton, Lecturer in Japanese Studies, The University of Sheffield, UK Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Translation, Subtitling, and Tokyo Placemaking 47

3 Gender and Mobility: Tracking Fictional Characters on Real Monorails, Trains, Subways, and Trams 69

4 Coordinates of Home and Community 93

5 Locating the Outsider Inside Tokyo 129

6 Tokyo Cartographies of Mystery and Crime 167

7 Conclusion: Flux and Fluidity and World Literature and Film 197

Appendix: Annotated List of the Translated and Subtitled Works Discussed in Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film 207

References 213

Index 227

xvii List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 An address plate attached to a utility pole in Setagaya Ward 4 Fig. 1.2 Consulting a map-board on a Ginza sidewalk 5 Fig. 1.3 A map in front of a police substation at Ōtsuka railway station 6 Fig. 1.4 Consulting a map in Iidabashi Station 7 Fig. 1.5 Printed maps of various sizes free for the taking in a Tokyo subway station 8

xix CHAPTER 1

Introduction

“I had bought maps first thing” (2002 [1996], 244), the narrator of Mayumi Inaba’s short story “Morning Comes Twice a Day” (2002, “Asa ga nido kuru” 1996) tells readers at the outset. “A booklet of maps of metropolitan Tokyo arranged by ward. I didn’t know where I should go, so I unhurriedly leafed through the maps page by page. … [T]he names of districts I had never heard of, the amenities, hospitals, the libraries in each ward, the names of the art museums assailed my eyes. The labyrinthine roads ran on from top to bottom, meshes in a net” (ibid.).1 The narrator, a young, self-reliant woman employed at a publishing house, turns to maps as she seeks housing with reasonable rent for a person accompanied by a pet. Rejected because of her cat by landlords holding the keys to desirable dwellings, she ends up stretching her budget and buying an apartment in a high-rise building near Shinagawa Station in south-central Tokyo. “The owner of a condominium, no matter how small the unit, seemed to enjoy an extraterritoriality that others could not violate” (ibid., 247), she comes to realize as she finally acquires a place of her own on the city map. This book is about the many ways that late twentieth- and early twenty- first-century fiction and film from Japan literally and figuratively map Tokyo. “Analysis of the formations and functions of the illusory power of representation is one of the ways in which scholars from literary, film and cultural studies can contribute to the new understandings of space and spatiality,” Maria Balshaw and Liam Kennedy write in their introduction

© The Author(s) 2020 1 B. E. Thornbury, Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34276-0_1 2 B. E. THORNBURY to Urban Space and Representation (2000, 4). The novels, stories, and films that I discuss are part of the flow of Japanese-language texts being translated into English (or, in the case of film, subtitled in English) and circulated outside of Japan. They are works that describe, define, and reflect on Tokyo urban space—and, in so doing, convey compelling images of and perspectives on life there. The material originally won recognition in Japan from book and magazine publishers, film distributors, and, above all, readers and audiences. Much of it also garnered the acclaim of critics and prize-granting entities.2 Its circulation in professionally translated and subtitled English-language versions helps validate its inclusion in lists of world literature and world film3—and helps ensure its accessibility to the primarily anglophone readers of this study. In analyzing representations of space and place (real, imagined, and real-and-imagined, to borrow the phrasing of Edward Soja [1996]) in fiction and film, I align Mapping Tokyo with the well-established and dynamic field of spatial literary and film studies. The temporal has ceded its former dominance. As Robert T. Tally Jr. notes, “slowly, and picking up pace especially after the Second World War, space began to reassert itself in critical theory, rivalling if not overtaking time in the significance it was accorded by critics and theorists” (2013, 3).4 When it comes to cities in particular, what scholars call the “spatial turn” in the humanities offers “renewed insights into our knowledge of the development of urban modernity and modern subjectivity” (Hallam 2010, 278). Literature and film are recognized as significant components of what James Donald refers to as “the interaction of inextricably entwined realities” that determine how cities are experienced and understood (2000, 47).5 I follow Tally’s lead in regarding mapping as “the most significant figure” in spatial literary and film studies—as he says, “partly because of its direct applicability to the current crisis of representation often cited by theorists of globalization or postmodernity, but also because of the ancient and well-known connections between cartographic and narrative discourse. To draw a map is to tell a story, in many ways, and vice versa” (2013, 4). There are scholars who take the position that the study of space in fiction and film may best be left to practitioners of geographic information system (GIS) technologies—experts in the production of digitally based interactive maps.6 However, in the humanities (where my project resides), mapping, as Sébastien Caquard succinctly puts it, “refers to a broader range of concepts and practices” than the scientific cartographer’s “specific set of conventions and techniques” (2011, 224). My project 1 INTRODUCTION 3 takes advantage of what David Cooper and Gary Priestnall call “the helpful malleability of the mapping metaphor” (2011, 250).7 Although I use mapping as a general term denoting a multifaceted mode of literary and cinematic analysis that gives precedence to space and place, I set the stage below by emphasizing that mapping also applies to ways in which Tokyo fiction and film function cartographically in a literal sense.

Tokyo’s Culture of Mapping The conceptual starting point of this study is what I call Tokyo’s culture of mapping: the widespread and shared practices of mapmaking and map reading across all domains of life in that city. There is abundant evidence of such practices, first of all, in the street-level physical environment. Even if it cannot be statistically proven to surpass other conurbations in this respect, Tokyo is notably a city of maps. In such a massive and massively complex metropolis8—where streets do not necessarily have names and neighboring buildings may not be numbered consecutively—address plates are attached to utility poles, and map-boards are placed at frequent intervals along sidewalks to help guide pedestrians to their destinations.9 At neighborhood police substations, where uniformed officers can be counted on to give directions, a detailed map of the local precinct and its surrounding area is often posted near the front entrance. To guide customers and clients to shops, restaurants, and offices, maps are worked into the layout of business cards and advertisements.10 Marvels of graphic design, maps of Tokyo’s intricately connected train and subway lines are displayed on station walls, in train cars, and, of course, in digital form online.11 Freshly printed paper versions are free for the taking from racks in station concourses. Even in this era of GPS-enabled smartphones, news- stands and bookstore shelves are still stocked with up-to-date books of street and transit-system maps (Figs. 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5).12 Paul Waley has remarked on Tokyo’s “exceptionally rich topographical language” and its “deeply topophilic sensibility.” He cites as an example the array of names for the passenger ferry lines that once crisscrossed Tokyo’s principal waterway, the Sumida River, which runs through the eastern side of the city to Tokyo Bay. Each ferry-line name was “a reposi- tory” of cultural and historical associations (Waley 2003, 208 and 228).13 This “deeply topophilic sensibility” goes hand in hand with Tokyo’s culture of mapping—and, by extension, with what can be recognized as the city’s deeply cartographic sensibility. 4 B. E. THORNBURY

Fig. 1.1 An address plate attached to a utility pole in Setagaya Ward

That said, Tokyo’s culture of mapping signifies more than just a profound attachment to place or an affinity for maps as urban artifacts. A key point of this study is that Tokyo’s culture of mapping should also be viewed as a counter-response to the sense of insecurity and disconnection that pervades life in the real, imagined, and real-and-imagined city. In a book of essays on cinema and urban space, Stephen Barber pinpoints the twentieth-century historical underpinnings of this feeling of Tokyo unease: “Rendered in film, that city forms an unhinged and unliveable space … carry[ing] the historical residue of disparate but enduring variants of Tokyo that disappeared from the same site—the city flattened by the great 1 INTRODUCTION 5

Fig. 1.2 Consulting a map-board on a Ginza sidewalk earthquake of 1923, or that incinerated by the firestorms of 1945. Those virtual, destroyed cities inflect the contemporary one as phantom pres- ences” (Barber 2002, 143). He cites the 1995 sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo subway system as an assault “[m]ore intimate to the present” that “infuse[s] the place with the potential for its population to be randomly decimated” (ibid., 144). To extend Barber’s timeline to the present: the devastating March 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear meltdown in northeastern Japan literally shook the residents of Tokyo, leaving them with a persistent, low-grade “fever” of anxiety and fear. And, even putting aside the 6 B. E. THORNBURY

Fig. 1.3 A map in front of a police substation at Ō tsuka railway station historical-scale cataclysmic events, there is a growing, generalized “sense of being out of place, out of sorts, disconnected,” as Anne Allison (2013, 14) writes in Precarious Japan. Street-level manifestations include the “string of violent attacks, all random and conspicuously public, [that have] plagued Tokyo” (ibid., 3) in recent years. Still seared into the public’s memory is the image of the twenty-five-year-old man who killed seven people in broad daylight in Akihabara, the busy commercial area packed with computer and videogame retailers.14 Copycat acts ensued— “[r]andom attacks on strangers by people desperately disconnected” (ibid.). Deployed in response, mapping helps impart a sense of predict- ability, stability, and placeness. With a map in hand, you can figure out where you are. A map, as critical geographers such as J.B. Harley stress, may also be an instrument of control, a way for governments (the main mapmakers) and other powerful entities to demarcate space and dictate how it is to be understood and used (see, for example, Harley 1989). But, for the 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Fig. 1.4 Consulting a map in Iidabashi Station average individual going about his or her daily life, the political aspects of the mapmaking enterprise are not a direct concern: maps are “just” essential tools for secure and efficient navigation. The iconographic Tokyo transit system maps are primary examples. They are replete with the reassuring promise of universal, unfettered spatial mobility and access across the length and breadth of the metropolitan area—even if for one reason or another that promise in the end turns out to be illusory. At the midpoint of Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Tsukuru realizes that he “could go anywhere he liked. … But he couldn’t think of any place to go” (2014 [2013], 159). His solution is to head to Tokyo Station. But, rather than actually get on a train when he arrives there, Tsukuru—whose career is designing train stations—“sat down on a bench on the Yamanote line platform. He spent over an hour watching as, almost every minute, another line of green train cars pulled up to the platform, disembarking hordes of people and hurriedly swallowing up countless more … the endless repetition 8 B. E. THORNBURY

Fig. 1.5 Printed maps of various sizes free for the taking in a Tokyo subway station enthrall[ing] him as always” (ibid., 160). At that moment in Tsukuru’s life, all he could do was watch the movement of others who “have places to go, places to return to” (ibid.).15

Mapping in Tokyo Fiction and Film Fiction and film constitute a significant domain in which Tokyo’s culture of mapping finds expression. In the pages that follow, I show some of the ways in which Tokyo novels, short stories, and films are literally carto- 1 INTRODUCTION 9 graphic. “In a world in which the real is no longer a given,” Peta Mitchell has written, “the map becomes a key metaphor for the negotiation (physical and cognitive) required in order to derive meaning from our environment” (2008, 3). The potency of the map metaphor is amplified in the many works of the imagination that are themselves sites of map reading and mapmaking. The process is ongoing. “The mapping project of narrative,” as Tally observes, “is necessarily incomplete, provisional, and tenta- tive” (2013, 53). The first section below gives examples of fiction and film that incorporate references to actual Tokyo street and transit maps. I then turn to instances of fiction and film as mapmaking texts—works that verbally or cinematically track characters’ point-to-point movement through Tokyo urban space.

Reading Maps The ability to read a map and extract the information embedded within it can be a prerequisite to finding a satisfactory place to call home in the city. It is a skill possessed by the narrator of Inaba’s story “Morning Comes Twice a Day,” as illustrated in the excerpt quoted at the beginning of this introduction. The same maps that the woman consults in order to find a new home where she and her cat can live in central Tokyo also contain threads that connect back to their previous abode in the city’s western suburbs. When the aging cat suddenly disappears one day and the narrator is desperate,

I could only conclude now that the cat had intentionally gone missing. Disgusted with life in a condo, had she taken it in her head to go back to Musashino? Were that the case, where might she be now? Did she know in which direction to go? From Ō saki to Gotanda, then Meguro. I visualized the terrain in the booklet of maps of Tokyo wards that I had once gazed at with such fascination. From there she would go north to the road to Itsukaichi. Filling my feverish mind with the map, I traced the route the cat would have to take. Could she actually be walking in the right direction, the direction to Musashino I had shown her from the stair landing? That way, long time ago. Now, here. (Inaba 2002 [1996], 258)

The cat is soon discovered having merely wandered into the apartment of an upstairs neighbor, who sheltered the animal until finding out to whom it belonged. Reunited, the narrator and her cat continue growing older 10 B. E. THORNBURY together in their Shinagawa condo, the place where—as long as good fortune allows—they will remain close to each other without any further need of maps to find their way home. Characters who read maps may be rewarded with ideas and inspiration, such as those in Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X. Riding a subway train in the course of investigating the murder of Yasuko Hanaoka’s ex-husband, detective Kusanagi “glanced up at the subway map above the door. Think I’ll make a stop in Hamacho,” he suddenly decides (Higashino 2011 [2005], 165). Hamachō Station is near Benten-tei, the takeout bentō shop that employs Yasuko—about whom Kusanagi is rightly becoming increasingly suspicious.16 Later in the novel, Ishigami, the math teacher who is secretly in love with Yasuko (his next-door neighbor) and tries to do everything in his power to protect her and her daughter, informs the police that he lured Yasuko’s violent ex-husband to a deserted spot and murdered him there. Under the pretext of revealing Yasuko’s “new address” to her ex when he comes in search of her, Ishigami tells the officers, “I told him to wait while I went back into my room, looked at a map, and wrote down an address—the address of a water treatment facility” (ibid., 235). It was in that deserted location, as Ishigami later tells the police, that he ended the man’s life—and, indeed, that is where a man’s body does turn up. While maps in subway cars are the norm in any city, it is not surprising to still find, even in this digital age, a sheaf of maps ready at hand in Tokyo homes. Map-reading characters are potentially able to turn up sought-after links between time-present and time-past. There is a scene in Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s film Café Lumière (Kōhı ̄ jikō 2003) in which freelance writer Yōko unfurls an old map of Tokyo. She is on a quest to recuperate a segment of Tokyo’s (and Japan’s) historical memory by researching and writing about the life of Taiwan-born composer Wenye Jiang (1910–1983). Despite learning that the Ginza-neighborhood music café that Jiang frequented in the 1930s no longer exists, Yōko determinedly uses the map to help her locate where it used to be. Arriving at the spot amid the rush of Ginza traffic and pedestrians, she points her camera at the steel and concrete structure that now stands where the café once was. It is as if a phantom of the past will reveal itself in the photographic images that she captures, and thereby affirm the accuracy of the paper map. The link that the map-reading character finds may be to his own memories. When the narrator of Murakami’s novel A Wild Sheep Chase (1989, Hitsuji o meguru boken̄ 1982) is preparing to attend the funeral of a 1 INTRODUCTION 11 woman with whom he was once close, “I got out my map and marked the block in red. There were subway and train and bus lines everywhere, over- lapping like some misshapen spider web, the whole area a maze of narrow streets and drainage canals” (1989 [1982], 3). The woman had lived in Tokyo’s shitamachi. A multilayered space of stories and stories-within- stories, shitamachi is both a specific and nonspecific Tokyo geographical term that has its origin in Edo-period (1603–1868) nomenclature. Shitamachi was the appellation for the “downtown” districts in the city of Edo (renamed Tokyo in 1868) where commoners lived—as opposed to the “uptown,” yamanote, areas, where high-ranking samurai resided.17 As a geographic expression (rather than a singular location) embodying collective Tokyo memory (and, by extension, a space of neighborly connection and community belongingness), shitamachi is an appropriate image for the first pages ofA Wild Sheep Chase—a work that traces a man’s quest to understand himself through people he knew in the past. Although “I got out my map” is an adequate translation, what Murakami wrote in the Japanese edition of the novel is more complex—and, from the perspective of this study, more interesting. The line “Boku wa Tōkyō-to no kubun-chizu o hiraki” (Murakami 1990 [1982], 14) conveys that the narrator opened a multipage booklet of maps (that, as a Tokyo resident, he naturally kept handy) delineating each of central Tokyo’s twenty-three wards. As detailed as the maps in the booklet were, the shitamachi area appears to him as a “maze.” It is a foreshadowing of the psychological maze in which the narrator eventually finds himself—a maze through which no existing map can make navigation possible. Women are the intended readers of the maps the police hand out to passersby at Chitose Karasuyama Station in Shūichi Yoshida’s novel Parade (2014, Parēdo 2002). The maps document the kind of danger women instinctively fear at night, even in a city like Tokyo with its reputation for safety. Apartment-mates Koto and Mirai are gripped by a sense of unease when they look over the handout they are given: “It was a printed official warning about the serial attacks on young women in the neighborhood. Be Careful When You Walk Alone at Night! it said. The paper had a map of the area around the station, with X’s marking the places where the women had been attacked” (Yoshida 2014 [2002], 130). Mirai immediately becomes afraid that the assailant may be Satoru, the young guy who recently began staying at their apartment. She is wrong on that count, but her guess that the attacker is among the three guys with whom she and Koto share the apartment turns out to be shockingly correct. 12 B. E. THORNBURY

Reading a map can enable contact between people who are in close physical proximity but inhabit altogether different worlds. In Nao-cola Yamazaki’s story “Dad, I Love You” (2015, “Otosan̄ daisuki” 2009), the middle-aged male narrator who works for a market research company calls on a Chinese woman who is struggling to keep her online clothing store afloat in Tokyo’s hypercompetitive business environment: “At four, I went out to visit a Chinese-run company out in Ogawa [in the municipality of Kodaira in the western part of Tokyo]. It was within walking distance, so I printed out a map from the internet and looked at that as I went” (Yamazaki 2015 [2009], 87). Having just experienced the dissolution of his marriage, the narrator is in a fragile emotional state. He bonds, if briefly, with the woman—having discovered that she, too, is suffering psychologically. Characters may read maps to attain—and even help others attain—an autonomous mobility. Back home after surreptitiously following her husband Ryō to his girlfriend’s apartment (so she can pinpoint the location of the couple’s trysts), Mizue in Noboru Tsujihara’s story “My Slightly Crooked Brooch” (2011, “Chotto yuganda watashi no burōchi” 2004) “spread out a map of Setagaya Ward on the coffee table and marked the apartment complex in red” (2011 [2004], 216). The map holds all of the information she needs to singlehandedly subvert the rules of her husband’s game. Similarly, the Tamiya family’s young son Kōta, in Agata Hikari’s story “A Family Party” (1991, “Hōmu-pātı”̄ 1986) wants to ride his bicycle from the Tamiyas’s new home in Yokohama all the way to the central Tokyo neighborhood where they used to live and where they are holding a family reunion at a hotel. In preparation, Kōta and his father “studied the map, marked the route with red pencil and measured the distance” (Hikari 1991 [1986], 89). The boy arrives safely, but not before becoming overwhelmed at the sight of the massive high-rise buildings that were transforming the appearance of the West Shinjuku area, where he is headed. On the way, Kōta phones for directions. His mother, the story’s narrator, relates that Kōta’s father “then asked for a map, and when I handed him a map of the street[s] around the hotel, he continued to give directions on the phone” (ibid., 117). No longer residing in central Tokyo, Kōta and his family realize that there is no easy way to reconnect with the rapidly changing urban landscape. Likewise, Masako and Kuniko in Natsuo Kirino’s novel OUT (2003, AUTO 1997) are among those trapped by life’s circumstances, but the cars they own and drive—and the maps they read to get where they want to go—give them at least a fleeting measure of autonomy. When the deeply 1 INTRODUCTION 13 indebted Kuniko, knowing that loan sharks will soon find her, decides to seek out Masako for money, “[c]limbing … into her car, she unfolded a large map and held it up with one hand as she pulled … onto the main road” (Kirino 2003 [1997], 83). In turn, when Masako needs to find Kuniko, the coworker who gives her Kuniko’s address “watched as Masako seemed to unfold a map in her head and make plans for the morning” (ibid., 131). Later, settling into the driver’s seat of her car, Masako “used the map she kept in the car to locate Kuniko’s apartment complex in the neighboring town of Kodaira” (ibid., 146). Map-reading can paradoxically provide proof of non-belonging, as it does for the young office worker named Fujii, the narrator of Shiina’s “The Yellow Tent on the Roof,” in a segment of the story already alluded to in note 9. When a fire at his apartment building in the Kinshichō neighborhood leaves Fujii homeless, he gathers up his belongings and heads unannounced to his friend’s apartment in Tsukishima, where towering condo buildings standing on reclaimed land at the mouth of the Sumida River cast their shadow over old-fashioned, single-family homes. Entertaining his girlfriend, the guy is unwilling to let Fujii past the front door—although he readily lends him the camping equipment Fujii requests as a last resort. Fujii thinks that he might find a park in which to pitch his tent: “I turned down some narrow streets at random. The occasional car went by, but had I wanted to ask for directions there was no one around.” He is able to consult a map of the local area posted on a neighborhood notice board—which he illuminates with his cigarette lighter. “The locations of all the different shops were written in tiny kanji characters, but there was no sign of a park” (Shiina 2004 [2000], 133). Reading the map emphasizes to Fujii that he does not have a reason to be there, that he does not belong. As if to further drive home the point, a policeman on patrol suspiciously eyes the business-suit-attired Fujii as he drags along an unwieldy assortment of luggage and camping equipment in the dark of night. Fujii takes the hint and leaves the area. Maps may lead to new ways of looking at a familiar cityscape. In Hino’s Isle of Dreams, Shōzo Sakai—who has spent his career helping erect Tokyo’s skyscrapers—is suddenly moved to spend his free time exploring the reclaimed lands of Tokyo Bay:

Once more taking out his map of the districts bordering Tokyo Bay, Shozo was astonished at the extent of the reclaimed land. … His work led him to assume that he knew the streets and neighborhoods of Tokyo. … Yet the bay 14 B. E. THORNBURY

was for him a complete blind spot. Allowing his eye to wander the entire map of the city, including the bay, he was surprised to see how deeply into the heart of the metropolis the water penetrated. … It seemed to Shozo as though land reclamation had advanced, quite beyond the reality of the capital’s increasing refuse outflow, as though some immense and invisible force had suddenly begun filling in what the water had once gouged away. (Hino 2009 [1985], 24)

The city’s enormous quantity of consumer-generated garbage, mixed in with soil and rocks, provided the infill to widen the shoreline of Tokyo Bay and create new islands connected to the rest of the city by a web of bridges and tunnels. Maps are instrumental in leading Shōzo to infer that there are forces shaping the city that are not the product of civil engineering alone. The literary and cinematic map-reading may be more abstract. In the opening lines of the novel After Dark (2007, Afutādāku 2004), Murakami animates an imagined panoptic map of Tokyo using words that suggest a director’s instructions to a cinematographer:

Eyes mark the shape of the city. Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature—or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. (Murakami 2007 [2004], 3)18

The camera-like eyes of the bird are those of an all-seeing cartographer trying to represent—in other words, trying to map—the “creature” that is the city. Consumers of fiction and film are sometimes drawn in as participating map-readers. In Masayuki Suo’s filmShall We Dance? (Shall We Dansu? 1996), a large map of the Tokyo-area transit system is displayed on the wall of the dance studio where Sugiyama, the section chief of his company’s accounting department, begins taking lessons in an effort to get closer to the beautiful instructor named Mai.19 It was while riding the Sōbu line on his long evening commute back into the suburbs that he happened to look out the window when the train made a brief station stop, and caught a glimpse of the Kishikawa Dance Studio—one of those random sightings that are an integral part of life in the city. He was immediately drawn to 1 INTRODUCTION 15

Mai as she pensively gazed out of the studio window. After a long day at work, Sugiyama was exhausted and irritated. Progressing along the career track and in his personal life (he is married, with a teenage daughter), he has taken the next expected step: the purchase of a single-family house made possible by a mortgage that will chain him to his job for decades to come. To get a desirable place with a small backyard, he has to live way out in the distant suburbs—requiring a long train ride to his office near the Sumida River, to judge by the view outside of the window near his desk. The house is not even close to the train station: he needs to cover the remaining distance by bicycle. The map that hangs on the wall of the dance studio communicates to viewers of the film that Tokyo holds the potential for alternative paths, although finding the right one (in both a literal and figurative sense) may not be easy or straightforward. In similar fashion, readers of the translated English edition of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage are suggestively positioned as map-readers by the very design of the book. The hardback cover design by Chip Kidd, whose skillful packaging of Murakami’s translated novels has contributed to the author’s global renown, incorporates segments of a Tokyo-area transit map. A bit of the map peeks out through cutouts in the dust jacket and decorates the first page of every chapter, and more complete sections of the map cover two preliminary pages of the novel.20 Tsukuru tells his girlfriend Sara that, rather than trying to develop new friendships when he first arrived in Tokyo as a student, he became absorbed by the metropolitan area’s network of trains: “I enjoyed my days. The railroad lines in Tokyo are like a web spread out over the city, with countless stations. Just seeing them took a lot of time” (Murakami 2014 [2013], 30). The transit system—represented on countless maps—gives Tsukuru literal mobility. What he now seeks is a sustained personal connection that will give meaning to that system by providing him with a place to go and a route to follow.

Mapping Movement Point to Point Tokyo fiction and film also function as mapmaking texts as they chart characters’ point-to-point movement within the geographically real city. “[T]he technology of the moving image is, in part, an advanced carto- graphical apparatus, combining the act of location and the enabling and tracking of motion and locomotion” (Webber 2008, 2)—an observation that can also apply to the cartographically descriptive power of words on a 16 B. E. THORNBURY page. The opening scene of The Devotion of Suspect X, for example, gives the exact route Ishigami takes as he walks from his apartment to the school where he teaches—which on that day incorporated a detour to the bentō shop where Yasuko is employed: “At 7:35 a.m. Ishigami left his apartment. … A short way to the south, about twenty yards, ran Shin-Ohashi Road. From that intersection the road ran east into the Edogawa district, west toward Nihonbashi. Just before Nihonbashi, it crossed the Sumida River at the Shin-Ohashi Bridge” (Higashino 2011 [2005], 1). Having noticed on his way out the door that Yasuko’s bicycle was not in its usual spot at the apartment building—a sign that she had already left for work— “Ishigami walked south to the red light at the intersection, then he turned right toward Shin-Ohashi Bridge” (ibid.). Crossing the river, “he took a set of stairs that led from the foot of the bridge down to the Sumida” (ibid., 2) and walked along the river, passing the vinyl-covered cardboard shelters erected by homeless people. “At the foot of Kiyosu Bridge, Ishigami climbed the stairs back up to the road. The school was across the bridge from here, but he turned and walked in the opposite direction” (ibid., 4) toward Benten-tei, where he purchased his noontime meal-to- go from Yasuko. This sort of casual and brief encounter with Yasuko is all Ishigami can hope for, since he knows that such an attractive woman would hardly be likely to reciprocate the feelings he has for her. “Boxed lunch in hand Ishigami walked out of the store. This time, he headed straight for Kiyosu Bridge, his detour to Benten-tei finished” (ibid., 5). Here, geographically precise, point-to-point mapping underscores the attention to detail that is a defining characteristic of mathematician Ishigami. Moreover, like Ishigami himself, the part of Tokyo’s shitamachi in which Higashino situates Suspect X is relatively nondescript. In this section of the city, there is little more than the Sumida River and a couple of its bridges to serve as topographic reference points. Director Takeshi Kitano, on the other hand, links the characters of his filmKikujiro (Kikujirō no natsu 1999) with Asakusa, the instantly recog- nizable bright heart of Tokyo’s shitamachi. In the film’s opening frames, the camera tracks the young boy Masao and his friend Yūji as they walk home from elementary school on the last day before summer vacation. They follow a route that takes them across the grounds of Asakusa’s landmark Sensōji Temple, out through its Nitenmon gate, and over to the Sumida River. Masao’s journey continues across Sakurabashi Bridge until he reaches the old, but well-kept, house on the quiet residential street where he lives with his grandmother. Kikujiro’s shitamachi may have its 1 INTRODUCTION 17 dark edges—personified by the bullies and others who would prey on children—but the film’s point-to-point mapping immediately establishes Masao as a boy who can securely move about a sizable sector of the city on his own, occasionally helped by a community of adults willing to keep an eye out for him. In director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s filmNobody Knows (Dare mo shiranai 2004), by contrast, a Kikujiro-like community of adults willing to protect the children in their midst is starkly absent. Junior-high-age Akira, the eldest of four children, must quickly learn to navigate the streets and walkways of the new neighborhood into which his single mom has just moved the family. The mother leaves Akira to care for himself and the younger children while she is out working and socializing. Kore-eda does not specify the exact Tokyo location, but it is a densely populated residential area with a view of the Haneda Airport monorail line overhead. On the very day of their arrival, Akira is sent to fetch the older of his two sisters from the nearby train station. When his mother asks him if he knows the way, he immediately says “yes”—his first task having been to internalize the layout of the neighborhood’s streets and walkways. It is essential knowledge for a boy who is forced by his mother to take on an adult’s responsibilities. He must be able to get the food and other supplies he and his sisters and brother need to survive and even to pay the family’s monthly rent and utility bills. Over the course of the film, the camera follows Akira as he repeatedly makes his way from the family’s residence in a down-at-the-heels apartment building to the neighborhood’s busy shopping area—and, his chores done, back again. He passes along one of Tokyo’s cement-banked waterways and traverses building-lined roads and walkways used by numerous pedestrians who are going about their routine activities, and have no reason to pay attention to him. In short order, the children are left totally on their own by their mother—a woman who makes yet another attempt to forge a relationship that she believes will allow her to fulfill her dreams of love and marriage, albeit this time with a man who apparently would reject her if he knew she already had children. A convenience store, with its ready-to-eat food and snacks, everyday supplies, and items like toys and manga for children, becomes the center of Akira’s existence outside of the apartment. The manager of the store, who sees Akira on a daily basis, represents all of the adults who are oblivious to children in need. Only the store’s teenage and young-twenties part-timers are aware of Akira’s plight, and try to help out in the small ways they can. 18 B. E. THORNBURY

Point-to-point mapping can also serve as a way to present a character to readers as a fully functioning adult urban resident—even one suffering in isolation like Ryōtarō in Tomotake Ishikawa’s novel Gray Men (2013, Gurei men 2012). On a day when Ryōtarō is scheduled to work behind the counter at a high-end jewelry show taking place in the ballroom of a hotel near the building that houses Japan’s legislature (Diet), he “left [his] apartment at 2 p.m. and began his journey to the National Diet train station. He took the [JR Keihin-Tōhoku Line] and then changed to the [Tokyo Metro Chiyoda Line] before arriving at the National Diet and going into the Grand Capital Hotel just across from the station” (Ishikawa 2013 [2012], 21).21 Although bullied and driven to despair by coworkers who demand that he obey their orders, the shred of agency that Ryōtarō retains is manifested in the confidence with which he navigates the city via its train and subway lines. Similarly, Café Lumière projects Yōko as a woman whose life is defined by her mobility in Tokyo—as well as her rich network of social connections there. Throughout Hou’s film the camera follows Yōko as she makes her way around the city—onto the Toden Arakawa streetcar line at Kishibojin-mae Station near her apartment, then transferring at Ō tsuka Station to the Yamanote line and, step by step, on to destinations such as the Jinbōchō neighborhood, where she does her work at one of the cafés there and meets with friends. Early on, a journey by rail takes her outside of the city (to her family home in the town of Yoshii in Gunma Prefecture, northwest of Tokyo)—and, again, the camera follows her as she goes from Jinbōchō to Nishi Nippori Station, where earlier in the day she had left her luggage in a coin locker in preparation for the trip out of town. She deftly transfers from train line to train line until finally arriving at the small station out in the countryside where her father waits to pick her up. She is a woman who prizes her mobility and autonomy. Mapping point to point in “My Slightly Crooked Brooch” marks the egotistical desires of Mizue’s husband Ryō. Tsujihara precisely charts the journey Ryō makes from the house where he lives with Mizue, about an hour south of Tokyo in Kanagawa Prefecture, to the apartment that he temporarily shares with his lover Maiko in the middle of Tokyo: “The [Tōkaidō line] train thundered its way across the Tama River. Ryō changed to the Yamanote line at Shinagawa and got off at Shibuya. He went underground and rode the Tōkyū Den-en-toshi line to Sangen-Jaya, navigating the undulating subterranean passage until he reached the station at Setagaya” (Tsujihara 2011 [2004], 207). He then transfers to the tram: 1 INTRODUCTION 19

“He got off at the third stop, went through the small railroad crossing, and turned left onto the first street. … The road zigzagged, and at last Maiko’s apartment building came into view” (ibid.). Mizue’s assertive response to her husband’s infidelity is depicted in a parallel way. Like a detective, she follows her husband to Maiko’s apartment, unseen: “[S]he arrived at Tokyo Station at around five o’clock and walked down a side street toward Ō temachi” (Tsujihara 2011 [2004], 215). When Ryō comes out of his office building, “[s]he narrowed the distance between them as he was waiting for the intersection light to change and followed him down into the subway, navigating the serpentine underground passage to Hanzōmon Station. She boarded the train bound for Chūō-Rinkan. … At Sangen-Jaya she transferred to the Setagaya line. She got off at the third stop” (ibid.). After obtaining the information she wants—the location of Maiko’s building—“Mizue turned on a heel and went back: from Shibuya to Shinagawa on the Yamanote line, from Shinagawa to Ō funa on the Yokosuka line, and lastly by monorail to Kataseyama Station for exactly one hour and forty minutes of travel” (ibid.). Mizue’s determination is highlighted in the description of her trip back to Maiko’s apartment the next day: “From the monorail she changed to the Yokosuka, Yamanote, Den-en-toshi, and Setagaya lines, and by noon was exiting the last station. She passed the railroad crossing and made her first left between the pharmacy and the convenience store. There was a bicycle shop, a laundromat, and a small playhouse. At last the road veered, and again she was standing in front of the same apartment complex as the night before” (ibid., 216). Mizue’s life has taken on new contours. She is a character through whom mapping becomes an act of resistance. In Murakami’s fiction, mapping point to point opens pathways between multilayered “real worlds.” Examples include the stories “The Second Bakery Attack” (1993, “Panya saishūgeki” 1985) and “All God’s Children Can Dance” (2002, “Kami no kodomotachi wa mina odoru” 1999) and the novels The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1997, Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru 1994–95) and 1Q84 (2011, 1Q84 2009–10). In the middle of the night, when most city residents are at home and asleep, the couple in search of an open bakery in “The Second Bakery Attack” drives “through the empty streets, from Yoyogi to Shinjuku, on to Yotsuya and Akasaka, Aoyama, Hiroo, Roppongi, Daikanyama, and Shibuya” (Murakami 1993 [1985], 44). Spurred on by their hunger and their intention to steal some bread, they are faced with the fact that “[l]ate-night Tokyo had all kinds of peo- 20 B. E. THORNBURY ple and shops, but no bakeries” (ibid.). Having entered the nighttime world of globalized Tokyo, they come upon one of the city’s twenty-four- hour McDonald’s restaurants—and that is where they wind up staging their attack. The regularity of Yoshiya’s point-to-point journey back and forth to work in “All God’s Children Can Dance” is broken one night when he catches sight of a man who he thinks might be his biological father, whom he has never met. Earlier that day, as usual, Yoshiya “left the condo in Asagaya that he rented with his mother, took the elevated Chuo Line to Yotsuya, transferred to the Marunouchi Line subway, took that as far as Kasumigaseki, transferred again, this time to the Hibiya Line subway, and got off at Kamiya-cho, the station closest to the small foreign travel guide publishing company where he worked” (Murakami 2002a [1999], 57). Headed back home later that day, he sees “the man with the missing earlobe”—his mother had told him that his father had a missing earlobe—“as he was transferring back the other way underground at Kasumigaseki” (ibid.). Sensing “with intuitive certainty” that the man is his father, Yoshiya follows him onto the Chiyoda subway line: “The train passed through the Shin-Ochanomizu, Sendagi, and Machiya subway stops before rising to the surface” (ibid., 67). When the man exits at an unidentified station on the outskirts of Tokyo and gets into a taxi, Yoshiya pays a cab driver to follow. In the dark of the night, they enter an area that is faceless, without landmarks. The journey ends on foot: Yoshiya follows the man into an alleyway that eventually opens onto a baseball field—a spatiotemporal connection to his childhood wish to be able to catch fly balls. The man has disappeared, but it is a journey that helps Yoshiya come to terms with the emptiness he feels inside him. The upset and confused Tōru in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle is searching for answers after his wife, Kumiko, has left him. Hanging out in a plaza near Shinjuku Station one day, he catches sight of a young man carrying a guitar case. It is the same man Tōru thinks he saw in a snack bar one day three years back when he was away on a business trip to Sapporo—the very day that Kumiko, at home in Tokyo, terminated her pregnancy. He spontaneously decides to follow the man “to see what happen[s]”—realizing as he walks along that the day he saw the man (which is to say, the day of his wife’s abortion)—was “when things started to change” (Murakami 1997 [1994–1995], 332). Striding away from the Shinjuku Station area, the man crosses the Ōme highway, heading in the direction of Yoyogi. He then crosses the tracks of the Odakyū 1 INTRODUCTION 21 train line, “through a block of shops, through a shrine, through a labyrinth of alleys” (ibid., 333). As Tōru follows, they get to “a hushed area of deserted streets lined with two-story wood-frame houses” (ibid.). Tōru becomes disoriented: “The geography of this place was lost on me. I couldn’t tell north from south. I guessed that I was in the triangular area between Yoyogi and Sendagaya and Harajuku, but I could not be sure” (ibid., 333). When the man enters an abandoned building, Tōru goes in too—and barely survives the vicious attack that ensues. In this passage, Murakami uses the actual geography of Tokyo to express Tōru’s psychological and physical entry into a space beyond what is familiar to him and verifiably exists. In 1Q84, Aomame embarks on a journey that begins in 1984 and ends in a new world that she dubs 1Q84. West to east, on the way to a hotel in Shibuya to murder a man (an act of revenge on behalf of the woman who suffered bone-shattering spousal abuse at his hands), she catches a taxi near Kinuta and instructs the driver to get on the elevated Metropolitan Expressway in Yōga. Outside of Sangenjaya they run into stalled traffic: “Only the side headed toward downtown Tokyo was tragically jammed. Inbound Expressway Number 3 would not normally back up at three in the afternoon, which was why Aomame had directed the driver to take it” (Murakami 2011 [2009–10], 8). The driver tells her that she can get on the Tōkyū train line, provided that she is willing to make her way down a nearby emergency staircase. She readily agrees to do it. Although almost trapped in a gated enclosure at the bottom of the staircase, she manages to get out onto the street: “The traffic on Route 246 was heavier than usual, probably because word had spread that an accident had stopped traffic on the parallel urban expressway. Aomame abandoned the idea of taking a cab and decided instead to take the Tokyu Shin-Tamagawa Line from a nearby station” (ibid., 41).22 Unbeknownst to her at that moment, she is now in the world of 1Q84. In detective fiction, such as Tetsuya Honda’s novelThe Silent Dead (2016, Sutoroberı ̄ naito 2006), the mapping of the police officers’ exact and efficient point-to-point passage through the complex Tokyo transit system stands in contrast to the far less straightforward process of gathering the information and evidence that are required in order to solve a case. Heading to a dental clinic in order to get records that may help reveal the identity of a murder victim, Lt. Reiko Himekawa and her partner “took the Joban line to Kitasenju, then switched to the Chiyoda line as far as Otemachi, then transferred again, to the Tozai line to Nakano” (Honda 22 B. E. THORNBURY

2016 [2006], 68). The coherent clarity of the vast and intricate Tokyo transit system stands as a spatial metaphor for the step-by-step, rational methodology that is the necessary tool for those seeking to untangle webs of mystery and crime. Finally, mapping point to point challenges simplistic notions of Tokyo as a spatial construct. In Hideo Furukawa’s story “Model T Frankenstein” (2015, “T-gata furankenshutain” 2010), the ferry on which the captive monster-man-goat is riding follows a route along the Izu island chain— starting from the southernmost island of Hachijōjima, where the goat had been living. The boat proceeds to Mikura Island, then on to Miyake Island. “Eventually the ferry enters the Uraga Channel. It passes through the straits between the Bōsō and Miura Peninsulas, now cut off from the Pacific by Tokyo Bay. … Time ticks on and before long the ferry reaches Takeshiba Pier in the innermost part of Tokyo Bay” (Furukawa 2015 [2010], 9–10). The story rests on the fact that Japan’s capital encompasses what Furukawa playfully calls a primary, secondary, and tertiary Tokyo. All of the islands along the ferry’s route are, in fact, administratively part of Tokyo. Primary Tokyo, to use Furukawa’s facetious ranking, comprises the twenty-three wards of the central city—what many people erroneously think of as Tokyo in its entirety. Secondary Tokyo is the Tama area that extends a considerable distance to the west of the central, downtown area and that contains its own quite densely populated cities that are also part of Tokyo. Tertiary Tokyo is made up of the Izu and Ogasawara chains that stretch southeastward into the Pacific Ocean. (See the section on Tokyo-area cultural references in Chap. 2 for additional information on Tokyo’s geography and population.) The narrator posits a visible and hidden Tokyo—the (visible) urban core and the (hidden) areas that include Tama to its west (all the way to the border with Yamanashi Prefecture) and the far-flung island chains in the Pacific Ocean.23 “Maps entice and fascinate,” as Anders Engberg-Pedersen has written, “and they whisper implicit promises of comprehension, of clarity, of transparency, and of order” (2017, 1). The examples given in these two sections on reading maps and mapping movement point to point are evidence of the centrality of mapping in Tokyo literature and film—which in myriad ways evinces, to repeat Engberg-Pedersen’s words, promises (both ful- filled and broken) of comprehension, clarity, transparency, and order for characters navigating their way through life in the city. 1 INTRODUCTION 23

The Transnational Circulation of Fiction and Film from Japan “The translation and circulation of literature today,” Rebecca Walkowitz has noted, “is historically unprecedented once we consider how quickly books enter various national markets, small and large, across several continents. … Contemporary novels enter new markets with exceptional speed” (2015, 2). And, film, as Abé Mark Nornes has pointed out, “was one of the first globalized art forms, if we mean by this a mode of production so thoroughly internationalized that it predicates itself on translation and traffic”—traffic being the term Nornes prefers to movement or circulation (2007, 4). Despite these upbeat assessments, only a fraction of work from Japan (and many other countries and cultures) is available in English- translated and English-subtitled versions, legal or otherwise.24 The Dalkey Archive Press, which, since the 1980s, has been publishing translated literature (including the work of writers from Japan), pulls no punches in this regard: “Much of the best international literature remains unknown and underrepresented in anglophone countries and the cultural richness and diversity of individual countries is not made available to English readers. It is often said that books in translation have no market and are therefore unprofitable—they pass through the market unnoticed and forgotten” (http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/national-literature-series/).25 Even so, it is the Anglo-American publishing industry that, as William Marling underscores, is “the engine of world publishing” and—thanks to a cohort of skilled translators and willing publishers—“at the center of World Literature” (2016, 3). The same can be said of the Anglo-American film distribution industry and its central place in a world cinema built on the talent and technology needed to offer audiences multilingual subtitles.

Japanese Literature in Translation: Funding Initiatives, Prizes, and Publishers Literature and film are important categories of “soft power”—the good- will generated by the cross-border influence of a nation’s culture and ideas.26 Initiatives to expand Japan’s soft power by financially supporting the translation and publication of literary works have included the Japanese Literature Publishing Project (JLPP), a program that ran from 2002 to 2015 under the auspices of the Japanese government’s Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunkachō). The goal of the JLPP was 24 B. E. THORNBURY

to promote awareness and assist in the publication of modern Japanese literature throughout the world. … Works of Japanese literature published in the past 150 years were selected by a committee of professionals, translated into various languages, and published overseas. By 2015, the JLPP had published approximately 180 translations into a suite of languages. … These titles were introduced to a worldwide readership through foreign publishers, and were donated by the JLPP to libraries, universities, and other overseas institutions, making them available for research and education. (http:// www.jlpp.go.jp/en/aboutus/index.html)27

Although financial support for translation and publication ended in 2015, since then JLPP “has concentrated its effort on fostering the next generation of literary translators by organizing events such as the JLPP International Translation Competition, literary translation workshops, and symposiums and forums on Japanese literature and translation” (ibid.). The Nippon Foundation’s Read Japan Program is another Japan-based translation and publishing initiative.28 In cooperation with the British Centre for Literary Translation, Read Japan has financed the publication of several issues of Words without Borders: The Online Magazine for International Literature that shine a spotlight on translated new fiction from Japan.29 The journal Monkey Business: New Writing from Japan, published annually from 2011 to 2017, was another project supported by Read Japan. Edited by Ted Goossen and Motoyuki Shibata, it was the “in- translation offspring” (to quote the journal’s website) of Shibata’s Tokyo- based journal MONKEY, which was produced from 2008 to 2011. (See https://www.newwritingfromjapan.com/?mc_cid=3c36199691&mc_ eid=bc42c9a9f5.) Monkey Business: New Writing from Japan featured translations of work by contemporary Japanese writers, although “modern classic Japan” (work by Doppo Kunikida, for example) was also included, as was a small selection of new American and British fiction (“The Monkey Speaks” 2014). Read Japan also provided funding, again with the cooperation of the British Centre for Literary Translation, for the publication by England’s Comma Press of The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction (2015)—an anthology of ten short stories by contemporary Japanese writers, edited by Michael Emmerich, Jim Hinks, and Masashi Matsuie.30 Prizes also promote translation. The Japan-based Ō e Prize for literature, awarded from 2007 through 2014, was established by Kōdansha publishers in honor of Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburō Ō e. The prize guaranteed translation and international publication of the selected work.31 The short-lived Golden Elephant Award, begun by Japan’s Ei Publishing 1 INTRODUCTION 25

Company in 2010, was given “to genre fiction with the potential to reach a global audience.”32 Perhaps the most prestigious prize in the field of English-language translation is the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (now called The International Booker Prize), which was launched in the early 1990s by the British newspaper The Independent to bring recognition to translated fiction published in Great Britain. Although there are as yet no first-prize winners from Japan, short-listed nominees have included, in 2015, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, the Murakami novel translated by Philip Gabriel; in 2014, Stephen Snyder’s translation of Yōko Ogawa’s Kamoku na shigai, midara na tomurai (published under the English title Revenge); and, in the same year, Allison Markin Powell’s translation of Hiromi Kawakami’s Sensei no kaban (published in the United States under the title Strange Weather in Tokyo).33 Prizes of a different sort also motivate translation. It is often the case that novels that have already garnered one or more of Japan’s top literary prizes are those selected for translation.34 And, once translated, they may become eligible for further accolades. In 2005, Higashino won the Naoki Prize (awarded semiannually since 1935 for the best work of popular literature by a new or early-career writer) for Yōgisha X no kenshin. The English-language version, The Devotion of Suspect X, was a finalist in 2012 for the Edgar Award for Best Novel35 and in 2012 for a Barry Award.36 In 1998, Kirino’s AUTO won Japan’s Grand Prix for Crime Fiction. The English-language translation, titled OUT, was a finalist in 2004 for an Edgar Award for Best Novel.37 Without a doubt, Yasunari Kawabata and Kenzaburō Ō e would not have won the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1968 and 1994, respectively) had their work not been translated into English. Haruki Murakami, who has long been rumored to be a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, counts among his international awards the Jerusalem Prize (2009)—also inconceivable in the absence of English translations.38 Several major commercial publishers in the United States commission and widely market translations of work by a handful of high-profile contemporary novelists from Japan whose fiction-in-translation is deemed profitable in the American market. Examples of such companies and writers on their lists include Alfred A. Knopf and Vintage (divisions of Random House), publishers of Murakami, Kirino, and Yoshida; Grove Press (a division of Grove Atlantic), publisher of Ō e and Sayaka Murata39; and Minotaur Books (a division of St. Martin’s Press), publisher of Higashino.40 Given the relatively small number of writers from Japan whose work has 26 B. E. THORNBURY won the support of major publishing houses, considerable credit for bringing out Japanese novels and short stories in English translation must go to smaller houses, such as Vertical,41 Tilted Axis Press,42 Soho Press,43 Pushkin Press,44 and Dalkey Archive Press45—along with university presses that include Cornell, Columbia, Hawai‘i, and The University of Michigan’s Center for Japanese Studies. The names of enterprising editors, translators, and even a literary agent are behind several important collections of short fiction from Japan that represent the work of a wide range of contemporary writers and their translators. Tokyo-based literary agent Corinne Quentin arranged for the French publisher Éditions Autrement to issue a Tokyo volume in its Romans d’une Ville (“City Stories”) series, in which “[f]ive well-known writers residing in a particular city are asked to produce a short story reflecting their vision of a specific neighborhood” (Murray 2004, 8). The project came to fruition in 2000, when Kōdansha published the five Japanese stories under the title Tokyō ̄ shosetsū and Éditions Autrement simultaneously released a French translation titled Tokyo Électrique. Giles Murray subsequently translated the stories into English, which Tokyo’s IBC Publishing brought out in 2004 under the title Tokyo Fragments. Other examples include Tokyo Stories: A Literary Stroll (2002), edited by Lawrence Rogers, containing eighteen pieces of short fiction translated by Rogers; Digital Geishas and Talking Frogs: The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan (2011), edited by Helen Mitsios, representing the work of thirteen writers and nine translators; and The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction, which has already been mentioned. Another noteworthy example is the Spring 2014 “Japan” issue of the literary journal Granta: The Magazine of New Writing, which showcased the work of eleven Japanese writers and their translators. It is often the case that a writer’s earlier works will enter the translation and publication stream after the successful introduction of one or more recent ones. Gabriel’s 2014 translation of Yoshida’s 2002 novel Parēdo (Parade) came out after the successful 2010 publication of Gabriel’s translation of Yoshida’s 2007 novel Akunin (Villain). Both were published by divisions of Random House. The 2012 publication of Nakamura’s 2009 novel Suri (The Thief ), translated by Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates, was followed in quick succession by his 2010 novel Aku to kamen no rūru (Evil and the Mask 2013), also translated by Izumo and Coates, and his 2013 novel Kyonen no fuyu, kimi to wakare (Last Winter, We Parted 2014), translated by Allison Markin Powell. The positive reception accorded 1 INTRODUCTION 27 these works opened the way for Nakamura’s 2003 novel Jū (The Gun 2015) and his 2005 novel Tsuchi no naka no kodomo (The Boy in the Earth 2017), both translated by Powell, as well as Kalau Almony’s translations of Nakamura’s 2011 novel Ōkoku (The Kingdom 2016) and his 2014 novel Kyodan̄ X (Cult X 2018). All were published by Soho Crime.46 There is often considerable lag time between the publication of a novel or short story in Japan and its availability in a translated edition for which the rights have been legally obtained. The Hunter, Juliet Winters Carpenter’s translation of Asa Nonami’s Kogoeru Kiba (1996), was brought out by Kodansha International in 2006—a full ten years after the novel was released in Japan. Snyder’s translation of Kirino’s AUTO, also published by Kodansha International, took six years to appear in English. Despite the enthusiastic reception for OUT, it was five years before Gabriel’s translation of Kirino’s 2003 Riaru warudo (Real World 2008) was published by Alfred A. Knopf. However, the time gap between the publication of Japanese-language and translated editions of some writers’ work has considerably shortened. Whereas it took six years for Murakami’s Kokkyō no minami, taiyo ̄ no nishi (1992) to come out in an English translation by Gabriel—published in 1998 under the title South of the Border, West of the Sun—both Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage and 1Q84, the latter translated by Jay Rubin and Gabriel, appeared (under the imprint of Alfred A. Knopf) within twelve months of the Japanese- language editions. Even after a novel or short story has been translated and published, issues of accessibility inevitably arise. Books go out of print, as is the case now with Wayne Lammers’s translation of Taichi Yamada’s Ijintachi to no natsu (1987), published by Vertical in 2003 under the title Strangers. Kodansha International, once a prominent publisher of Japanese literature in translation, is no longer active in the field—and readers must rely on libraries and the used-book market to find titles such asThe Hunter that, unlike OUT, have not been reprinted by other publishers. At times, translations are released, at least temporarily, only in certain markets, as was the case with Alexander O. Smith’s translation of Keigo Higashino’s 1999 novel Byakuyakō (Journey Under the Midnight Sun 2015), which was marketed by Hachette publishers in Britain for a time before being stocked by booksellers in the United States. On the other hand, digitization has made some works legally available that may not otherwise be for sale in certain markets: Amazon, for example, sold Kindle versions of The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction before offering buyers print editions of the anthology. 28 B. E. THORNBURY

Subtitled Japanese Film: Festivals, Prizes, and Distributors Thinking back to the history-altering moment when Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon won the Golden Lion award at the 1950 Venice International Film Festival—bringing film from Japan to the attention of the world— Abé Mark Nornes writes that “[f]ilm festivals have been the main interface between Japanese cinema and its world audience” (2014, 245). In all of its manifestations, the film festival is a singular cultural event, which Julian Stringer characterizes as “a cultural matrix … a place for the establishment and maintenance of cross-cultural-looking relations”—noting that “[f]estival screenings determine which movies are distributed in distinct cultural arenas, and hence which movies critics and academics are likely to gain access to” (2001, 134). Spurred on by the proliferation of festivals across continents, the number of films from Japan that are professionally subtitled and legally available to transnational audiences has grown exponentially in recent years due to the rise in the number of distribution companies and, of course, the expansion of distribution platforms (DVDs and streaming services). Annual Japan-focused film festivals in the United States include the Japan Film Festival of San Francisco and Japan Society New York’s Japan Cuts (“[t]he largest festival of contemporary Japanese cinema in North America” [https://www.japansociety.org/page/programs/film/japan-cuts-2019?utm_source=google&utm_ medium=search&utm_campaign=japancuts2019]). Specialized festivals like these capture distributors’ attention—as do major events such as the Venice Film Festival, at which Café Lumière was nominee for a Golden Lion award in 2004—the same year that Yūya Yagira won the best-actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for his role in Nobody Knows. Again at Cannes, director Kore-eda would go on to win the top-prize Palme D’Or in 2018 for Shoplifters (Manbiki kazoku 2018). New distribution platforms and channels have markedly eased the challenges that transnational audiences once faced in accessing film from Japan. Examples of companies and the English-subtitled films from Japan that they have made available for sale on DVD in the United States include Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (Kikujiro [1999], directed by Kitano, and Tokyo Godfathers [2003], directed by Satoshi Kon), Wellspring Media (Café Lumière [2003], directed by Hou), VIZ Pictures (Train Man [2005], directed by Shōsuke Murakami), Miramax Films (Shall We Dance? [1996], directed by Masayuki Suo), IFC Films (Nobody Knows [2004], directed by Kore-eda), and Film Movement (Hospitalité [2010], directed 1 INTRODUCTION 29 by Kōji Fukada, and After the Storm [2016], directed by Kore-eda). Video streaming services, such as those offered by Amazon and Netflix, have an expanding number of films from Japan in their catalogues—including those, like Satoshi Miki’s Adrift in Tokyo (Tenten 2007), that are not necessarily available on DVD.

Crafting Titles for the “Global-English” Market Titles matter when it comes to marketing translated and subtitled works that will attract readers and film audiences. More and more, it appears that authors, directors, publishers, and producers in Japan are titling works of fiction and film in ways that signal their readiness for “global-English” circulation. There are the Japanese titles that are direct transcriptions— adjusted for Japanese pronunciation—of English words, such as Afutādāku (After Dark), AUTO (OUT), Gurei men (Gray Men), Paredō (Parade), Riaru wārudo (Real World), Shall We Dansu? (Shall We Dance?), and Tokyō ̄ goddofāzāzu (Tokyo Godfathers).47 Close behind are titles that can be easily and directly translated, such as Densha otoko (Train Man), Jū (The Gun), Yōgisha X no kenshin (The Devotion of Suspect X), and even Kantai (Hospitalité). (The French word hospitalité, used instead of “hospitality,” was apparently thought to be a more sonically appealing term that would not present a linguistic challenge to anglophone consumers.) And, there is the occasional case whereby all or part of the original Japanese-language title is retained, as it is in the case of Gabriel and Rubin’s translation of Murakami’s 1Q84 and Asa Yoneda’s translation of Banana Yoshimoto’s 2010 novel Moshimoshi Shimokitazawa (Moshi Moshi 2016). The retained titles appeal to readers for their cultural authenticity and for giving them the satisfaction that they already know or will figure out what the terms mean. Titles, of course, present the same sorts of translation challenges that all other aspects of texts do. The Thief was chosen as the English-language title of Nakamura’s novel Suri, although the word in Japanese specifically refers to a pickpocket. Kore-eda’s filmDare mo shiranai became Nobody Knows, even though the phrase in Japanese can convey, depending on the context, “nobody knows” or “we don’t know anyone.” Both meanings apply to the children in the film in the sense of no one knowing about their plight and their not knowing anyone who can help them. Nonami’s novel Kogoeru kiba—which literally means “frozen fangs,” a reference to a dog that was trained to kill—was published in translation as The Hunter, 30 B. E. THORNBURY with the subtitle A Detective Takako Otomichi Mystery to clarify the genre of the novel. The title of Hou’s filmKo hı̄ ̄ jikō is written with characters that signify “light” (in the sense of illumination) and “coffee.” In translation, it became Café Lumière—another sonically appealing French phrase. Yamada’s Ijintachi to no natsu—literally, “summer with strangers”—was simplified toStrangers . As all of these examples indicate, crafting titles for both domestic and transnational consumers is a process of trying to appeal simultaneously to a wide range of perceived tastes and expectations.

The Late Twentieth- to Early Twenty-First-Century Timeframe: Cityscape and Sociocultural Transformations In Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun, the protagonist’s father- in-law, a man with a successful construction company, speaks expansively about Tokyo’s future:

Look out at Tokyo here. … The price of land has shot up so much old buildings aren’t profitable anymore. … That’s why they need newer, bigger buildings. … In a couple of years you won’t recognize Tokyo. There’s no shortage of capital. The Japanese economy’s booming, stocks are up. And banks are bursting at the seams with cash. … That’s why all these buildings are going up one after another. (1998 [1992], 127–8)

Mapping Tokyo draws on fiction and film produced since the 1980s, a watershed decade when Tokyo “was at a turning point in its urban development” (Machimura 1992, 127). Having grown into an export power- house, Japan was being strongly pressured by its trading partners (the United States, in particular) to open up its markets at home. Starting in the early 1980s, the country’s central government made urban development the cornerstone of efforts to stimulate domestic demand. The city began building—and building—and building. In an article published in 2013, Waley was especially referring to Tokyo when he wrote:

The transformation of Japanese cities in the last thirty years—and more especially over the last fifteen years—has been dramatic. … Not only have skyscrapers come to predominate in city center areas, but high-rise residential buildings now pepper the previously low-rise suburbs. This change has been effected principally through creeping, and often less-than-transparent 1 INTRODUCTION 31

easing of regulations on building heights, but it has been accompanied by a powerful rhetoric establishing the advantages of high-rise cities set within the framework of a weak public realm, strong private property rights, and a growing culture of business-led urban restructuring. (Waley 2013, 46)

The novels, short stories, and films discussed in the chapters that follow are both a product of and a response to the powerful “high-rise” ideology that has had such a visible impact on Tokyo and the profound sociocultural changes that have shaped life in the late twentieth- and early twenty- first-century city. Tokyo fiction and film contain abundant allusions to the city’s high-rise “calling cards,” a term Waley uses in reference to skyline- and cityscape-altering monoliths (2013, 45). At the same time, the texts are also replete with representations of “the economic and social anxieties that [had] intensified by the mid-1990s” (Plourde 2014, 119). These allusions and representations are integral to how the contemporary city is understood—or, in other words, how it is mapped. Keizō Hino’s novel Isle of Dreams is an eloquent example of such texts. The character Shōzō Sakai, who spent his long career helping build Tokyo, contemplates what was lost in the process:

They had demolished delicate, flimsy houses of wood and paper and destroyed moss-covered gardens, small and somber, to make way for an ongoing stream of office buildings, condominium and apartment complexes, factories, and elevated roads—all made with concrete and iron. They were certainly strong, stable, and even beautiful. Yet have we done nothing more than throw cold and hard materials together and pile them up? Enclosed wall-to-wall interiors … empty and frigid. … It is we who have first bestowed on our country this hermetically sealed darkness, desolate and dead, where even the strange-smelling air is stagnant. … I have built Tokyo from burned-out ruins to a great city. But I have thereby destroyed something invisible, including … myself. (Hino 2009 [1985], 79)

Other good examples include Ishikawa’s Gray Men, in which the menacing, mirror-reflective skyscrapers near Ikebukuro and Tokyo Stations speak to the use and abuse of power and money. In Nakamura’s The Thief, the image of a tower haunts the mind of the pickpocket who steals from those whose power bases are in central Tokyo’s tallest buildings, while he—disdaining the money he so easily takes from those men—takes refuge in low-lying, barebones rental accommodations in a marginal corner of the city. The family in Hikari’s “A Family Party” that decided to sell its 32 B. E. THORNBURY property to developers of a new hotel, yet another addition to the cluster of imposing high-rises on the west side of Shinjuku Station, comes to question—and even grieve—that decision. The condo building in Shinagawa that provides a new home for the narrator and her cat in Inaba’s “Morning Comes Twice a Day” leaves them cut off from the smell of the earth that once enriched their lives in Tokyo’s Musashino suburbs. Films translate these ideas into visual images. In Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers, the double-towered, forty-eight-story, Kenzō Tange–designed Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, completed in 1991, stands in marked contrast to the tiny, makeshift structure erected in its shadow on a patch of landscaped ground below that shelters the three homeless characters. And, in Fukada’s Hospitalité and Kore-eda’s Shoplifters, glimpses of the Skytree communications tower, which opened to the public in 2012 as the second-tallest edifice on the planet, implicitly questions what family and community have come to mean today for the residents of Tokyo’s neighborhoods. Dramatic sociocultural transformations intertwined with the remaking of the physical cityscape also resonate in Tokyo fiction and film. A concrete example relates to changes in Japan’s immigration policy starting in the 1980s. Desirous of promoting internationalization and facing a shortage of workers available (and willing) to take marginal and low-wage jobs during the economic bubble years, Japan opened its doors to students and laborers from abroad (Liu-Farrer 2013, 232). Anna, in Kirino’s OUT, represents those many individuals from China granted language-student visas who either never went to classes or soon dropped out to enter Japan’s labor market.48 And, OUT’s Kazuo represents the population of Brazilians of Japanese descent who, starting in the 1980s, were recruited for factory work in Japan. The 1980s are also now vividly remembered as a time when “flamboyant investments in insubstantial public projects and the ostentatious display of consumption by wealthy individuals” (Bestor et al. 2011, 3) came to a head. When the bubble burst in the early 1990s, there were “massive collapses both in the stock market and the real estate market; large corporations were forced to restructure and sacrosanct notions of ‘lifetime employment’ disappeared” (ibid.). For the better part of the following two decades, Japan was in and out of recession, “and a feeling of national malaise … pervaded public discussion” (ibid.). Such a situation is powerfully depicted in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2008 filmTokyo Sonata (Tokyō ̄ sonata). Although the economy has returned to a more stable and positive trajectory, a sense of stress and 1 INTRODUCTION 33 unease infuses texts ranging from Yoshida’s Parade to Murakami’s 1Q84. These and many other examples offered throughout this book demonstrate the interweaving of spatial and social processes in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Tokyo fiction and film.

Tokyo Space and Place: An Expanding Area of English-Language Scholarship Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film joins the expanding, multidisciplinary area of English-language scholarship focusing on Tokyo space and place. Edward Seidensticker’s Tokyo Rising: The City Since the Great Earthquake (1990) remains a classic study of twentieth-century Tokyo history and culture.49 Studies that also take an historical and cultural perspective include essays brought together in special issues of journals: “Thinking from the Yamanote: Space, Place, and Mobility in Tokyo’s Past and Present” (Japan Forum, edited by Mark Pendleton and Jamie Coates [2018]), “Tales of the City” (Japanese Studies, edited by Vera Mackie [2011]), and “Tokyo and Beyond: Reading Japan from the Metropolis” (Japan Forum, edited by Angela Yiu [2006]). They include, too, work published in book form, such as Tokyo: Memory, Imagination, and the City (Thornbury and Schulz 2018), Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects (Sand 2013), and Tokyo in Transit: Japanese Culture on the Rails and Road (Freedman 2011). Specialists in architecture, urban planning, and geography have produced many studies on Tokyo, among them Tokyo Totem: A Guide to Tokyo (Gardner and Fruneaux 2015), Small Tokyo (Radović and Boontharm 2012), Roppongi Crossing: The Demise of a Tokyo Nightclub District and the Reshaping of a Global City (Cybriwsky 2011), Tokyo: City and Architecture (Sacchi 2004), and Tokyo: The Shogun’s City at the Twenty-first Century (Cybriwsky 1998). Another proliferating category of scholarly work with a Tokyo focus is anthologies of translated stories, such as A Tokyo Anthology: Literature from Japan’s Modern Metropolis, 1850–1920 (Jones and Inouye 2017), The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction (Emmerich et al. 2015), Tokyo Fragments (Quentin 2004), and Tokyo Stories: A Literary Stroll (Rogers 2002). Evidence of the vitality of Tokyo space and place as an area of scholarly inquiry is, moreover, found in the Tokyo-focused chapters in books such as the Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature (Hutchinson and Morton, eds. 2016) Cartographic Japan: A History in Maps (Wigen 34 B. E. THORNBURY et al. 2016), Three-Dimensional Reading: Stories of Time and Space in Japanese Modernist Fiction, 1911–1932 (Yiu 2013), Urban Spaces in Japan: Cultural and Social Perspectives (Brumann and Schulz 2012), and Japanese Capitals in Historical Perspective: Place, Power and Memory in Kyoto, Edo and Tokyo (Fiévé and Waley 2003). Along with the growth of published scholarship, university courses open up the area to students as part of their academic curriculums. At Temple University, I developed and teach “Tokyo in Literature and Film.” Swarthmore College offers “Tokyo Central: The Metropolis in Modern Japanese Literature and Film,” the University of Oregon has “Tokyo in Japanese Literature,” and the University of Massachusetts gives “Tokyo Through Literature and Film.” These and similar courses at other institutions both respond to and help stimulate interest in a “spatial” approach to the humanities.

The Chapters This study continues with “Translation, Subtitling, and Tokyo Placemaking,” which examines Tokyo placemaking as a function of the processes of literary translation and cinematic subtitling. Cross-border readers/viewers increasingly seek texts that enable a direct, authentic, and intense relationship between themselves and the authors/directors whose work they consume. It is a relationship made possible by those who translate literature and subtitle film in transnational circulation and those who publish and distribute those works. The first part of the chapter looks at some of the challenges related to literary translation and cinematic subtitling—as well as the struggle for recognition on the part of professionals engaged in those fields. If Tokyo fiction and film literally and figuratively map the city, cultural references—the subject of the remainder of the chapter—are the data points that define the contours and fill in the details of those maps. Each of the chapters that follow approaches Tokyo fiction and film from a particular perspective. “Gender and Mobility: Tracking Fictional Characters on Real Monorails, Trains, Subways, and Trams” tracks (in an analytical sense) fictional characters whose narrative trajectories are inscribed by and on Tokyo’s real network of rail lines. It is a network in which multiple strands of the city’s gendered narratives find expression, and one that frames and defines the city as a socially dynamic geographical entity. The stories, novels, and films that are discussed literally and figura- 1 INTRODUCTION 35 tively map the space in and around trains to reveal, shape, and construct understandings of gender. By so doing, they produce sharply articulated portraits and critiques of the rail-riding society they depict. Not unexpectedly, the alluring promise of mobility, in the sense of being able to move freely and securely to one’s destination in both life and on the rails, frequently proves illusory or comes at a steep price for women in particular. At the same time, there are glimmers of newly emerging interventions and choices—as well as the possibility of a counter-hegemonic discourse in which women resolutely assert their agency on a rail system built by and mostly for men. “Coordinates of Home and Community” looks at how Tokyo fiction and film map the social and spatial constructs of home (and, by extension, community) through the lens of memory, from the perspective of vulnerable children, in the eyes of independent and not-so-independent women, and as illusion. Home, of course, is not just a physical structure. It extends more profoundly to the sense of social belonging embedded in the family as the most basic unit of community. In a study of twentieth-century Japanese and Taiwanese fiction, Margaret Hillenbrand speaks of the “destruction of family life by the city, and the emotional attenuation it engenders,” leading “emotionally dispossessed urbanites to seek out replacements for the lost family” (2007, 190). The works discussed in the chapter communicate a yearning for reliable connectedness between and among individuals embodied in the concepts of home and community, while also cultivating the conceptual ground of a Tokyo that is repeatedly depicted as a place of social fragmentation and dislocation. “Locating the Outsider Inside Tokyo” foregrounds fiction and film that challenge ideologies of homogeneity in Japan by mapping the spaces occupied by the “outsider” inside Tokyo. “[C]apital cities,” as Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps note, are seen “as representative of national identity”—a national identity that “can be threatened by those considered ‘other’ within their midst” (2013, 3). Outsider-characters in the works discussed here include those who are not members of the majority Japanese population either due to their ethnicity or nationality. They also include those who are members of the majority Japanese population but whose homelessness or sexual orientation, for example, places them “outside” of mainstream society. What often binds together these outsider-characters is the emotional trauma and, sometimes, actual physical violence they experience. For them, Tokyo is not a place of safety and security. 36 B. E. THORNBURY

“Tokyo Cartographies of Mystery and Crime” looks at works that map a Tokyo where events arising from individuals’ “deeper psychic drives”—to quote terminology used by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson in a study of urban space (2000, 10)—unfold across telephone lines, in the bedrooms of luxury condo buildings, on the city’s watery margins, in a crowded train car in full public view, within the walls of fraying apartments and those of well- tended homes, on the streets of prosperous neighborhoods, in the shadows of the city made visible on the dark web, beneath the surface of the city’s pavement, and within an alternate world. The novels and short stories that are the focus of the chapter expose extreme and unrelenting bullying, sexual abuse and exploitation, domestic violence, random attacks on women walking alone at night, and, of course, murder for multiple reasons and taking multiple forms. They also extend to fearsome events arising out of the natural world. Collectively, the materials illustrate Philip Howell’s point that works of crime fiction—to which can be added mystery fiction broadly defined— “can be taken … as alternative epistemologies of the city, worthy of as much consideration as radical geography’s urban knowledge” (1998, 358). The book concludes, first, by drawing attention to Iain Chambers’s observation that

the city, as both a real and an imaginary place, apparently provides a ready map for reading, interpretation and comprehension. Yet the very idea of a map, with its implicit dependence upon the survey of a stable terrain, fixed referents and measurement, seems to contradict the palpable flux and fluidity of metropolitan life and cosmopolitan movement. (1994, 92)

As the chapters in Mapping Tokyo endeavor to show, mapping—as both a function of fiction and film and as a multifaceted mode of literary and cinematic analysis that gives precedence to space and place—opens up ways of grasping and gaining insight into “the palpable flux and fluidity of metropolitan life and cosmopolitan movement” to which Chambers refers. In literature and film, a Tokyo that may be unrepresented and unrepresentable on public maps, to borrow Jordan Sand’s phrasing (2013, 48), is given expression (in other words, mapped) through words and cinematic imagery—especially in the depictions of encounters between characters that shape understandings of Tokyo. An overview of such encounters is followed by reflections on the transnational circulation of Tokyo fiction and film within the context of discussions relating to world literature and world film.

* * * 1 INTRODUCTION 37

Tokyo fiction and film offer numerous examples of works that feature real city settings—with what Malcah Effron calls “near-cartographic accuracy” (2009, 331). Although the specific topic of Effron’s comments is crime fiction, her observation can be applied much more generally. “[T]he topo- graphically accurate details,” she writes, “refer directly to streets that exist in extratextual reality and that can be found in cities and represented on maps outside the context of the fictional novels” (ibid., 332–33). A “real setting,” Effron further notes, is one that is “independently verifiable through the use of maps, photographs, or visits”—and that “provides an underlying basis of reality to confirm the legitimacy of the events portrayed in the narrative as a description of the society and culture represented in the novel” (ibid., 333–34). With few exceptions, the Tokyo settings of the works used in this study conform to Effron’s definition of real settings. The four dozen novels, short stories, and films that are the subject matter of this book make up only a small segment of the steadily increasing number of Japanese-language texts that have been translated or subtitled. Each, however, exemplifies one or more of the myriad ways in which late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century fiction and film from Japan literally and figuratively map Tokyo. “The way we experience cities is profoundly shaped by the immaterial city of word, image, and myth,” as James Donald has written. “It is through them that we learn not only to see cities, but also how to live in them” (2000, 47). In challenging the assumption on the part of some that “there is a real city and then a representation of it,” Donald goes on to say that “we experience cities as what Henri Lefebvre calls ‘representational space,’ and that this space comes into being through the interaction of inextricably entwined realities” (ibid.). It is this interaction of inextricably entwined realities that is the subject matter of Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film.

Notes 1. Central Tokyo is divided into twenty-three ku. Although “ward” has long been used as a translation for the term (a convention I continue to follow), each ku now refers to itself as “city” in the English portion of its website and in printed material. The change in nomenclature stems from a measure passed in 2000 by Japan’s National Diet declaring central Tokyo’s twenty- three districts city-like in their administration. 2. Emily Apter refers to “publishing, criticism, [and] prize-granting” as “structures of legitimation endorsed by the media” (2013, 327) for literature. In the case of film, the parallel structures would be distribution, criticism, and prize-granting. 38 B. E. THORNBURY

3. As David Damrosch observes, “[a] work enters into world literature by a double process: first, by being readas literature; second, by circulating out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin” (2003, 6). An analogous process operates in the formation of world film. 4. Or, to cite Michel Foucault’s often-quoted observation, The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. (1986, 22) 5. The relation between novels and the city, as Donald wrote in an earlier essay, “is not merely one of representation. The text is actively constitutive of the city. Writing does not only record or reflect the fact of the city. It has its role in producing the city for a reading public” (1997, 187). Focusing on film and the city, Allan Siegel has said that “cinema has influenced political, economic, and cultural reality and transformed our perception and reading of the urban environment” (2003, 137). In Siegel’s view, “[t]he processes of cinema specify representations of the city, refract memory, and shape perspectives of history that engender the formulation and reading of social space—re-generating processes of spectatorship—and thereby changing a society’s cultural vocabulary” (ibid.). 6. See, for example, Piatti and Hurni (2011) and Bodenhamer et al. (2010). 7. In an essay titled “Mapping the City through Film: From ‘Topophilia’ to Urban Mapscapes,” Teresa Castro draws on the work of Brian Harley when she writes that “the physical artifact we now call map is but a small part of a wider history, that of mapping; that is, communicating about space.” Following Harley, Castro contends that mapping can be thought of “as a particular mode of thought, related to a series of processes and formal strategies” that “structur[e] and transform … our geographical imagination and affect … the ways in which we have come to understand cities and act upon them” (Castro 2010, 154). (Note: All italics appearing in quotations throughout this study match the usage found in the original texts.) Others who have addressed the subject include Stephen Daniels, Dydia DeLyser, J. Nicholas Entrikin, and Douglas Richardson who, in their introduction to Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities, observe: “Mapping as a term of cultural description in the arts and humanities has moved beyond the practice of cartography to a broader, metaphorical sense of interpreting and creating images and texts and of making sense of a fast modernizing or post-modernizing of the world” (2011, xxx). 1 INTRODUCTION 39

8. “The scale of the city was overwhelming, the diversity of life there extraordinary” is the way the title character of Haruki Murakami’s novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2014, Shikisai o motanai Tazaki Tsukuru to, kare no junrei no toshi 2013) summed up his first impression of Tokyo when he arrived there as a college student (2014 [2013], 31). In terms of total land area and population, Tokyo is the largest city in the world. See Chap. 2 for details relating to Tokyo’s geography and population. 9. Address plates and map-boards are also fixtures of Tokyo’s streetscapes in fiction and film. When detective Kusanagi hits the streets in Keigo Higashino’s novel The Devotion of Suspect X (2011, Yōgisha X no kenshin 2005), he “walked steadily, occasionally glancing at the small address plates on the telephone poles, comparing them to the address written on the memo in his hand” (2011 [2005], 49). When the homeless Fujii in Makoto Shiina’s story “The Yellow Tent on the Roof” (2004, “Okujō no kiiroi tento” 2000) wanders around the Tsukishima neighborhood looking for a park in which to camp out, he “finally came across one of those notice boards for neighborhood news … and examined the map of the local area” (2004 [2000], 133). And, in Keizō Hino’s Isle of Dreams (2009, Yume no shima 1985), when Shōzō Sakai goes to a warehouse district in Shibaura, near Tokyo Bay, in search of the mysterious Yōko Hayashi, he “walked around for a while, checking his location on the address signs attached to the telephone poles” (2009 [1985], 67). 10. Taylor (2016) focuses on the free maps that are printed in “Walking Guide to Jinbōchō,” one of Tokyo’s numerous “town papers”—local publications meant to encourage visitors to explore the city’s neighborhoods and to patronize the businesses pinpointed on the maps of those neighborhoods. In Tomoka Shibasaki’s Spring Garden (2017, Haru no niwa 2014), a pancake-loving office colleague of the character Tarō gave him “a list of the ten best places for pancakes in Tokyo, together with maps showing how to get to them” (2017 [2014], 106). 11. About to escape from the dismal world underneath Tokyo, the “Hard- boiled Wonderland” narrator of Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991, Sekai no owari to hādo-boirudo wandārando 1985) thrills to the sound of trains: “Never in my whole life had I been so happy to hear the subway. People boarding trains, reading papers and magazines, bound for work and pleasure. I thought about the color advertisements hanging over the aisles and the subway system maps over the doors” (1991 [1985], 309–310). Maps are an integral part of the everyday, ordinary world that he longs to be part of again. See Freedman (2016) for an essay on maps of the Tokyo subway system. 40 B. E. THORNBURY

12. Especially since the 1970s and 1980s publishers of map-filled guidebooks and travel-oriented magazines have been cultivating a Tokyo readership with the money, leisure, and desire to explore the city from every angle imaginable. Writing about the weekly guides PIA and City Road, Jordan Sand observes that “[w]ith copious information on theater, film, and event venues major and minor, and with detailed neighborhood maps, these guides presented Tokyo as a vast assemblage of places to be explored” (2013, 90). He adds that “PIA Map, a periodical volume of ‘play spot’ maps, began publication in 1982, reflecting the expansion of consumption opportunities and the demand for related geographical data” (ibid.). 13. The names of the ferry lines included, among others, Chitose, Fujimi, Hashiba, Kachidoki, Nakazu, Takeya, Tsukuda, and Tsukishima. 14. Evidence of the event’s continuing impact is a Japan Times article published on June 8, 2018, titled “Akihabara Marks Ten Years Since Deadly Stabbing Rampage” (https://www.japantimes.co.jp/ news/2018/06/08/national/akihabara-marks-10-years-since-deadly- stabbing-rampage/). 15. Despite the incredible density and extent of the Tokyo-area transportation system, not every part of the city is equally well served. Writing about a neighborhood in Tokyo’s less affluent industrial northeast, Joseph Hankins points out: “It lacks a train line through or near it, and is bisected by only one bus line, linking it to Hirai station nineteen minutes to the east and to Ueno station thirty-five minutes to the west” (2018, 197). 16. Unfortunately, even the most attentive reader of the translation will likely miss the connection here between Hamachō and Benten-tei. The reason is that some fifty pages earlier “Hamamatsu” (the name of a city and its rail station in Shizuoka Prefecture) was mistakenly printed instead of “Hamachō,” the subway station closest to Yasuko’s place of employment and the place name that Higashino actually used. See Higashino (2011 [2005], 112). 17. As Jordan Sand has written, The high-tech transformation that began in the 1970s and accelerated in the 1980s took place in only certain parts of [Tokyo]. The city’s old downtown persisted in Shitamachi, a loosely defined area of commercial and industrial neighborhoods that retained traces of the traditional social and physical geography, in which the front streets were dominated by owner-occupied retail shops and workshops and the back streets were lined with wood-built rental housing. Although most of Shitamachi had been destroyed in the firebombing of 1945, the rows of tightly packed houses had been rebuilt in much the same form, and pockets of prewar shops and housing had survived. By late in the twentieth century [and continuing to this day], many streets in Shitamachi looked mildly dilapi- dated, but they were occupied by a stable—albeit aging—population, and they retained some of their industrial-era functions. (2013, 13) 1 INTRODUCTION 41

18. Murakami’s words here recall those of Michel de Certeau writing about New York prior to 9/11: To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the city’s grasp. One’s body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according to an anonymous law. … When one goes up there, he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up in itself any identity of authors or spectators. An Icarus flying above these waters, he can ignore the devices of Daedalus in mobile and endless labyrinths far below. His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was “possessed” into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more. (de Certeau 1984 [1980], 92) 19. The map is shown early in the film when Tamako, one of the studio’s instructors, first teaches the group class whose members are Sugiyama, Hattori, and Tanaka. 20. The subsequently published paperback editions of the English translation have a different cover design, although Kidd’s map motifs are retained on the inside pages. Japanese editions of the novel do not have the map design. 21. The brackets around JR Keihin-Tōhoku and Tokyo Metro Chiyoda are there to indicate that the order of the two lines was mistakenly switched in the translation—and I have made the correction here. Ryōtarō would have taken the Japan Railways Keihin-Tōhoku line to Yūrakuchō Station, where he would have transferred to the Chiyoda subway line before getting off at Kokkai-gijidōmae, the station closet to the National Diet building. 22. In the year 2000 the Tōkyū Shin-Tamagawa line was merged into the Den- en-toshi line. 23. The segment of Inaba’s “Morning Comes Twice a Day” cited at the beginning of this introduction, in which the narrator studies maps of Tokyo as she contemplates having to find a new place to live, helps illustrate Furukawa’s point regarding the tripartite division of Tokyo. The woman notes that Musashino, where she had been residing in a cottage with her cat, “was still inside the city limits, but on the outskirts” (Inaba 2002 [1996], 244). A city with a population of just under 150,000 people, Musashino is in the Tama area, part of “secondary” Tokyo. Assiduously studying the maps, the narrator of the story finds herself attracted to central (“primary”) Tokyo—“to sections of the city I’d never even laid eyes on” (ibid.) 42 B. E. THORNBURY

24. Even though the focus here is on work made available in English, it goes without saying that the market for literary translation and cinematic subtitling embraces dozens of languages. A closely followed figure is the growing number of languages into which Haruki Murakami’s work has been translated—estimated to be somewhere in the range of fifty or sixty. See Zielinska-Elliott (2015, 94) and Strecher (2014, x). 25. Writers from Japan whose work has been translated and published by the Dalkey Archive Press include, among others, Mieko Kanai (The Word Book, translated by Paul McCarthy, 2009), Keizō Hino (Isle of Dreams, translated by Charles de Wolf, 2010), and Hisaki Matsuura (Triangle, translated by David Karashima, 2014). 26. The concept of soft power—as opposed to the “hard power” of military force—was introduced by Joseph Nye in his 1990 book Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. “What is soft power?” Nye asks in a more recent study. “It is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payments. It arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies” (2004, x). 27. Charles de Wolf’s translation of Keizō Hino’s Isle of Dreams, published by Dalkey Archive Press, is one example of a JLPP project. 28. The Nippon Foundation (originally called the Japan Shipbuilding Industry Foundation) was founded in 1962 by the controversial and flamboyant Ryōichi Sasakawa, who spent time in prison as one of Japan’s Class-A war criminals. For information on Sasakawa’s life, see, for example, http:// www.nytimes.com/1995/07/20/obituaries/ryoichi-sasakawa-96-right- ist-and-gambling-figure-in-japan.html. Officially renamed The Nippon Foundation in 2011, it is reportedly the largest philanthropic organization in Japan, and is a major donor to a wide range of global humanitarian causes and Japan-related scholarly and cultural projects. See http://www.nippon- foundation.or.jp/en/who/about/history/01.html 29. See, for example, http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/on- memory-new-writing-from-japan. As stated on the journal’s website, the mission of Words Without Borders, which began publication in 2003, is the expansion of cultural understanding through the translation, publication, and promotion of the finest contemporary international literature. Our publications and programs open doors for readers of English around the world to the multiplicity of viewpoints, richness of experience, and literary perspective on world events offered by writers in other languages. We seek to connect international writers to the general public, to students and educators, and to the media and to serve as a primary online location for a global literary conversation. (http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/about/) 1 INTRODUCTION 43

30. Comma Press, which is funded by Arts Council England, “is a not-for- profit publishing initiative dedicated to promoting new writing, with an emphasis on the short story. It is committed to a spirit of risk-taking and challenging publishing, free of the commercial pressures on mainstream houses” (http://commapress.co.uk/about/history/). 31. Winners include Fuminori Nakamura, for his novel Suri (2009). Translated into English by Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates, it was published in 2012 by Soho Press under the title The Thief. Its popularity has so far led to the translation and publication (also by Soho Press) of a half dozen other novels by Nakamura. 32. This phrasing is from the back cover of Ishikawa’s novel Gray Men. The Japanese edition of the novel won the second annual Golden Elephant Award. Given to a Japanese-language work in manuscript form, the award came with suggestions for revision prior to release by a Japanese publisher—eventually leading, it was hoped, to its translation and circulation outside of Japan. 33. The prize has had a somewhat uneven history. After five successive years of awards, there was a period of dormancy until Arts Council England provided funding to revive the prize in 2001. The British nonprofit organization BookTrust took over administration of the prize in 2011 with a 5000-pound award (and a magnum of champagne!) going to the author and to the translator. BookTrust announced in 2015 that, starting in 2016, the Man Booker International Prize (awarded by the Booker Prize Foundation) would be combined with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, with the new prize being called the Man Booker International Prize. Although awarded only once every two years, the Man Booker International Prize (renamed, as of June 1, 2019, The International Booker Prize) used to be seen as a kind of Nobel Prize in literature insofar as it was awarded for lifetime achievement to a writer who produces work in English or whose work was “generally available” in English translation (http://themanbookerprize.com/international/history). The prize is now an annual award for a single translated work of fiction published in the United Kingdom during the prior year. The author and translator of the winning book each receive 25,000 pounds and the authors and translators of the five shortlisted books receive 1000 pounds each. From the start, the unique feature of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize—and now The International Booker Prize—is that it gives “the winning author and translator equal status … recognizing the importance of the translator in their [sic] ability to bridge the gap between languages and culture” (http://www.booktrust.org.uk/d/ prizes/archive/7). 44 B. E. THORNBURY

34. Mack (2010) is a detailed study of the publishing industry and literary prizes in Japan. See also the chapter “Haruki Murakami: The Prizes, Process, and Production of World Literature” in Marling (2016). 35. The prize has been awarded annually since 1945 by Mystery Writers of America (http://mysterywriters.org/about-mwa/mwa-history/). 36. The prize has been awarded annually since 1997 by Deadly Pleasures magazine for the best work in crime fiction (http://www.deadlypleasures.com/ barry.html). 37. Japan’s Grand Prix for Crime Fiction (Nihon suiri sakka kyōkai shō) is awarded annually by Mystery Writers of Japan, Inc. Regarding Kirino’s 1998 award, see http://www.mystery.or.jp/search/prize/page:4?prize=1 38. Starting in 1979 with his receipt of the prestigious Gunzō New Writers’ Prize, Murakami has “won most of [Japan’s] major literary awards” and “almost every major literary award the world has to offer” (Strecher 2014, 2 and x). 39. Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (2018, Konbini ningen 2016) was published with financial support from the Japan Foundation. 40. Large commercial publishers tend to have a number of divisions and associated imprints. Minotaur Books is the division of U.S.-based St. Martin’s Press that specializes in mystery and crime fiction. St. Martin’s is itself one of the publishing companies that make up Macmillan Publishers, “a global trade publishing company, owned by Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, with imprints in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, and around the world” (http://us.macmillan.com/about). 41. “Vertical translates the best contemporary Japanese books. We select our popular novels, graphic novels, and quality nonfiction from a rich, varie- gated stock: Japan’s huge and vibrant book market,” notes the company’s website (http://www.vertical-inc.com/company_profile.html). Its book- list includes Ishikawa’s Gray Men, Kōji Suzuki’s Death and the Flower: Six Stories (2014, Sei to shi no gensō 1995), and Taichi Yamada’s Strangers (2003, Ijintachi to no natsu 1987). Hiroki Sakai, the founder of Vertical, was an editor in the publishing division of the Nihon Keizai Shinbun newspaper prior to going to the United States in 1998 “to learn why Japanese novels were not being more eagerly read abroad” (Machida 2006, 118). Under Sakai, Vertical’s policy regarding the selection of novels to translate includes the requirement that they “not require any special knowledge of Japan” (ibid., 118–19). 42. “Founded in 2015 and based in London, Seoul, Toronto and Vienna, Tilted Axis is a not-for-profit press on a mission to shake up contemporary international literature” (https://www.tiltedaxispress.com/about). Supported by Arts Council England, the press “publishes the books that 1 INTRODUCTION 45

might not otherwise make it into English, for the very reasons that make them exciting to us—artistic originality, radical vision, the sense that here is something new” (ibid.). Its small, but growing, list of authors includes Yū Miri, whose JR Ueno-eki koen-guchī (2014) was published in 2019 under the title Tokyo Ueno Station in a translation by Morgan Giles. 43. Soho Crime, an imprint of New York–based Soho Press (founded in 1986), has published translations of work by Fuminori Nakamura, Akimitsu Takagi, and Seichō Matsumoto. “For more than twenty years, Soho Crime has been publishing atmospheric crime fiction set all over the world. … [Y]ou can count on an immersive adventure steeped in cultural and setting detail” (http://sohopress.com/soho-crime/). 44. London-based Pushkin Press was founded in 1997 with the aim of bringing readers “high-quality writing from around the world” (https://www. pushkinpress.com/about/). It is currently one of the most prolific publishers of Japanese literature in English translation, with a list of authors that includes Hideo Furukawa, Toshiyuki Horie, Yasushi Inoue, Hiromi Kawakami, Ryū Murakami, Akiyuki Nosaka, Toshiki Okada, Tomoka Shibasaki, Sōji Shimada, Masako Togawa, and Nahoko Uehashi. 45. See note 25. 46. In an “Author’s Note,” given in both English and Japanese and inserted just after the title page of The Gun, Nakamura notes that the novel was written “long before” the other works of his that have been published by Soho Press in translation. “I am delighted to see this long-ago novel of mine retroactively translated into English. My deepest gratitude to everyone who has been involved in the process, and to all those kind enough to read it.” 47. The original title of the film Shall We Dance? is a combination of the English phrase “shall we” and “dansu,” the Japanese pronunciation of the word “dance” (which was rendered in katakana script). 48. “From 1984 to 2011, nearly 400,000 Chinese citizens entered Japan with either university or pre-university language student visas,” as Gracia Liu- Farrer has written (2013, 236). 49. Tokyo Rising and its predecessor volume Low City, High City: Tokyo from Edo to the Earthquake (1983) have been reissued and published together under the title Tokyo: From Edo to Showa, 1867–1989: The Emergence of the World’s Greatest City (2010), with an introduction by Paul Waley. CHAPTER 2

Translation, Subtitling, and Tokyo Placemaking

“How does the activity of translation nourish … the city?” Sherry Simon asks in Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory (2012, 8). Although Simon’s focus is on translations incorporated into street- level shop signs and advertising boards aimed at passersby within the geographic borders of cities, I apply her question to the large volume of translated material in various media that reaches individuals who are physically located outside of those borders. Fiction and film that cross borders in translation nourish cities by enabling the widespread transmission of ideas and images that emanate from those urban settings. On the negative side, that transmission is not always smooth, unbiased, or error-free—and, as Simon notes, translation “can deepen a sense of otherness, reifying the categories of knowledge production” (ibid., 13). On the positive side, however, the ideas and images that are successfully transmitted may stimulate interest in and initiate new understandings of places, however geographically distant they may be from the reader of fiction or viewer of film. This chapter examines Tokyo placemaking as a function of the processes of literary translation and cinematic subtitling. The individuals who are translating and subtitling works of fiction and film in transnational circulation—and those who are publishing, distributing, and consuming them—recognize that global literacy in the twenty-first century demands a wide-ranging cultural and geographical vocabulary and knowledge (Thornbury 2017, 133).

In an essay on novelist Haruki Murakami’s parallel career as a leading translator of American literature, Ted Goossen points out that Murakami and his fellow English-to-Japanese translators in Japan know that many people there “are comfortable reading English at some level, and almost everyone has a basic vocabulary” (2013, 185)—due in large part to the requirement that, beginning in grade school, students learn a foreign language, which in practice almost invariably means English. When Murakami, in his role as translator, “comes to a crucial yet untranslatable phrase … he has the option—which he takes—of leaving it in English, and then discussing it in the afterword. Far better, he insists, to stick with the original than replace it with a Japanese phrase whose associations are markedly different” (ibid., 186). The Japanese-to-English translator, as Goossen (who is among that cohort) almost unnecessarily adds, has “no recourse to a similar solution” (ibid.). Even so, the linguistic demands on readers of translated fiction and viewers of subtitled films—and expectations about the cross-cultural knowledge that they have—are noticeably intensifying. At a minimum, unfamiliar terminology encountered by readers (however much or little they know about Japan) can usually be clarified quite easily with a quick web search (Thornbury 2017, 133–34).

Issues of Literary Translation and Cinematic Subtitling “When you read Haruki Murakami, you’re reading me, at least ninety-five per cent of the time,” Jay Rubin has said. “Murakami wrote the names and locations, but the English words are mine” (quoted in Kelts 2013). Rubin, who holds a PhD in Japanese literature from the University of Chicago and whose career has encompassed professorships at the University of Michigan and Harvard University, is the English-language translator of a significant body of Murakami’s work—includingNorwegian Wood (2000, Noruwei no mori 1987), The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, After Dark, and portions of 1Q84. Rubin’s point is clear: all translations are new and different works. In saying that Murakami wrote the names and locations, Rubin seems to be contending that these items alone are carried over as fixed features of the narratives. However, even they cannot help but acquire new and different meanings as they pass through the process of translation. 2 TRANSLATION, SUBTITLING, AND TOKYO PLACEMAKING 49

Shitamachi, mentioned in the introductory chapter, is a good example. It is a multifaceted Tokyo place name for which no single word in English captures its blend of culture, history, and geography.1 Translators have come up with a variety of solutions. Rubin employs the phrase “old working class area” (Murakami 2007 [2004], 138) to evoke the meaning of shitamachi in After Dark, while Alfred Birnbaum opts for “an old quarter of Tokyo” (Murakami 1989 [1982], 3) in A Wild Sheep Chase. Giles Murray renders “Tokyō ̄ no shitamachi no fuzei” (Shiina 2000, 14) as “the old atmosphere of downtown Tokyo” (Shiina 2004 [2000], 129) in “The Yellow Tent on the Roof.” “Old atmosphere” as a descriptor for shitamachi is good, although it does not quite match the sense of ineffable elegance and charm implied by the Japanese word fuzei. In The Devotion of Suspect X, Alexander O. Smith takes a different tack in the following passage:

The neighborhood [that detectives Kusanagi and Kishitani] had entered was mainly residential, though there were a few small shops here and there, all of which felt like they had been around for years—real mom-and-pop establishments. Most other parts of town had long since been overrun with supermarkets and chain stores, but this area was different. This is the old downtown district, Shitamachi, thought Kusanagi. Maybe that’s what makes it feel different. (Higashino 2011 [2005], 48)

By retaining the Japanese term while providing a measure of explanation in English (“the old downtown district”), Smith underscores the chrono- topic, temporal and spatial dimensions of shitamachi.2 How do readers come to terms with the newness and difference that are integral to translation? Edith Grossman, a prolific translator of writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, has tried to answer that question: “The undeniable reality is that the work becomes the translator’s (while simultaneously and mysteriously somehow remaining the work of the original author) as we transmute it into a second language. Perhaps transmute is the wrong verb; what we do is not an act of magic, like altering base metals into precious ones, but the result of a series of creative decisions and imaginative acts of criticism” (2010, 8). As translators, Grossman explains, “[o]ur purpose is to re-create as far as possible, within the alien system of a second language, all the characteristics, vagaries, quirks, and stylistic peculiarities of the work we are translating. And we do this by analogy—that is, by finding comparable, not identical, characteristics, vagaries, quirks, and stylistic peculiarities in the second language” (ibid., 10). 50 B. E. THORNBURY

To be a translator has long meant being acutely aware of what Lawrence Venuti, a pioneering scholar in the field of translation studies and a practic- ing translator, has famously called “the translator’s invisibility” (e.g., Venuti 1995). More often than not, neither the front side of the dust jacket on the hardback edition of a translated novel nor the cover of its paperback edition carries the translator’s name. Photos and biographical material on the inside back flaps of dust jackets and the back covers of softbound editions are by and large reserved for the author. Only by searching the inside pages is it possible to identify in all cases who the translator is—and, even then, the name is almost invariably given in much smaller type than the author’s, as if not to cause any confusion about who is the “real” creator of the work. Little by little, however, translators who publish in English seem to be winning more recognition.3 As Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky suggest, “A paradigm shift is under way in the Anglophone world. There is a gen- erational move toward an image of the translator as an intellectual figure empowered with agency and sensibility who produces knowledge by curating cultural encounters” (2013, xix). Allen and Bernofsky cite several reasons—among them, the new ways of accessing literature offered by the internet, and increased respect in university settings for translation as a scholarly practice. They also point to the growing number of small publishers and magazines that bring out and promote translated work. An indicator of the kind of paradigm shift to which Allen and Bernofsky refer can be seen in the contributors’ sections of publications specializing in translated fiction, such as Monkey Business: New Writing from Japan (published annually, as previously noted, from 2011 to 2017) and Granta: The Magazine of New Writing (including the Spring 2014 Japan-focused issue). In both, the biographical paragraphs summarizing the prior achievements of the authors who created the featured stories and of the translators of those stories are given together in one section, simply arranged alphabetically according to family name. There is no hierarchical distinction between authors and translators. Another approach is that used by Comma Press: the authors and the translators whose work is contained in its anthology The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction have their own separate contributors’ sections. Soho Press and Tilted Axis Press are among the few publishers that make it a practice to inscribe on the covers of their novels the name of the translator, along with that of the author. Both houses also give prominence to biographical material about the translator and the author.4 2 TRANSLATION, SUBTITLING, AND TOKYO PLACEMAKING 51

Translators know all too well that many readers (professional literary critics among them) naively view a translation as a kind of reproduction of the work as it was originally written, as if the task of the translator is just to mechanically replace the words of one language with those of another. At the same time, there are those who scorn a translation as somehow defiling the original work. “We read translations all the time,” Grossman writes,

but of all the interpretive arts, it is fascinating and puzzling to realize that only translation has to fend off the insidious, damaging question of whether or not it is, can be, or should be possible. It would never occur to anyone to ask whether it is feasible for an actor to perform a dramatic role or a musi- cian to interpret a piece of music. Of course it is feasible, just as it is possible for a translator to rewrite a work of literature in another language. … And the very concept of world literature as a discipline fit for academic study depends on the availability of translations. (2010, 12–13)

It is fair to say that readers should be able to rely on translators to facili- tate close engagement with the work being translated—while keeping in mind that the words on the page (or the digital screen) in front of them have been filtered through the translator’s understanding of that work and reflect his or her own use of language. I respect Venuti’s point that “[t]ranslation radically decontextualizes a foreign text by uprooting it from the literary traditions and practices that not only give rise to it, but make it meaningful to foreign readers who have read widely in the foreign language and literature” (2013a, 187). But, I think that a person who has only read a (good) translation and one who has only read the original should be able to find common ground when discussing “the work.”5 Venuti further says that “a scholarly apparatus might help immensely in compensating for the loss of context” (ibid., 188). Publishers are cogni- zant of the fact that many readers resist such an apparatus (especially when it takes the form of footnotes or endnotes), but—at least in the case of contemporary Japanese literature—translators are implicitly encouraging readers to expand the scope of their Japan-related knowledge and to at least do a quick web search as a way to fill in the gaps in the knowledge they already have. As a topic of scholarly inquiry, cinematic subtitling has so far attracted only a fraction of the attention that literary translation has. Two of the most important works on the subject to date are Cinema Babel: Translating 52 B. E. THORNBURY

Global Cinema (Nornes 2007) and Subtitles: On the Foreignness of Film (Egoyan and Balfour, eds. 2004). Just as Venuti has argued that a form of cultural “violence” is enacted in the name of literary translation (see, for example, Venuti 1995), Nornes contends that those who craft subtitles for films

accept a vision of translation that violently appropriates the source text, and in the process of converting speech into writing within the time and space limits of the subtitle, they conform the original to the rules, regulations, idioms, and frame of reference of the target language and its culture. It is a practice of translation that smooths over its textual violence and domesti- cates all otherness while it pretends to bring the audience to an experience of the foreign. (2007, 155)

On this score, cinematic subtitling and literary translation merge: “The peculiar challenges posed by subtitles and the violence they necessitate are a matter of course; they are variations of the difficulties in any translation” (ibid.). Like Venuti, Nornes also draws attention to the cloak of invisibility under which the practitioner of cinematic subtitling works. Those who subtitle films often do not get any onscreen credit at all. “The practice of subtitling has been even more obscured than the translation of written, printed texts” (2007, 158), he writes.

Indeed, most people probably have never thought of subtitling as translation. There is no question that English-language criticism about foreign cinema has taken the mediation of subtitles entirely for granted. … It has been noted more than once that the unlucky translator is an author but not The Author, that her translation is a work but not The Work. But even this dynamic is absent from both popular and scholarly discourses on the cinema. This absence speaks doubly of the dominance of the image and the utter suppression of the subtitler’s central role in enabling a film’s border crossing. (Ibid., 158–9)

Nornes speaks from direct experience: a professor of Asian cinema, he has also written the subtitles for commercially released films. Audience resistance to subtitled film is perhaps the foremost issue surrounding subtitling. “Spectators often find cinema’s powerful sense of mimesis muddied by subtitles, even by skillful ones,” Nornes maintains (2007, 1). “And dubbing is simply beyond the pale. The original, foreign, 2 TRANSLATION, SUBTITLING, AND TOKYO PLACEMAKING 53 object—its sights and its sounds—is available to all, but it is easily obscured by the graphic text or disconnected speech through which we necessarily approach it. Thus, the opacity or awkwardness of film translation easily inspires rage” (ibid.). American audiences are famously resistant to subtitled film. The president of Exhibitor Relations Co., Inc., a long-established enterprise that tracks the movie industry, perhaps sums it up best: “American audiences generally don’t want to go to the movies to read. They’d rather the experience flow over them, be spoon-fed rather than interactive. Reading dialogue takes them out of the movies, they say, shattering the illusion” (quoted in Rich 2004, 161–2). Even if viewers do accept the “alien” presence of words superimposed on the screen, they are easily put off by the limitations of subtitles, which by definition require “condens[ing] several lines of dialogue into brief textual snippets timed to the flow of the images” (Naficy 2004, 143). Subtitles are almost exclusively associated with a film’s dialogue and narration: “The presence of subtitles on a film screen might suggest that the only thing requiring translation is the words, as if images were somehow universally intelligible” (Egoyan and Balfour 2004, 26)—which, it goes without saying, is not the case. A single example—one that also happens to be related to Tokyo’s shitamachi—will suffice. In one of the first frames of Kōji Fukada’s Hospitalité, the camera lingers momentarily on a street sign marking the Kinshichō train station (along with other street signs pointing the way toward the nearby neighborhoods of Asakusabashi, Oshiage, and Kameido) in order to geographically orient those watching the film. Theshitamachi setting that these signs indicate to viewers who are already familiar with Tokyo is then confirmed as the audience’s gaze is directed to a narrow street of older two-story homes, some of which have modest ground-floor businesses—such as the Kobayashi family’s residence and print shop, where the majority of the film’s action takes place. There is no way to communicate to those who are not familiar with Tokyo the sociocultural implications of the shitamachi setting that underpin Hospitalité. The viewer of subtitled film has the images, but may not be able to understand the significance of what is being shown. On the other hand, the reader of translated fiction is given words, but may nevertheless not have enough information to be able to “see” the images that the words are meant to evoke. The issue of “domestication” versus “foreignization” frequently comes up in discussions of both literary translation and cinematic subtitling. Venuti, who made the concepts central to debates in the field of transla- 54 B. E. THORNBURY tion theory and practice, has defined the domesticating process as “the assimilation of the source text to what is intelligible and interesting to readerships in the receiving culture” (2013b, 37). In contrast, a foreignizing approach militates against assimilation—taking the readers outside of what might be called their linguistic and cultural comfort zone.6 However, target audiences are neither monolithic nor static with respect to their knowledge and understanding, not to mention their receptiveness to border-crossing fiction and film. Framing the conversation in terms of cultural references, as I do below, transcends the domestication/foreignization dichotomy—offering an equally or, perhaps, even more productive approach to analyzing the placemaking function of translated fiction and subtitled film (see Thornbury 2017, 135).

Cultural References and Tokyo Placemaking “In the context of a world which is, indeed, increasingly interconnected,” Doreen Massey has written, “the notion of place (usually evoked as ‘local place’) has come to have totemic resonance” (2005, 5). The data of the analysis in this section are cultural references, a term used in the field of translation studies for elements of a text that call forth the totemic resonance of place to which Massey refers. Cultural references, to use Harald Olk’s definition, are “those lexical items in a source text which, at a given point in time, refer to objects or concepts which do not exist in a specific target culture or which deviate in their textual function significantly in denotation or connotation from lexical equivalents available in the target culture” (2013, 346). The definition works for film as well, where cultural references are transmitted aurally (as words used in the dialogue and narration) and by means of the visual and even sonic imagery. Representing “knowledge assumed to be possessed by readers familiar with the society and culture associated with the source text,” cultural references “can range from all manner of place names and place-related phrasing to the names of real or fictional people, businesses, and institutions; elements of cuisine; household objects; and features of everyday life” (Thornbury 2017, 133). If fiction and film literally and figuratively map the city, cultural references are the data points that define the contours and fill in the details of those maps. While there is currently no English-language compendium of Japanese cultural references equivalent to The Routledge Dictionary of Cultural References in Modern French (Mould 2011), compilations such as the Routledge Handbook of Japanese 2 TRANSLATION, SUBTITLING, AND TOKYO PLACEMAKING 55

Culture and Society (Bestor et al., eds. 2011), The Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture (Sugimoto 2009), and the Dictionary of Japanese Culture (Kojima and Crane 1987) help serve a similar function.7

Tokyo-Area Cultural References When the ferry transporting the goat-turned-monster-man of Hideo Furukawa’s “Model T Frankenstein” docks at Tokyo’s Takeshiba Pier, the narrator drily observes: “From the point of view of tertiary Tokyo, this mainland is where the primary and secondary Tokyos are. Right? If one accepts the existence of the tertiary, won’t there also necessarily be a primary and a secondary?” (2015 [2010], 10). Furukawa’s primary, secondary, and tertiary Tokyo, as noted earlier, is a clever, if somewhat mocking, formulation of Tokyo Metropolis, the official English-language designa- tion for Tōkyō-to, as Japan’s capital and one of the country’s forty-seven prefectures is called in Japanese. It is also a perfect example of a cultural reference that demands from readers at least a basic familiarity with the tripartite components of Tokyo as a geographic entity.8 Tokyo Metropolis comprises, at its core, the twenty-three wards of central Tokyo, with a population of over 9.2 million. Approximately 4.2 million people reside in the twenty-six incorporated cities, three towns, and one village of the Tama area, which extends westward from the urban center. About 27,000 people reside on Tokyo’s Pacific Ocean Izu and Ogasawara island chains. The encompassing Tokyo megalopolis—with a total of some 35 million people (twenty-eight percent of Japan’s entire population)—includes all of Tokyo Metropolis, along with three other prefectures: Chiba, to the east; Saitama, to the north; and Kanagawa, to the south (see http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/ENGLISH/ABOUT/ HISTORY/history02.htm). Hailing from Hachijōjima in the Izu chain, the monster-man-goat of Furukawa’s story is, thus, a resident of Tokyo. While the three geographic sectors of Tokyo Metropolis are never actually ranked for the record in order of prestige, saying “Tokyo” when referring to Japan’s capital is generally assumed to signify, first, the twenty-three wards (what Furukawa meant when he wrote “primary” Tokyo); next, the wards plus Tama (“secondary” Tokyo); and, finally, the wards plus Tama plus the island chains (“tertiary” Tokyo). “Model T Frankenstein” uses the character of the island-born monster-man-goat to critique common misunderstandings about Tokyo as a spatial construct and, by extension, about the nature of 56 B. E. THORNBURY

Japanese identity—points readers will miss unless they understand the Tokyo-area cultural references that are the foundation on which the story rests. If cosmopolitan consumers of fiction can be expected to have a basic knowledge of New York and London geography, for instance, the translators and publisher of The Book of Tokyo: A City in Short Fiction might rea- sonably think: Why not expect a basic knowledge of Tokyo geography, too? If I were to compile a dictionary focusing exclusively on Tokyo-area cultural references, I would begin by dividing them into three main categories: (I) place names, (II) points and lines in the transportation network, and (III) other elements of the cityscape. Place names would include the following subsections: (1) businesses, institutions, and other manmade landmarks within Tokyo; (2) central Tokyo wards and neighborhoods; (3) cities and islands within the administrative jurisdiction of the Tokyo Metropolis; (4) greater Tokyo (locations within the administrative jurisdiction of other prefectures); (5) mountains within or visible from Tokyo; (6) Tokyo parks; and (7) Tokyo waterways and bridges. Points and lines in the Tokyo transportation network would comprise (i) airports, (ii) streets and highways, (iii) train, subway, streetcar (tram), and monorail lines, and (iv) train, subway, streetcar (tram), and monorail stations. Other elements of the Tokyo cityscape would consist of (a) generic fixed elements and (b) “random” elements. Elaborating here on a few of the entries that would be found within these main categories and subsections, I begin by immediately calling attention to the frequent appearance of Shinjuku and Shibuya in Tokyo fiction and film—a reflection of the fact that the neighborhoods around Shinjuku Station (in Shinjuku-ku, or “Shinjuku Ward”) and Shibuya Station (in Shibuya-ku, or “Shibuya Ward”) in west-central Tokyo are the city’s most intensively concentrated zones of commerce, entertainment, and transportation.9 They are prominent nodes of urban mobility and social encounter. In Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Tōru takes his uncle’s suggestion to “stand on a street corner somewhere day after day and look at the people who come by there” (1997 [1994–1995], 328). The assumption is that being out in the city among the crowds may help Tōru clarify his thoughts. Positioning himself in a plaza with heavy foot traffic near Shinjuku Station (said to see more passengers per day than any other in the world) eventually leads to his life-altering encounter with the woman called Nutmeg. Shibuya would have been an equally good choice. Made famous worldwide in photographs and video loops of the massive numbers of young people (especially) endlessly filling and empty- 2 TRANSLATION, SUBTITLING, AND TOKYO PLACEMAKING 57 ing its intersecting crosswalks in time to the cycles of green and red traffic signals, Shibuya is Tokyo’s focal point of trendy fashion packaged all too often with the sexual objectification and exploitation of young women. In Kirino’s Real World, Kirarin, who is still just a teenager, recalls that when she was just in her first year of high school “middle-aged guys in Shibuya used to call out to me, trying to pick me up” (2008 [2003], 178). Marking the dark side of urban life more than any other Tokyo neighborhood, Kabukichō, which borders the plaza in front of Shinjuku Station, has a notable currency in Tokyo fiction. The intensity of criminal activity and violence that unfolds behind the unmarked (or deceptively marked) doors of this adult-entertainment district has penetrated the urban imaginary. In Kirino’s OUT, Kabukichō is “chaotic and seamily hedonistic” (2003 [1997], 399), the place where the murderous Satake has built up a small gambling and sex-work empire that ensnares Yayoi’s husband, Kenji. For the banker Katagiri in Murakami’s “Super-frog Saves Tokyo” (2002, “Kaeru-kun, Tōkyō o sukū” 1999), Kabukichō is “a labyrinth of violence: old-time gangsters, Korean mobsters, Chinese mafia, guns and drugs, money flowing beneath the surface from one murky den to another, people vanishing every now and then like a puff of smoke” (2002b [1999], 118). In Nakamura’s The Thief, Kabukichō is where the pickpocket narrator climbs the stairs inside of a building past landings “filthy with dirt and grit” (2012 [2009], 125). Entering an unmarked steel door, he comes upon a nightmare scene of sex-and-drugs: “We passed a woman being strangled … a man being licked all over by a woman. One lone woman was having convulsions on the floor” (ibid., 126–7).10 West of Shibuya and Shinjuku, Setagaya Ward communicates a mon- eyed and media-savvy sense of “cool” success—the home of TV scriptwriter Hideo Harada in Yamada’s Strangers. Suginami Ward, which borders Setagaya to the north, conveys a similarly prosperous feeling—a place where “[n]ice-looking families” drive “expensive foreign cars” (Kirino 2008 [2003], 3), in the words of Real World’s Ninna Hori, a member of the group of friends that includes Kirarin. Shinagawa, on the southeastern side of the central city, is a kind of anonymous zone where high-rise office buildings, hotels, and condos have taken root near the train station. The atomistic, Shinagawa condo-tower lifestyle is rendered through the narrator and her cat in Inaba’s “Morning Comes Twice a Day” and Murakami’s “Where I’m Likely to Find It” (2006, “Doko de are sore ga mitsukarisō na basho de” 2005). Going further out from Shinagawa, life on the periphery of the city’s wealthier enclaves is geo- 58 B. E. THORNBURY graphically underscored, for instance, in Ota Ward, the location of the rundown accommodations occupied by the stalker Hikuma in Kōji Suzuki’s “Beyond the Darkness” (2014, “Yami no mukō” 1998). The extraordinary interconnectedness of the metropolitan area’s rail lines is a defining element of Tokyo urban life. The train, subway, streetcar (tram), and monorail lines that make up the system and the stations that are its connecting points are essential to the map-making and map-reading functions of Tokyo fiction and film. The Tokyo-based designer of train stations who is the title character of Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage stands in awe of the system’s extent and complexity: “A number of railroad lines cross [Shinjuku Station], the main ones being the Chuo line, Sobu line, Yamanote line, Saikyo line, Shonan- Shinjuku line, and the Narita Express. … In addition, there are two private rail lines, the Odakyu line and the Keio line, and three subway lines plugged in, as it were, from the side” (2014 [2013], 360). More than any other, the Yamanote line—which runs in a closed loop around and through the central city (with trains on one set of tracks moving clockwise and on the other counterclockwise)—represents Tokyo’s transportation network and, in many respects, the city itself.11 It plays a part in work that includes The Thief, “My Slightly Crooked Brooch,” and Hou’s film Café Lumière. In “Model T Frankenstein,” the first thing the monster-man-goat does when he arrives in central Tokyo is make his way to Hamamatsuchō Station and get on the Yamanote line. He is not riding the rails just to familiarize himself with the city. Having been held captive on his home island and then shipped to central Tokyo in a container (in which he transforms from powerless goat to powerful monster-man), he slaughters random riders on a Yamanote train and, Frankenstein-monster- like, becomes a man of the city created from his victims’ various append- ages. The Yamanote line embodies Tokyo as a geographic entity through its speed and comprehensiveness. It is a cultural reference that, like the other examples given, is essential to an understanding of the mapping function of Tokyo fiction and film.

Cultural References in Context: Parade and Hospitalité A distinctive characteristic of the English-language translation of Shūichi Yoshida’s Parade and the subtitled version of Fukada’s Hospitalité is the significant number of cultural references that are left “as is”—insofar as they remain untranslated, unsubtitled, and unexplained. I do not regard 2 TRANSLATION, SUBTITLING, AND TOKYO PLACEMAKING 59 this as a matter of forcibly pushing readers and viewers outside of what is assumed to be their linguistic and cultural comfort zone into the “for- eignized” terrain of the work in its original form. Rather, I view the decision to retain a greater number of unmediated cultural references than might have once been regarded as acceptable to the reader or viewer as an action taken on behalf of a new kind of cosmopolitan consumer of media in all forms. Such a consumer seeks texts that offer a more direct, authentic, and intense relationship between authors/directors and their cross- border readers/viewers—a relationship that is being facilitated by those who translate and subtitle works of literature and film and those who publish and distribute those works. Parade and Hospitalité presuppose a high degree of familiarity with Tokyo urban space—so much so that it can be surmised that not so long ago the two works would not have been acquired, for example, for U.S. publication or distribution, at least not by non-Japan-specialist entities (Vintage in the case of Parade and Film Movement in the case of Hospitalité). However, Vintage, a division of the global publishing giant Random House, felt confident in attempting to follow up on its success a few years prior with Yoshida’s novel Villain. And, Film Movement, “a North American distributor of award-winning independent and foreign films” (https://www.filmmovement.com/about-us) established in 2002,12 has cultivated a viewership that is receptive to the releases that it scouts from around the world.

The Densely Networked Tokyo of Parade The five characters—four twenty-somethings and one eighteen-year-old— who are the narrators of Parade occupy a two-bedroom apartment in the Chitose Karasuyama neighborhood of Setagaya Ward. Yoshida pinpoints the location of their residence at the beginning of the first chapter, as twenty-one-year-old university student Ryōsuke Sugimoto philosophically reflects on the smoothly flowing traffic along ̄koKyu ̄shū Kaidō, a major thoroughfare that runs past the apartment building. Preferring the autonomy of travel by car—albeit a barely functioning one—to a train system to which he has yet to acclimate himself, the Kyūshū-born-and-raised Ryōsuke observes that when he is “driving from Chitose Karasuyama to my college in Ichigaya, the ten-kilometer mark is exactly in front of Shinjuku Station” (Yoshida 2014 [2002], 5). In having Ryōsuke view Shinjuku Station from the outside as an abstract indicator of distance rather than from the inside as integral to his experience of life in Tokyo, 60 B. E. THORNBURY

Yoshida constructs a character who dwells in but does not quite feel at home in the city. Ryōsuke is not unique: each of the characters in Parade seeks an existential belongingness within a Tokyo setting that Yoshida presents with geographic precision and specificity. Gabriel’s translation retains the impact of that precision and specificity by leaving place names in their original Japanese form or by just giving a brief explanation, as when he attaches the word “boulevard” to Kyūkōshū Kaidō.13 When Ryōsuke’s car stalls in front of the landmark Alta building in Shinjuku, two tough- looking guys step forward to help him on his way—guys who give off an air of being “from Saitama City, or maybe Nagareyama City in Chiba” (Yoshida 2014 [2002], 6). Associating the men with these (peripheral) greater-Tokyo-area locations means that they are not effete city fellows. Ryōsuke’s helplessness is a chance for them to display their brawn on the urban stage. The deed done, they “hurried off in the direction of Kabukicho,” to which Gabriel appends “the red-light district” (ibid.)—in part to make absolutely sure that this key cultural reference will be understood by readers and in part because the appositive “red-light district” is commonly used by translators when Kabukichō is mentioned. The young narrators of Parade see themselves as mobile, and view their lives spatially. Who they are is defined by where they go. With the exception of their apartment-mate Kotomi, they range widely,14 going to and from Tokyo neighborhoods and parts of the city that include Akasaka, Aoyama, Ebisu, Ginza, Harajuku, Hatagaya, Iidabashi, Daikanyama, Daita, Dōgenzaka, Ginza, Golden Gai, Harumi, Kioizaka, Nishi Kokubunji, Omotesandō, Roppongi, Sasazuka, Soshigaya-Ō kura, Shibuya, Shimokitazawa, Shinjuku, Shinjuku 2-chōme, Takaido, Tama New Town, Tsukiji, Yotsuya, and Yūtenji. They ride the Chūō, Keiō, Odakyū, Yamanote, and Yūrakuchō train lines and travel by car along the Metro Expressway, Route 20, and Kannana, Kanpachi, Setagaya, and Yasukuni highways and avenues. They hang out at Bajikōen [inaccurately transcribed as Bashikōen], Hibiya, Inokashira, Kinuta, and Yoyogi parks. Other points of reference that Yoshida uses to map their movement through the city include the Imperial Palace moat, the Budōkan arena, Tokyo DisneySea resort, Isetan department store, the skyscrapers of Shinjuku, the campuses of Sophia University and Nihon University’s College of Commerce, the Capitol Tōkyū and New Ō tani hotels, and Japan’s State Guest House. 2 TRANSLATION, SUBTITLING, AND TOKYO PLACEMAKING 61

As this extensive set of place names shows, the narrators of Parade have spatially tapped into many of Tokyo’s most vibrant sectors. Theirs is a densely networked Tokyo that speaks to the way urban youth in Japan view their lives—always in motion and in synch with the trends. The numerous Tokyo-specific cultural references in the novel help create a sense of the characters’ direct engagement with the city—a sense of direct engagement also sought by many readers of translated Tokyo fiction.

Hospitalité’s Shitamachi in a Postmodern, “Skytree” Tokyo The looming singularity of Tokyo’s Skytree tower (nearing completion at the time of filming) stands out as a significant cartographic—and cultural—reference point in Hospitalité. According to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the 634-meter-high digital broadcasting communications tower is the world’s tallest—surpassing Guangzhou’s Canton Tower by thirty meters and Toronto’s CN Tower by eight-one meters (http://skyscrapercenter.com/buildings?list=tallest-towers). If the earth’s tallest towers and buildings were grouped together, Skytree ranks second in height after Dubai’s Burj Kalifa, an office, apartment, and hotel edifice that tops out at 828 meters—which is to say, over a vertical half-mile. Not far from the Kinshichō neighborhood where the narrative of Hospitalité unfolds, Skytree symbolizes a globalized, postmodern Japan embodied in the array of technologies that enabled and motivated the tower’s construction. Situated on the east side of the Sumida River and a mere kilometer from Asakusa, the nucleus of Tokyo’s geographically real and culturally imagined shitamachi, the tower also asserts the historical significance of Tokyo’sshitamachi in understandings of the city. It domi- nates Tokyo’s skyline as both an emblem of the digital age and as a kind of latter-day Ryōunkaku, the twelve-story, “cloud-scraping” brick tower that, until its demolition following the 1923 earthquake (when the upper portion broke off), drew visitors to Asakusa as the tallest structure in Japan—and all of Asia. The basket-like design of Skytree and the ideas behind the tourist- oriented complex called Skytree Town at its base speak to the enthusiastic promotion by government officials and tourist industry publicists of Tokyo’s shitamachi as, in Paul Waley’s words, “a space of communal memory and historical identity” (2002, 1533). The aim of Skytree planners, according to the tower website, was to “produc[e] a community brand transmitting new local values to the world by generously introducing facilities and functions that will manifest the charm of the shitamachi spirit and 62 B. E. THORNBURY produce a synergy effect.” Despite the information that “Shitamachi means traditional old town area with [an] Edo atmosphere” (http://www.tokyo- skytreetown.jp/english/), the somewhat obscure references to “community brand” and “synergy effect” position Skytree within a postmodern shitamachi that has been conceptually extended far beyond a relatively small geographic section of Tokyo. To again draw on Waley’s analysis,

With the material prosperity of contemporary Japan, the Shitamachi that was marginalized can now be celebrated. It can be celebrated for its associations with the Tokugawa capital of Edo, a link that is easily translated into patterns and styles commodified and sold in the marketplace of national and international tourism. … Shitamachi life can be seen as simpler and happier, a more feminine space of community as against the masculine world of corporate life. It is a part of the memory, a place absorbed into the mind and applied anywhere one wants it to be or nowhere at all. It is a space of the imagination. (Waley 2002, 1548)

Like the characters in Parade, those in Hospitalité are groping for an existential belongingness, but they are already situated in a place—Tokyo’s shitamachi—that is supposed to be able to give them the sense of belongingness they seek. As noted earlier in this chapter, in one of the film’s first frames, the camera pauses for a few moments on street signs pointing out Kinshichō Station and showing the way to nearby districts before transi- tioning to a narrow street of older, two-story structures—including the one where the Kobayashi family lives and runs its second-generation print shop. The location is not explained through subtitling, but the knowl- edgeable viewer immediately perceives that the setting is Tokyo’s shitamachi. Access to the Kobayashis’s living quarters is through their ground-floor print shop—as is access to the room set aside for a live-in print-shop employee. Having a live-in employee is a throwback to an earlier era and further amplifies the film’s shitamachi setting as a place that embraces the past even within twenty-first-century, world-city Tokyo. The Kobayashis’s business survives only because of the speed and flexibility of the services it offers. The precariousness of small shitamachi businesses—at least one of the printing machines stands unused at the beginning of the film—in the internet age is driven home when the live-in worker collapses on the job. The brief, but significant, appearance of Skytree inHospitalité instanti- ates the postmodern city—with shitamachi conceptually at its core. The Kobayashi family’s Kinshichō neighborhood potentially exemplifies a Tokyo where signals of social inclusion and friendship can figuratively, if 2 TRANSLATION, SUBTITLING, AND TOKYO PLACEMAKING 63 not literally, be transmitted to points near and far—and received from points near and far. In their direct, relatively unmediated handling of Tokyo-specific cultural references, both Parade and Hospitalité transcend the domestication/foreignization dichotomy. For the reader of fiction and viewer of film, a new kind of process is underway in which what is already familiar about Tokyo is becoming more so, and what is not yet familiar is becoming less so.

Misreadings, Omissions, and Inconsistencies Matthew Strecher’s praise for the accuracy and high quality of Jay Rubin, Philip Gabriel, and Alfred Birnbaum’s English-language renditions of Haruki Murakami’s stories and novels (see note 5) can be extended to the body of work produced by the expanding corps of talented people who translate fiction and subtitle film from Japan. However, problems of accuracy and completeness do exist, and I would like to say a few words about occasional misreadings, omissions, and inconsistencies that relate in particular to Tokyo place names—and that undermine the placemaking function of translated fiction.15 Students of Japanese well know that it is risky to guess the reading of a place name by simply looking at the kanji used to write it. The reading may be logical, yet still incorrect. The Devotion of Suspect X stands out in this respect. On the very first page of the translation, Seicho Garden Park (Higashino 2011 [2005], 1) should have been Kiyosumi Garden Park. Perhaps Kamedo (ibid., 47) was just a typographical error for Kameido. Instead of specifying Morishita Station, as Higashino does in the Japanese edition (2005, 66), the translators simply reduce it to “the subway station” (Higashino 2011 [2005], 48)—a problem in a work that rests on pinpointing exact locations. What should have been Kōtō Ward is incor- rectly transcribed as Edo Ward (ibid., 50) and, as mentioned in the previous chapter, what should have been Hamachō Station is given as Hamamatsu Station (ibid., 112). Inconsistency is an issue, too: in a passage relating to where the deceased Shinji Togashi used to live, Nishi- Shinjuku is accurately translated as West Shinjuku (ibid., 35). However, two lines later, the Japanese term Nishi-Shinjuku is used, and a few pages further on it reverts to West Shinjuku (ibid., 47). The point here is not to dwell on a few mistakes when so much else is correct. Rather, it is to say that misreadings and other problems are of consequence in works that map a geographically real Tokyo. Tokyo place 64 B. E. THORNBURY names matter, just as the place names of London, Paris, and New York matter in fiction that maps those places. Readers may rightly be puzzled to find in a highly charged scene inThe Thief a reference to “the coin lockers in front of the ticket gate for the Yamanouchi line” (Nakamura 2012 [2009], 198)—when it should have been the Marunouchi line (Nakamura 2009, 162). (“Yamanouchi” is a garbling of Yamanote and Marunouchi— two of the major rail lines that run through Shinjuku Station.) They may be puzzled, too, when, in the translation of Yoshida’s Parade, they find Chidori Karasuyama (Yoshida 2014 [2002], 187) instead of Chitose Karasuyama, “Kiyomi” (ibid., 214) instead of Harumi, and, as already mentioned, “Bashikoen” (ibid., 215) instead of Bajikōen. Misreadings aside, there is potential confusion when, in the translation of Ishikawa’s Gray Men, the narrator is said to have taken the Chiyoda Line and then changed to the Keihin-Tōhoko line (2013 [2012], 21), when it should have been the other way around (see Introduction, note 21). The problem in all of these cases could have been remedied with more careful fact- checking and proofreading.

* * *

“Translation not only brings us the work of those who write in other languages,” Allen and Bernofsky observe in their introduction to In Translation: Translators on Their Work and What It Means, “it simultaneously reveals the limits of our own language and helps us move beyond them, incorporating new words, concepts, styles, structures, and stories” (2013, xviii). The cohort of skilled Japanese-to-English translators is growing and a concomitantly larger number of English translations of Japanese works is being published—and, in the case of subtitled film, being distributed. The range of cultural references being encountered in print and onscreen has widened considerably, and the Japanese-originating vocabulary of those who consume translated fiction and subtitled film has enlarged—and continues to do so. As readers and viewers are increasingly exposed to and gain familiarity with Japanese cultural references, the placemaking function of fiction and film that crosses Japan’s borders outward exponentially expands as well. Readers of Japanese-to-English translated literature and viewers of Japanese-to-English subtitled film know that more is expected of them— just as readers of novels and stories translated into Japanese (and viewers of films subtitled in Japanese) have long accepted the multilingual demands 2 TRANSLATION, SUBTITLING, AND TOKYO PLACEMAKING 65 made on them. I refer back to Goossen’s point about Japanese readers of translated work—and the level of comfort they generally feel when encountering English words and phrasing left “as is.” A good illustration of stepped-up linguistic expectations is found in Lydia Moëd’s translation of Kaori Ekuni’s 2007 story “Pikunikku” (2015, “Picnic”) in a scene in which the narrator runs his hand over grass and tries to describe the sensation. The first word that comes to his mind is the English word “tickle.” “As I skim my palm lightly over the grass, I think about the word in English. ‘Tickle’—what would that word be, precisely, in Japanese? Kusuguttai would be close to it … but it’s a little too rough to be called kusuguttai, this feeling” (Ekuni 2015 [2007], 13). These lines suggestively illustrate Rebecca Walkowitz’s concept of literature that is “born- translated,” wherein “translation functions as a thematic, structural, conceptual, and sometimes even typographical device” (2015, 4). It can be argued that the placemaking potential of any word or expression is most fully realized when the text in which it resides gets out into the world through translation into one or more other languages.

Notes 1. Much work has been published on the topic of Tokyo’s shitamachi, including, for example, Aoki and Nishizaka 2006. 2. Chronotope (literally “time space”) is a term coined by Mikhail M. Bakhtin in his 1975 collection of essays Voprosy literatury i estetiki (trans. The Dialogic Imagination, 1981). 3. By contrast, translators enjoy a much greater visibility in Japan, where “readers tend to select books based on their translators, something hard to imagine in a culture such as ours [in the U.S.] in which the name of the translator seldom registers in a reader’s mind” (Goossen 2013, 184). Murakami, for one, has achieved such renown as a translator (and, of course, as writer of fiction) in Japan that his name usually appears on the cover of books he translates “in print quite as large as that of the original author” (Strecher 2014, 235). 4. Some larger presses are slowly moving in the direction of giving more visibility to translators. Although Minotaur Books did not identify translators Alexander O. Smith or Elye J. Alexander on the dust jacket of The Devotion of Suspect X, it did devote paragraphs to both Higashino and Smith (though not to Alexander, who assisted Smith) on the inside back flap. 5. Opinions vary considerably on what constitutes a good translation, but there should at least be a basic level of accuracy. Matthew Strecher has 66 B. E. THORNBURY

described variations in the styles of Alfred Birnbaum, Phillip Gabriel, and Jay Rubin’s translations of Haruki Murakami (2002, xiii), while praising them as “unvaryingly accurate and well wrought” (2014, xi). 6. In actual practice the two approaches may overlap and be applied inconsis- tently. When the character Mikage in Banana Yoshimoto’s novel Kitchen (1993, Kitchin 1988) thinks to herself “Nanika omoikiri omoi mono ga tabetakute” and says out loud “Katsudon o kudasai” (1988, 135), Megan Backus translates the lines as follows: “I craved something heavy and filling, so I ordered deep-fried pork in broth over rice. ‘Katsudon, please,’ I said” (Yoshimoto 1993 [1988], 89). Retaining the Japanese word katsudon can be said to have a foreignizing effect, one that is domesticated for English-language readers with the detailed explanation “deep-fried pork in broth over rice.” Moreover, the use of italics for this and other Japanese terms carried over into the translated text amplifies the imputed foreignizing effect by visually setting the items apart from the rest of the non-italicized English-language text. It is interesting to see that in “Moonlight Shadow” (“Mūnraito shadou”), a story that is separate from the rest of the narrative of Kitchen but was published by Yoshimoto in conjunction with it, Backus translates “kakiagedon” (Yoshimoto 1988, 177) as “tempura on rice” (Yoshimoto 1993 [1988], 119). She does not keep “kakiagedon” at all and does not italicize tempura, the implication being that it is a term already well understood by readers of the English-language text. As Backus knows, kakiage is a particular type of tempura—usually a mélange of thinly cut vegetable strips and shrimp. (The don suffix indicates food served over rice in a bowl.) The more general word tempura was presumably judged by Backus to be an adequate translation of the more Japanese cuisine-specific term kakiagedon. Here, then, rendering kakiagedon as “tempura on rice” can be regarded as a simple case of domestication. 7. At times, a translator is permitted by his or her publisher to use footnotes or endnotes to elucidate cultural references—the kind of scholarly apparatus to which Venuti alluded. For example, Lawrence Rogers, translator and editor of Tokyo Stories: A Literary Stroll (2002), and Jay Rubin, editor of The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories (2018), include a glossary of Japanese terms at the end of those volumes. 8. Furukawa’s Japanese-language phrasing for primary, secondary, and tertiary Tokyo is “dai-ichi no Tōkyō,” “dai-ni no Tōkyō,” and “dai-san no Tōkyō” (2011 [2010], 205). Even though the phrasing appears to be Furukawa’s own invention, it constitutes a readymade cultural reference that reflects deeply rooted assumptions about the primacy of the central city within the geographic space of Tokyo. 9. See note 1 in the introductory chapter on the subject of central Tokyo’s twenty-three ku. On the first page of Kirino’sReal World, translator Philip 2 TRANSLATION, SUBTITLING, AND TOKYO PLACEMAKING 67

Gabriel lays down a gauntlet of sorts by retaining the ku in Suginami-ku, rather than saying Suginami Ward (or Suginami City)—or just Suginami, as other translators sometimes do. I view this as Gabriel’s notice to readers that they need to understand what ku means in the context of Tokyo geography—as much as they might already know what arrondissement means when reading fiction set in Paris. (Note: The English-language spellcheck function in Microsoft Word does not flagarrondissement .) It is also worth mentioning that most translators retain the Japanese terms for Tokyo’s smaller geographic divisions—such as the chō in Kabukichō (usually given as Kabukicho, without the macron)—rather than awkwardly rendering the place “Kabuki town,” for example. 10. Urban studies scholars, such as Hiroo Ichikawa, have researched and written about the history and development of Kabukichō. See, for example, Ichikawa (2003, 57–64). 11. For discussions relating to the history and significance of the Yamanote line, see Pendleton and Coates (2018) and Pendleton (2018a). See also Jennifer Coates’s essay (2018) on representations of the Yamanote line in film. 12. As Film Movement has noted on its website, “[m]ore than ever, film choices are dictated to audiences by a smaller and smaller group of major studios, deciding which films to release based on superficial metrics that leave quality out of the equation. We created Film Movement because the system of releasing independent, foreign and documentary films needed a change. We believe that the only way to change the system is to reach out to film fans directly, to make the acclaimed independent films we love available everywhere you want to see them. At its heart, Film Movement is dedicated to providing intelligent, beautiful and compelling art to ever- growing audiences who want more than the standard Hollywood fare” (http://www.filmmovement.com/aboutus/). 13. Similarly, Moshi Moshi, Asa Yoneda’s English translation of Banana Yoshimoto’s novel Moshimoshi Shimokitazawa, not only retains the Japanese telephone-greeting “moshi moshi” in its title, but also leaves unchanged the Japanese word for avenue in references to Chazawa-Dori (literally, “Chazawa avenue”). See, for example, Yoshimoto (2016 [2010], 6). 14. Kotomi Okochi deviates from the other mobile characters. Although she has a cellphone, she is determined to stay put in the apartment and wait for her boyfriend to call her. Her spatial stasis is the ultimate expression of a young person who is without direction despite all of the possibilities offered by the city around her. By the end of the novel, realizing the futility of waiting for a future that will never come to pass, she decides to return to her parents’ home in Hiroshima (see Yoshida 2014 [2002], 210). 68 B. E. THORNBURY

15. There are other reasons, of course, to critique translations. Amanda Seaman, for example, notes that in Alfred Birnbaum’s translation of Miyuki Miyabe’s 1992 novel Kasha (1996, All She Was Worth) “much of Miyabe’s lengthy discussion of personal finance” was left out by either the translator or the editor. She also points out that Birnbaum “inexplicably changed the names of some of the minor characters, although these names have clear symbolic importance for the author” (Seaman 2004, 158: note 6). In an article focusing on segments that Jay Rubin famously cut, rearranged, or altered when working on The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Kieran Robert Maynard (2013) even goes so far as to offer his own translation of the material. CHAPTER 3

Gender and Mobility: Tracking Fictional Characters on Real Monorails, Trains, Subways, and Trams

“I’ve taken the train to school ever since elementary school” (Kirino 2008 [2003], 148–50), recalls the eighteen-year-old Terauchi, a character whose fears, regrets, and deep-seated depression lead to her suicide in Real World. As a little girl on a thirty-five-minute train ride to the private school she attended in central Tokyo, “I’d squeeze myself into a space next to the door and stand there. With each station the number of passengers increased and I’d start to get squashed” (ibid.). It was a “cruel commute” (ibid., 149) during which she would get pushed and shoved accidentally (or at times deliberately). She holds memories of falling and hurting herself, getting sick to her stomach, and being wedged so tightly into the crowd of passengers that she could not extricate herself in time to get off at the right station—and “never once did any adult try to help me” (ibid.). The torment on the train morphs into something new even as she grows bigger and stronger: “men would surround me and when I couldn’t escape, they would feel me up … [and] it taught me a painful lesson—that adult men are dirty and my enemies” (ibid., 150). This chapter focuses on gender and mobility by tracking (in an analytical sense) fictional characters whose narrative trajectories are inscribed by and on Tokyo’s real network of rail lines. “[T]he train is not merely an indicator of industrial progress or a metaphor/symbol for the contradictions of modernity but also a subject worthy of cultural

© The Author(s) 2020 69 B. E. Thornbury, Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34276-0_3 70 B. E. THORNBURY analysis of all types” (Fraser and Spalding 2012, x). Perhaps more than anyplace else, Tokyo is a “city of trains” (see Grescoe 2012)1—reflected in the numerous ways that writers and filmmakers incorporate in their work representations of and references to Tokyo’s actual transportation infrastructure. It is an infrastructure in which multiple strands of the city’s gendered narratives find expression and one that frames and defines the city as a socially dynamic geographical entity. “Tokyo vehi- cles,” Alisa Freedman has written, “are social and cultural spaces … [that] provide a more distilled means of observing the effects of urban- ization than other public places afford. Behaviors and interactions not possible elsewhere occur inside passenger cars and in stations” (2011, 5).2 The stories, novels, and films discussed here literally and figuratively map the space in and around trains to reveal, shape, and construct understandings of gender. By so doing, they generate sharply articulated portraits and critiques of the rail-riding society they depict.3 Not unexpectedly, the alluring promise of mobility—in the general sense of being able to move freely and securely to one’s destination in both life and on the rails—frequently proves illusory or comes at a steep price for women in particular. That cities (and their transit systems) often “spell danger, disempowerment and deprivation for women but pleasure and excitement for men” (Ledwith et al. 2000, 7) applies to Tokyo as elsewhere. At the same time, there are glimmers in the work examined here of newly emerging interventions and choices—as well as the possibility of a counter-hegemonic discourse in which women resolutely assert their agency on a rail system built by and mostly for men. One of the most richly suggestive literary works focusing on Tokyo, gender, and mobility is Noboru Tsujihara’s story “My Slightly Crooked Brooch,” which I use to lay out the main points of the argument in the first section below. To broaden both the thematic and fiction-and-film scope of the discussion, I then turn briefly to several other key works (including Real World) in which characters embody issues of gender in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Japan as they use the Tokyo- area rail network. These include Banana Yoshimoto’s story “Newlywed” (1995, “Shinkonsan” 1993), Fuminori Nakamura’s novel The Thief, Shōsuke Murakami’s filmTrain Man, and Hsiao-Hsien Hou’s film Café Lumière. 3 GENDER AND MOBILITY: TRACKING FICTIONAL CHARACTERS ON REAL… 71

“My Slightly Crooked Brooch”: Modernity, Gender, and Tokyo’s Rail Lines “The intersections and mutual influences of ‘geography’ and ‘gender’ are deep and multifarious,” Doreen Massey has noted. “Each is, in profound ways, implicated in the construction of the other: geography in its various guises influences the cultural formation of particular genders and gender relations; [and] gender has been deeply influential in the production of ‘the geographical’” (Massey 1994, 177). “My Slightly Crooked Brooch” metaphorically maps gender onto geographic space through the travels of an iconic young couple—Ryō, the white-collar, corporate employee “salaryman” husband, and Mizue, the full-time homemaker wife.4 Ryō’s hour- plus daily commute by rail from their home in an affluent and scenic corner of the greater Tokyo metropolitan area to his office in the ̄ Otemachi district, part of the capital city’s nexus of corporate and financial power, spatially articulates his elite standing in society as a man of privilege and authority. The dependent position of the as-yet childless Mizue is also spatially articulated in her stay-at-home-in-the-suburbs status. Mizue, however, resists the (historically) passive role her husband assumes she will play after he tells her about an affair he has been having with a university co-ed named Maiko. As if outlining a routine business deal at the office, he suddenly announces to Mizue one evening that he plans to move into Maiko’s apartment in central Tokyo for one month, after which he promises to break off ties with Maiko, return home, and resume life with Mizue as before. Tsujihara structures the story around Mizue’s resistance, which takes the form of what can be construed as a masterful act of murderous revenge on Maiko that is plotted over a series of journeys Mizue makes by train between home and her target in the city’s canter. As already sketched out in the introductory chapter, they are journeys back and forth between Kataseyama Station (on the Shōnan Monorail line) in a quiet, out-of-the- way pocket of the historic seaside city of Kamakura, and Shōin Jinja-mae Station (on the Tokyū Setagaya tram line) just outside of the densely thriving residential, retail, and culturally cosmopolitan neighborhood of Sangenjaya—a stone’s throw from the hyper-commercial Shibuya section of Tokyo’s urban core. Mizue’s trips require transfers to the Yokosuka (or, alternatively, Tōkaidō) rail line and then onto the Yamanote and Den-en Toshi lines (and back again). Her travels even include passage on the Hanzōmon subway and the Keihin-Tōhoku and Negishi train lines. 72 B. E. THORNBURY

Tsujihara scrutinizes contemporary Japanese society through the three main characters of the story. He juxtaposes the brilliance of Japan’s twentieth-century technological achievements—manifested in what is probably the world’s most stunningly efficient (not to mention, almost incomprehensibly complex) urban transportation network— with the far less appealing side of a society that continues to foster and reward an embedded patriarchal system that all too often represses and humiliates women, even to the point of destructively pitting one against the other. When Maiko suddenly disappears one night, it is reasonable for the reader to assume that she is the victim of one of the “fatal accidents” that bring trains to a temporary standstill in the story. Whether she has been murdered or driven to suicide (or, perhaps, neither) is unclear. Before her possible death, Maiko is literally stalked by Mizue. In a way, she is treated the same way by her family—residents of Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four main islands, located in the Inland Sea at a considerable distance from Tokyo. With her graduation from university quickly approaching, her parents make the long trip (by train) to Tokyo to see her. Almost immediately afterwards, and within the timeframe of the story, they dispatch her brother on a visit there. The family members’ message is clear: they expect that Maiko will give up the autonomous, unfettered life she has enjoyed as a university student in the city. As soon as she has completed her studies, she is to return home and marry the man the family has designated for her. It is not a stretch of the imagination to say that Mizue, the wife who was so matter-of-factly cast aside, at least for the time being, by her husband Ryō, personifies a future that Maiko has every reason to fear. Maiko’s death, if it occurred and whatever hand Mizue may have played in it, easily fits the pattern of Tokyo’s tragically all too familiar incidents of suicide by rail—incidents that elicit collective groans of barely suppressed irritation directed at those desperate individuals who cause massive inconvenience when they interrupt the smooth flow of the transportation network by throwing their bodies into the path of the fast-moving machinery. Tsujihara may not absolutely clarify what happens to Maiko, though at the end of the story, when Ryō arrives home again, he discovers that Mizue is wearing what looks to be the expensive lapis lazuli brooch that he had bought as a gift for Maiko. Dumbstruck, he stares at the piece of jewelry. The story ends with Mizue asking in an eerily calm voice: “What’s wrong? Is it crooked?” (Tsujihara 2011 [2004], 230). Her presumed violence offers, though in an extreme and fictional way, the possibility of a 3 GENDER AND MOBILITY: TRACKING FICTIONAL CHARACTERS ON REAL… 73

counter-hegemonic discourse in which women use a transportation system assembled by—and in large measure for—men to wrest control from them. The possibility of such a discourse is a direct outgrowth of encounters that transpire within the space of the modern urban rail system. “Last April,” Tsujihara writes by way of explaining how Ryō and Maiko first met, “at the Tokyo Station Gallery, there had been an exhibition of a certain architect, which he stopped by to see on his way home from work” (Tsujihara 2011 [2004], 205). Ryō notices a woman standing by herself at one of the displays, and reflexively projects his highbrow (befitting his executive status) erotic fantasies onto her: “Despite her casual attire, to him she looked for all the world like the geisha in Kaburaki Kiyokata’s famous print Tsukiji Akashicho. Her soft hair fell gently about her shoulders, swaying in the still air as if by some unseen breeze. … He was already talking to her before he thought to stop himself” (ibid., 206).5 They go their separate ways, but a week later he spots her again in the station con- course. An independent woman who apparently welcomes the attention of a somewhat older, seemingly well-established man, she accepts his pro- posal that they revisit the exhibition together. Not only does the woman look like a geisha to Ryō, but her name “Maiko” just happens to be a homonym for a word that means “geisha-in-training”—the young, lavishly attired, emblematic sexual-fantasy figure who is a holdover from a “traditional” Japanese culture of unquestioned male power, prestige, and privilege. Modernizing Japan, as James Fujii has observed, became “a nation built upon railways” (1999, 113), noting that

the railway cars that mediated the transitions from work-school-errands- and-pleasure to home also proved to be a form of subjection to a social space defined by the logic of capital. [The] railways dramatically redefined the way time and space were experienced by urban Japanese … serv[ing] not only the instrumental function of transportation, but also as a Lefebvrian space of cultural production. (Ibid., 108)

Railways, moreover, “dramatically increased the possibilities of encounters with strangers (a distinct feature of modern life)” (ibid., 123). The encounters did not take place just on the trains themselves. They also took place in the stations, which grew along with the expanding rail network in number, complexity (as hubs of commercial and even cultural activity), 74 B. E. THORNBURY and in terms of their significance as social spaces. Fujii’s reference to a fictional character who is “consumed both by the disconnected encounters he has with women on the train and around the station—the sightings, the overheard conversations—and the flights of fantasy they engender” (ibid., 125) calls to mind Ryō’s encounter with Maiko as a flight of fantasy on his part. What Peter Eckersall has written about Shinjuku Station also applies to Tokyo Station, where Ryō first meets Maiko:

As a mega-space for suburban workers entering Tokyo, [the station] was a medium for the exchange of bodies; workers pass through this liminal space crossing a threshold from urban domestic “bed towns” to the city where they resume company activities and services for the state. [The station] was (and remains) a space of transit for the ideology of postwar suburban values. (2011, 337–38)

Those who engage in company activities and services for the state are, for the most part, men in their role as the earners of income for families that live throughout the greater Tokyo metropolitan area. The flows and encounters taking place within the geographic framework of the transportation network are integral to the totality of the gendered urban narratives—both real and fictional—unfolding within modern and contemporary Japan. Whereas wives in Japan may use “traditional, samurai symbolism” when discussing their salaryman-husbands’ sanctioned roles as “protec- tors” of the household, the use of such vocabulary, as Ofra Goldstein- Gidoni has cautioned, does not mean that “Japanese are more traditional in their expectations about gender roles” (2012, 90–91). That said, however, Tsujihara uses Ryō’s view of Maiko-as-geisha to suggest that the salaryman’s perspective on ideal relations between men and women may indeed be as narrow as the “traditional” geisha trope would indicate. In short, Ryō proves himself an exceedingly poor judge of women in twenty-first-century Japan. He expected his “rooted” homemaker wife to respond to him with unprotesting acquiescence when he informs her about Maiko. Such an expectation is linked to the sexual attraction he immediately felt for the mobile Maiko in her passage through Tokyo Station. The adult Maiko in “My Slightly Crooked Brooch”—like the (shockingly) young Terauchi in Real World—exemplifies Freedman’s observation that “female mobility has become associated with sexuality 3 GENDER AND MOBILITY: TRACKING FICTIONAL CHARACTERS ON REAL… 75 in the Japanese cultural imagination and discourses about the city” and also points to “the role of mass transportation in constructing this notion” (2011, 25). All of the rail lines specifically mentioned in “My Slightly Crooked Brooch” concomitantly represent discrete lines in Tokyo’s gendered narratives. Each is replete with meaning and historical resonance for readers who know the city. Three in particular stand out. One is the Tōkaidō, Japan’s main rail artery. It symbolizes the nation’s highly networked railway infrastructure, and encapsulates the prerogatives and authority of corporate Japan.6 The Tōkaidō tracks, which were first laid down in the nineteenth century, follow centuries-old roadways connecting the present- day capital region with the political, financial, and cultural centers of Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe to the west. In Tsujihara’s story, the Tōkaidō, which carries commuters to and from Tokyo, is noted for giving passengers a “smooth” ride (2011 [2004], 204). Although not explicitly refer- enced by Tsujihara, the original Shinkansen (“bullet train”) is a super-smooth, super-express, long-distance Tōkaidō-line train. The start of Shinkansen service in 1964, like the opening of the Tokyo Olympics the same year, signaled Japan’s postwar recovery—and turned the world’s attention for the next two and a half decades to the nation’s seemingly unstoppable economic growth. The core customer of the Shinkansen (and of the Tōkaidō line in general, no matter the length or destination of the ride) was (and is) the male, white-collar, corporate employee—in other words, the salaryman. The salaryman who serves the corporation—and, by extension, the state—is in turn “served” by the full-time housewife who tends the couple’s (highly mortgaged) home and has primary responsibility for their children.7 Ryō and Mizue fit this pattern precisely, except that they do not have any children—at least not yet. The Shōnan Monorail also has a prominent role in “My Slightly Crooked Brooch.” Completed in 1970, it uses aerial-track technology developed in France. This monorail marks an expanded, “internationalized” segment of Japan’s domestic transportation system, signifying the worldwide reach of Japan’s industrial and corporate sector. Ryō conveys particular pride that he rides it: “I’ll be the only one of the 3,000 employees at my company … who commutes to work this way” (Tsujihara 2011 [2004], 204), he told Mizue some years earlier, at the point when he was sufficiently settled into his job that he and Mizue were ready to buy a house—the size, design, and location of which would be the outward manifestation of their socioeconomic standing. 76 B. E. THORNBURY

Even though Ryō takes palpable pleasure in being a client of the monorail, it does not have the same attraction for Mizue. As they make their way home on the night of Ryō’s announcement regarding Maiko, “[t]here were no seats in any of the three cars [of the monorail], crowded as they were with homebound businessmen” (Tsujihara 2011 [2004], 204). They have to stand, “mak[ing] an awkward grab for a hand strap” (ibid.). Moreover, the passenger cars of the Shōnan Monorail are prone to swaying—given that they are suspended from the top like ski lifts, a technology suited to the hilly Kamakura-area terrain. With his stable corporate job and, consequently, his recognized place in society, Ryō understandably relishes the fun, out-of-the-ordinary feeling of the monorail ride. For Mizue, however, the rocking motion of the cars mirrors and exacerbates her sense of unsteadiness and uncertainty—notably at the moment of her husband’s sudden revelation about Maiko: “As they swayed back and forth in the monorail car, [Ryō] told his wife of ten quiet years that he’d been having an affair for the past year. During dinner he’d been his usual self, remarking only about the lack of cilantro flavor in their meal” (ibid.). The third especially noteworthy example is the Tōkyū Setagaya tram line, which provides Ryō’s (and Mizue’s) access to the station closest to Maiko’s apartment. The only tram line besides the Toden Arakawa that still survives in Tokyo, the Tōkyū Setagaya stands in contrast to the “masculine” Shōnan Monorail and Tōkaidō lines as a “feminized” and aestheti- cized historical artifact—and as such it delights Ryō: “This train was a two-car affair, colorful and small like a toy” (Tsujihara 2011 [2004], 207). Just as he sees Maiko as a geisha-like plaything from the past, the tram line is for him a fittingly whimsical and historical conveyance that he uses to visit her. Even the neighborhoods that the tram line serves—and where Maiko lives—are, as Tsujihara writes, places with picture-book-like wind- ing and pathway-narrow streets that nostalgically recall earlier eras. The focus on gender in “My Slightly Crooked Brooch” extends to the realm of women’s outward silence in the face of assaults by men in crowded trains. Tsujihara carefully cultivates the point by establishing a context for Mizue’s silence in her everyday interactions. The reader learns early on that Mizue and Ryō’s ten-year marriage has been marked by politeness— devoid of real communication. “We’re always so considerate of each other” (Tsujihara 2011 [2004], 213), Mizue tells Ryō. On the surface, she seems to quietly accept her husband’s temporary defection to another woman, but her true violent feelings soon erupt in a miscarriage—the 3 GENDER AND MOBILITY: TRACKING FICTIONAL CHARACTERS ON REAL… 77 swift end of a pregnancy in its earliest stages, a pregnancy that would have elevated Mizue’s status from that of “just” a wife to being “fully certified” as a wife and mother. After cleaning up the blood, she stares out into the garden at birds looking for food: “It’s almost like they’re competing with each other, not that they’d know the difference” (ibid., 214), she says out loud, although there is no one to hear words that are an implicit commentary on her rivalry with Maiko for the attention and affection of Ryō. Tsujihara uses another male figure—a real-estate agent—to further underscore the issue of Mizue’s (and, in general, women’s) silence. Having secretly followed Ryō from his office building to his lover’s abode, Mizue proceeds to rent a vacant apartment in a neighboring building from which she can gaze directly into Maiko’s apartment. As a woman dependent on her husband’s income (who falsely represents herself to the real-estate agent as divorced and without relatives), Mizue does not have the power to sign the lease on her own. She needs a financial guarantor who will co- sign with her. The leering agent handling the lease agrees to let her have the apartment without a guarantor only if she promises to perform sexual favors for him. She is trapped. She has no choice but to quietly murmur her acquiescence. However, she cleverly saves herself by setting the date for delivery on the arrangement to just after she knows that the period of her husband’s tryst will be over. She will be finished with the apartment and will never have to actually endure the touch of the agent’s hand on her. Having established Mizue’s outward silence in the face of the psychological and verbal assaults meted out by her husband’s shocking announcement and the real-estate agent’s demand, Tsujihara amplifies the point when he moves the character into the public space of a rail car. As the story is rapidly closing in on its denouement, Mizue leaves the apartment from which she silently spied on Maiko and Ryō to go back home to Kataseyama. The Yokosuka line that she normally takes to Ō funa Station, where she transfers to the monorail, is far more crowded than usual because of a problem on the parallel Tōkaidō line. For women, hyper-crowded trains— ones in which it is literally impossible to move even a few inches while the vehicle is in motion—pose a particular kind of threat. And, indeed, for some thirty minutes of her ride, Mizue is repeatedly groped on her chest and thighs by a “young, foul-breathed man [who] got off at Hodogaya” (Tsujihara 2011 [2004], 226) Station. Gropers, chikan in Japanese, are figures of threat to women on trains. They are assailants with a privileged (that is to say, male) place in society. Chikan do their work in the most public arena possible—crowded trains (see, for example, Horii and Burgess 78 B. E. THORNBURY

2012). On a crowded commuter train, personal space collapses. It is body forced against body. And, it is in that environment that chikan go to work. Mizue silently endures the attack. The immediate question is: “Why?” Not crying out in public, though becoming less likely among younger women in such a situation, is behavior that accords with entrenched female norms of quiet passivity. By not shouting out, Mizue preserves the status quo. “My Slightly Crooked Brooch,” however, is not simply about women’s silence. It is also about how they find their voice—imagined even through violence. Before boarding the train, Mizue had observed the tears Maiko shed in response to her brother’s visit, the purpose of which was to make sure that she clearly understood that the time had arrived for her to leave the city to return home and marry according to her parents’ wishes. It is pressure that Maiko is hardly in a position to resist—certainly not if she wants to continue her current lifestyle (symbolized by a nice apartment in a nice part of town), which requires the kind of substantial financial resources that are not readily within the reach of a newly minted college graduate (especially one who is female, not to mention one who was entering the job market in the tight, early twenty-first-century economy). It can be said that accepting marriage in order to maintain at least a superficially equivalent lifestyle is akin to Mizue silently enduring the groper’s assault on the train. On the other hand, Tsujihara constructs in Mizue a woman who does find her voice through her resistance. She may have been publicly silenced by the expectation that women will be quietly passive. At the same time, though, the groper’s touch (like her husband’s words and those of the real-estate agent) is fuel to stoke the fire of her “private” resistance, which brought her onto the train in the first place. Unfortunately, to use her voice—which, in the context of this story, means getting back at men—Mizue has to reach the men through the other women who are close to them.8 It is not just Maiko on whom she (presumably) acts. Even though Mizue knows she will never have to actually endure the touch of the real-estate agent, she knowingly brings grief to his secretary in the course of buying the time she needs. When the agent catches sight of Mizue in the street waiting at the railway crossing a few days before the agreed-upon time, he reminds her of her promise. In response, Mizue tells him to get rid of his secretary. The agent foolishly interprets Mizue’s words to mean that she will henceforth “assist” him both within and outside of his storefront office. Mizue knows that the agent will behave as her husband did—that he, too, will summarily dismiss the woman who has long been loyal to him in order to replace her, 3 GENDER AND MOBILITY: TRACKING FICTIONAL CHARACTERS ON REAL… 79

temporarily or not, with a different woman, one whom he sees as more sexually desirable. Tsujihara plays the scene through to its logical conclusion: the agent’s laid-off secretary turns up a day or so later at the door of Mizue’s stake-out apartment, but is in the end too emotionally defeated to even knock, much less confront Mizue. The reader is left wondering if the second fatal accident on the train lines the night Maiko disappears may have been the suicide of that woman. Given how difficult it is for older women, especially, to find relatively good, well-paying jobs, the former secretary conceivably felt that her life was over when she lost her position in the real-estate office. The issue of women’s voice is directly linked to their mobility in “My Slightly Crooked Brooch.” Tsujihara introduces both Mizue and Maiko as women who, up until the events of the story transpire, did not possess cell phones—even in so cell-phone–saturated a society as Japan’s. As a housewife who was expected to stay close to home, Mizue would have communi- cated with the outside world through the couple’s landline. The house phone represents the housewife’s ties to the fixed space of the home. As part of her plan to keep watch on Ryo ̄ and Maiko, Mizue immediately acquires a cell phone—an unmistakable symbol of mobility. Having demanded that Ryo ̄ call her every evening that he is away, the newly mobile, cell-phone– carrying Mizue unsettles Ryo ̄ because he cannot be sure where she is. Maiko, too, gets a cell phone, but it is imposed on her by her family to keep track of her. The “geisha-like” Maiko was initially alluring to Ryo ̄ in part because she did not have a cell phone. Ryo ̄ saw her as an old-fashioned, voiceless—essentially, immobile—beauty. Tsujihara uses the cell phone as a symbol of women’s potential (in the case of Mizue) to be mobile and find their voice in contemporary society—as well as a tool used by others (in the case of Maiko) to try to rein in that mobility and suppress that voice.

Interventions and Choices When a groper assaults Mizue on the train, she remains silent. So, too, do those around her. The crowd wills itself not to notice the woman’s victimization, not to get involved. Artists such as Tsujihara use the emotional impact of their work to draw attention to society’s blind eye—and to press home the need for intervention. As Freedman has written, “[p]roviding a more affective experience of history is just one of literature’s many values” (2011, 19). The same can be said of film. This section broadens the thematic and textual scope of this chapter by first looking at three works 80 B. E. THORNBURY that reference train-riding in order to address—whether implicitly or explicitly—the need for interventions on behalf of those without a voice in society. It then looks at two other works that extend conversations about gender and mobility through their focus on the choices available to and made by rail-riding characters. The first example, already introduced at the beginning of this chapter, relates to Terauchi, who is perhaps the most compelling of the five main characters in Kirino’s Real World. Her experiences of being groped on the train are the culmination of a long chain of incidents during which, as she says, “never once did any adult try to help me” (Kirino 2008 [2003], 149). Unlike Mizue in “My Slightly Crooked Brooch,” however, she does not remain silent: “One day when I felt the perverts start to approach, I laughed out loud, this foolish laugh” (ibid., 151). Far from being a deliberately planned strategy, it is a wholly unexpected, reflexive response ema- nating from deep within her psyche. And it works. The men look “startled and scared” and they “edge away” (ibid.). But, in order to drive away her pursuers she has had to change herself by “acting like an idiot” (ibid.). Although the part of Real World that concerns what happened to Terauchi on the train when she was younger covers only a few pages, it is crucial to the meaning and impact of the novel as a whole. The urban train-riding public in Japan takes for granted the schoolchildren they see every day commuting on their own, choosing to believe that the very presence of the children proves the inherent safety of the system—and of Japanese society itself. Kirino’s fictional Terauchi is a wake-up call—structured as a set of events that lead to Terauchi’s complete loss of trust in the world around her, which, within the context of the novel, has failed to intervene.9 Nakamura’s The Thief offers another wake-up call—one growing out of an assault by a groper on a young girl in a “terribly crowded” (Nakamura 2012 [2009], 9) train (on the Keikyū line) in Tokyo. As in Real World, the scene is brief, but noteworthy—especially insofar as there is an intervention within the storyline, albeit by a man who is himself a criminal. “When I looked around the [train car,] I saw a man who seemed to be totally absorbed by something” (ibid., 10), says the master-pickpocket narrator of the novel. The man is “in a trance, eyes half closed, as he groped a woman’s body” (ibid.). The pickpocket regards gropers as falling into two categories: “ordinary people who have perverted tendencies, and people who are swallowed up by their perversion so that the boundary between fantasy and reality becomes blurred and then disappears completely” (ibid.). He avers that the focus of his attention is of the second type. 3 GENDER AND MOBILITY: TRACKING FICTIONAL CHARACTERS ON REAL… 81

Seeing that the victim is just a junior-high-school student, he makes his way through the crowd to the man. “I deliberately grabbed the man’s left wrist with my left hand. All his muscles suddenly jerked into life and then I felt him go limp, as though after a severe shock” (ibid.). Gripping the arm of the man, a thirty-something salaryman with a wedding ring on his finger, the pickpocket feels as if time slows down: “The man was trying to open his mouth to speak, as if he wanted to justify himself to me or to the world. It seemed like some malevolent spotlight was calling attention to his presence” (ibid., 11). When the train stops at the next station, the pickpocket silently mouths “Go!” and the man leaves, “thrust[ing] his way into the throng, wriggling and shoving people out of the way” (ibid.). Although hardly faint of heart, the pickpocket describes himself as feeling “revulsion” at the episode in which he intervened (ibid., 12). It is not that the pickpocket narrator of The Thief shows any feeling of warmth toward the girl he has just helped. He is not her protector in a conventional sense. He is a man whose primary interest is in exercising his own kind of power—an uncanny ability to blend into the crowd and take whatever he wants, especially from riders on crowded trains. His prey is other powerful men, those whose cash- and credit-card-laden wallets often hold, as he wryly notes, membership cards for exclusive sex clubs. Although his behavior deviates from society’s norms, within a world defined by patriarchal privilege (exercised in multiple settings), Nakamura’s pickpocket protagonist emerges as a tantalizingly ethical man, as illustrated when he intervenes on behalf of a young girl on the train. The central figure of Murakami’sTrain Man also intervenes against an assault by a man on a train-riding woman. The story of an isolated otaku “nerd”—the eponymous Train Man (Densha Otoko in Japanese)—who finds love with the help of his chat-room friends after a chance encounter with a beautiful young woman became well known in Japan through the popular film, a best-selling novel, and a widely watched television series. Urban legend even has it that the events actually took place, with the Train Man character coming to represent what Susan Napier refers to as “the ‘technologized masculinity’ of the otaku in as comfortable and appealing a form as possible” (2011, 155–56). It is literally on a train that Train Man crosses paths with the woman with whom he falls in love and who opens up to him the possibility of connectedness and inclusion.10 The precipitat- ing event involves an older, suit-wearing salaryman who drunkenly harasses and assaults several people, but especially targets a woman who sits reading a book close to where Train Man is also sitting. 82 B. E. THORNBURY

Etiquette on Tokyo trains, as elsewhere, means shunning eye contact. Passengers might be squeezed so close together that they are physically touching, and an exhausted passenger might fall asleep on someone’s shoulder, but the rule is to mind your own business. Like the other passengers in the same car, Train Man’s first instinct is to try to ignore what is going on (by turning up the earphone volume of the music he is listening to), but he quickly, though awkwardly, steps in to pull the man away from the frightened woman—and is in the next moment joined by a train conductor who subdues the assailant. His decision to go to the woman’s aid was an act of selflessness that was not motivated by any expectation of reward. By intervening he risked getting hurt. When the train comes to a stop at the next station, railway security personnel escort everyone involved to an office to take statements. The woman aided by Train Man tells him that she wants to send him a token of her appreciation and asks for his name and address. She is later dubbed Hermès by Train Man and the chat- room “friends” who coalesce around him, because the gift she selects for delivery is a teacup and saucer set from that luxury retailer. The very fact that she shops there indicates that she is a woman of money and sophisticated taste. The otaku figure in Murakami’s film is quite different from that of a salaryman like Ryō in “My Slightly Crooked Brooch.” The Ryō-like, stereotypical, career-successful (heterosexual) man wants to be near, hold, and “possess” a beautiful woman. But Train Man is a different sort of man-on-the-train—one who is uncertain and, though mobile, is not comfortable in his mobility. Before getting a makeover—a stylish new haircut and trendy clothes—at the behest of his chat-room friends, Train Man is socially rejected in the workplace (where he is left out of colleagues’ socializing), on the street (where distributors of product samples intended for fashionable young men ignore him), and on the train (where, when he clumsily drops his shopping bag at one point, others—especially young women—derisively laugh at him). Train Man may work in a corporate setting, but he is a backroom, systems-support guy. The location of his work- space outside of the main office area suggests that he is not directly engaged in his (anonymous) company’s core business. As the complement to the otaku-as-Train Man, Hermès simultaneously projects a progressive and retrograde image of the twenty-first-century Japanese woman—offering to audiences a character who both personifies aspects of and contrasts with Tsujihara’s Mizue and Maiko. The film implies that she is an executive in a big company—with the clothing, 3 GENDER AND MOBILITY: TRACKING FICTIONAL CHARACTERS ON REAL… 83 accessories, and general appearance to match. During the course of the film she travels abroad on business, and is shown speaking in English with business-suit–wearing male colleagues/clients outside the entrance to the corporate tower that houses the office where she works. At the same time, her quiet and demure demeanor, along with her unwaveringly “sweet” expression and tone of voice and her professed lack of technological know- how (despite her job, computers seem foreign to her) point to an old- fashioned, well-heeled hako-iri-musume (literally, daughter-put-in-a-box), the Japanese term for a young woman whose family has coddled and sheltered her from the harshness of the world. Although Hermès could undoubtedly afford her own apartment, she chooses to live at home with her wealthy parents. As she tells Train Man, she spends her free time going to expensive restaurants with her female friends. In praising Train Man for his courage in helping her during the incident on the train, Hermès significantly mentions that she is afraid when she rides the trains—meaning that she sees herself as a young woman vulnerable to predatory men. Two scenes—one depicting the assault directed at her on the train and, later, another showing her being verbally accosted by a group of loud young guys while waiting for Train Man in the central pedestrian plaza of Ebisu Garden Place (one of Tokyo’s posh retail and dining complexes)—show that her concerns are well grounded. While her face may register fear during these incidents, she noticeably remains silent and just cringes. (In the scene with the young guys, she swiftly walks away, though with a bent, cowering posture.) Given her age (well into her twenties), she is portrayed as possessing a strangely out-of-date “delicate femininity”—as a woman who requires the protection of a male.11 Indeed, Hermès praises Train Man for being a rare, polite young man, implying that she can count on him to shield her. When he takes her hand as they walk along the street, it is not just a sign of his affection. He is keeping her from falling behind and getting lost in the crowd—and, at one point, making sure that she will catch the last train of the evening so that she gets home safely. Up until the final scene of the film,Train Man gives every indication of being a romantic confection with a happy ending for everyone (including all of the chat-room participants whose respective life stories have also fac- tored into the movie script). But, Murakami’s vision is more biting. At the end, both Train Man (looking just as rumpled as he was at the beginning of the film) and Hermès (quietly reading her book) are riding the train, but there is no connection between them. Was Train Man’s metamorpho- 84 B. E. THORNBURY sis and newfound love just a dream? Perhaps the otaku-as-Train-Man remains untransformed, as unlikely to become the protector of the contemporary Tokyo woman as such a woman is to go back to being a silent, unresisting person for whom the train system is a zone of fear rather than the key to the mobility and independence she has come to take for granted. Yoshimoto’s “Newlywed” is the first of two additional examples offered here to help illustrate ways that issues of gender are expressed in fiction and film through the choices characters make as they use Tokyo-area railways. A salaryman husband riding home from the office on a commuter train late one night suddenly decides that he wants to break free of his repetitive, daily loop and not go home—at least not right away. Like the character Shōhei Sugiyama in Masayuki Suo’s filmShall We Dance?, the train-riding husband’s desire to escape is realized in the form of a beautiful woman. “I had spent the evening downing whiskey at a bar with my bud- dies and was totally smashed by the time I got on the train to head home” (Yoshimoto 1995 [1993], 1), the husband/narrator says on the first page of “Newlywed.” “For some reason, when I heard them announce my stop, I stayed put, frozen in my seat” (ibid.). He quickly concludes that he “had stayed on the train because [he] didn’t really feel like going home” (ibid.). The man reveals that he is twenty-eight years old, has been married for one month, and has no children. Aspects of gendered Tokyo narratives play out not just in the life story of the rider himself, but in the nature of his encounter with a striking young woman. Like a number of such characters in Yoshimoto’s fiction, the young woman is a liminal being, one who appears to be in but is not wholly of this world. When she first gets on the train, “she” is actually (and, at the end of the story, reverts to being) “an old homeless guy, with ragged clothes, long, matted hair, and a beard … [who] smelled really strange” (Yoshimoto 1995 [1993], 2). The millions of people who ride Tokyo’s trains every day overwhelmingly—in dress, accoutrements, and deport- ment—give the impression of a prosperous society. The man Yoshimoto describes is emblematic of abject failure—and the average person automatically recoils from him. The three people riding in the same train car as the narrator at that late hour immediately get up and move to other cars. The narrator does not join them—in part, at least, because he sees himself as a person who does not discriminate against others. He feels “a trace of contempt” (ibid.) for those who do discriminate. “Newlywed,” which takes place entirely inside a Tokyo commuter train (the specific line is unnamed), was commissioned by the Japan Railways 3 GENDER AND MOBILITY: TRACKING FICTIONAL CHARACTERS ON REAL… 85

Group and initially published in installments on posters displayed inside the passenger cars of the company’s Tokyo system. Yoshimoto’s straightforward and pleasantly rhythmic writing style has a wide appeal among Japanese readers who praise her ability to address head-on painfully fundamental concerns in their lives. The narrator of “Newlywed” is psychologically distressed, having realized that his wife, Atsuko, has turned into a being he cannot understand. She has become a housewife extraordinaire, pouring all of her energy into managing what seem to him the utterly trivial components of the home over which she presides. “Our house is Atsuko’s universe, and she fills it with small objects, all of her own choosing” (Yoshimoto 1995 [1993], 16), he remarks. “Thanks to Atsuko’s ways, we have a happy home. In fact, sometimes it’s so much fun at home that it makes me want to puke” (Yoshimoto 1995 [1993], 7). The being who elicits from the narrator his reasons for not wanting to go home that night is the homeless guy who, in the blink of the young husband’s eye, turns into someone who looks to him like the perfect, sexually desirable woman. “She had long brown hair, gray eyes, gorgeous legs, and wore a black dress and black patent leather heels” (Yoshimoto 1995 [1993], 4). Yoshimoto’s readers understand that she is providing them with a grown-up fairy tale—a soothing balm for the troubling com- plexities everyone inevitably faces as life unfolds. There are no easy answers, she appears to be saying, but there are choices—as seemingly inconse- quential but as potentially profound as when to get on the train and when to get off. “It seemed as if we had toured Tokyo from every possible angle, visiting each building, observing every person, and every situation” (ibid., 17), the narrator says near the end of the story, having decided at last to go on with life as he has known it up until now—in other words, to go home. “It was the incredible sensation of encountering a life force that enveloped everything, including the station near my house, the slight feeling of alienation I feel toward my marriage and work and life in general, and Atsuko’s lovely profile. This town breathes in all the universes that people in this city have in their heads” (ibid.). It is an individual on the gendered margins of society—a homeless man, who by definition exists outside of the male power structure—who gets the rapt attention of the narrator.12 He captures the newlywed husband’s attention first in a negative way—by offensively sidling up next to him even though every other seat on the train car is empty—and then draws him in by turning into a mysteriously attractive young woman. But a somewhat threatening note darkly reverberates throughout the tale. 86 B. E. THORNBURY

Should the young husband—who, to all appearances, is on the “right track” (metaphorically speaking) as a well-employed salaryman—not be able to make the “right” choices (and come to terms with those choices), he may possibly wind up as one of those marginalized men from whose presence people flee. Choice of a different sort is expressed by director Hou in Café Lumière, a dynamic celebration of Tokyo as a city of trains. Commissioned by Shōchiku Films to mark the centennial of the birth of Yasujirō Ozu—the great mid-twentieth-century director whose cinematic vocabulary gave prominence to images of moving trains—Hou’s film focuses on Yōko, a character for whom Tokyo railways are integral to her identity. Yōko’s apartment, as mentioned in the introductory chapter, is situated near Kishibojin-mae Station on the Toden Arakawa tram line. A short ride on the Toden Arakawa connects her to the Yamanote train line (central Tokyo’s landmark loop line) and to the rest of the metropolitan area’s transportation infrastructure. Yōko’s mobility defines her career and relationships. She continually moves around the city for her work as a freelance writer and to connect with her friends. She also occasionally goes abroad, and sometimes travels (using a series of interlinking train lines) to her hometown in the countryside northwest of Tokyo to visit her father and stepmother. The title of the film—both the French-soundingCafé Lumière, which was used to distribute the work outside of Japan, and the Japanese-language Kōhı ̄ jikō—allude to the cozy, old, wood-grained neighborhood café that Yōko uses as her “office.” It is where she comfortably sits with her computer, cell phone, and other materials of her work life arrayed on the table in front of her and where the avuncular proprietor brings her the cups of coffee or hot milk that she orders. By extension, the film title also metaphorically applies to trains as similarly comfortable and familiar transitional spaces. Passengers regularly get on “their” train at the exact same spot and, if available, sit in the exact same seat in that car. Through repetition trains become lived-in spaces—along with the geographically fixed spaces where people sleep, work, and otherwise spend time. Café Lumière makes a statement worthy of attention within the context of Tokyo’s gendered narratives, especially insofar as it suggests a possible new kind of relationship between women and men (see Thornbury 2010). Yōko is far different from the anxiety-ridden Maiko in “My Slightly Crooked Brooch” who, despite her university education and cosmopoli- 3 GENDER AND MOBILITY: TRACKING FICTIONAL CHARACTERS ON REAL… 87 tan life in Tokyo, readily entered into a dead-end relationship with a married man. It is difficult to imagine Yōko making such a choice. Yōko’s relationships with men are basically on her terms. At a point before the film’s storyline begins, she spent extended time in Taiwan (teaching Japanese) and had a boyfriend there. Back in Tokyo, she is pregnant with his baby—though she unequivocally tells her father and stepmother that she will not marry the man because it would mean giving up her career to work in his family’s manufacturing business and he is, most egregiously in her eyes, not independent enough from his mother. Her circle of Tokyo friends includes a man named Hajime, who owns and runs a small bookstore in the Jinbōchō neighborhood, where Yōko buys research materials. Within the time span of the film, the friendship between Yōko and Hajime deepens. In addition to his work at the bookstore, Hajime is a kind of amateur anthropologist of Tokyo train-riding, who goes about the city recording the announcements and melodies that inform and guide passengers and signal, for example, imminent door-closings and departures from stations. By recording the melodies uniquely associated with individual stations, Hajime is creating an aural map of Tokyo. He also fabri- cates stylized, visual maps of Tokyo on his computer screen using digitized images of trains. The baby inside of a “womb” made up of tiny train cars in one of his designs that he shows Yōko seems to convey that—even though he is not the biological father of the baby to whom she will give birth—he is willing to be her supportive partner in her quest to be a mother who can retain her mobility and independence. It is this possible new configuration of relationships between men and women and of the choices they have that is the bright kernel at the center of Hou’s film. Hou underscores the need to reimagine what it means to be a fully functioning (which is to say, mobile) adult in Japan today. The old structures (including conventional modes of employment and marriage) are crumbling or at least losing their former meaning. New, more flexible and perhaps more enduring arrangements are needed to satisfy people’s needs. If twentieth-century Japan built Tokyo’s highly networked rail systems, its twenty-first-century children—women and men like Yōko and Hajime, who grew up in and on that system—are now constructing their own lives and their own gendered narratives in ways that their mothers and fathers likely could not have envisioned.

* * * 88 B. E. THORNBURY

“The conceit that Japan is a world leader—if not the leader—in railway technology turns out to be a significant part of Japan’s self-image as a thoroughly modern nation” (2012, 263), Hiraku Shimoda has observed. Textual evidence prodigiously supports Shimoda’s assertion “that trains, as they are in practical function, are also cultural vessels that can be freighted with just about any content and meaning, which makes them a useful site for producing culture” (ibid., 264). In the short stories, novels, and films cited in this chapter, the interactions of characters in and around trains powerfully shape and construct understandings of gender—and thereby of society as a whole. In “My Slightly Crooked Brooch” Tsujihara makes visible women’s historical “invisibility.” Home and its immediate environs in the leafy suburbs are where Mizue, as the wife of an elite, white-collar, city-center corporate employee, was to retreat and spend her days. She is expected to use the rail lines basically only during off-peak hours. She is to do her visiting, shopping, and other errands after the mostly male, rush-hour crowds have cleared in the morning and before they form again in the evening. It is during those in-between hours that space for her opens up, literally and figuratively. Groping occurs only in crowded trains.13 In Mizue, Tsujihara creates a character who subverts the commuter system. She commutes, not to work like her husband does, but to assert her agency (albeit in a presumably murderous way) in a world where the rules are still largely written by her husband and men like him. For young women, especially—as shown in Kirino’s Real World, Nakamura’s The Thief and Murakami’s Train Man—the rail infrastructure may be a splendidly efficient machine that takes people exactly where they want to go, but it can also be seen as a zone of danger where silence reigns and interventions are few. In Yoshimoto’s “Newlywed,” the train car is a space where feelings of being lost and isolated are intensified in the mind of a newly married, commuting salaryman—and “relief” takes the shape of a sexually attractive woman. As in Train Man, the rail car affords the dream, if not the reality, of an unexpected and pleasurable new connection for the central male figure. In Café Lumière, Hou most tangibly expresses Yōko’s self-sufficiency and freedom to choose through her rail-based mobility—a mobility that, along with the career she has built for herself, is threatened by the future needs of the baby she is carrying. Hou points to the developing relationship between Yōko and Hajime as a potential way for them to come together and mutually develop the lives that both have already begun and want to sustain. 3 GENDER AND MOBILITY: TRACKING FICTIONAL CHARACTERS ON REAL… 89

Each of the writers and directors demonstrates respect for, if not awe of, the railway network that so intimately defines Tokyo. Hou films moving trains as if they were perfectly choreographed dancers. Tsujihara is almost encyclopedic in the number of rail lines he employs in just that one story. The character Ryō expresses a kind of triumphal postwar modern- ism in his praise of the technologically advanced Shōnan Monorail, but Mizue’s anger at the words he spoke to her while riding that conveyance gives them a bitter edge. Murakami uses not only the train itself but also the train platform to build a scene where a despondent Train Man stands on one side of a platform and his online supporters are arrayed on the other. They entreat Train Man not to give up, not to fall into the gap where the rails run, but to metaphorically cross it and join them in their chorus of optimism. A train hurtles into the station between them and carries off a newly energized and determined Train Man.14 For her part, Yoshimoto sees trains as infinite in length and possibility: Tokyo’s lines are so extensive and conjoined that it seems they go on forever. “Insofar as fiction is written in the world, it takes on the double faculty both to report reality and, at the logical extreme, to exert influence over reality, or, more precisely, over the representation of reality,” Bertrand Westphal (2011 [2007], 116) has pointed out. In all of the short stories, novels, and films discussed here, trains are not just about passing through space. The linkages between characters and the Tokyo rail system that the writers and directors incorporate into their works map that space, thereby opening up an essential path for gaining insight into issues related to gender and mobility in contemporary urban Japan.

Notes 1. In the chapter titled “City of Trains: Tokyo, Japan,” Taras Grescoe views Tokyo’s railways—“the standard by which all others must be judged” (2012, 185)—as a model for a massively mobile, yet relatively car-free, society. 2. Starting in the late nineteenth century, Tokyo “transformed from a city of waterways linked to the Sumida River and roads to a metropolis dependent on rails” (Freedman 2011, 5). Focusing on the period from around 1900 to 1940, Freedman notes that the discourse that developed around the use of mass transportation during that time “shaped human subjectivity and artistic production, giving rise to gender roles that currently represent Japan” (ibid., 1). There is a growing body of scholarly and other serious 90 B. E. THORNBURY

writing in the broad field of urban cultural studies that engages with Tokyo as a “city of trains,” to use Taras Grescoe’s term (see note 1). Examples of English-language studies, in addition to Grescoe’s, Freedman’s, and chapters in Fraser and Spalding (2012), include Fujii (1999) and Horii and Burgess (2012). 3. “[O]ne cannot become a social being without taking up a position in relation to the male and the female,” Henrietta L. Moore (2013, 204) has written. And, as Claire Blencowe has observed, “we are forced to perform a gender whenever we participate in social life. … To participate in social life, to be able to perform at all, we are forced to perform a gender” (2013, 162, 164). 4. The “middle-class, heterosexual, married salaryman” (sararıman̄ in Japanese), as James E. Roberson and Nobue Suzuki write, is the “dominant (self-)image, model and representation of men and masculinity in Japan” (2003, 1). The salaryman’s archetypal wife is the full-time homemaker (sengyō shufu) who is dependent on her husband’s pay check. 5. Kaburaki (1878–1972) was especially renowned for his paintings of beautiful women. Ryō’s decision to stop by the gallery after his workday has concluded and the attraction he feels toward a woman he encounters there perfectly illustrate a point made by Jordan Sand in an article on literary conceptualizations of life in Tokyo’s suburbs: “In a situation that would be repeated nightly from the time of the first commuter rails [between central Tokyo and its suburbs], the commuting male found himself at the end of each day torn between the tranquillity and comfort of home at the end of the train line and the stimulation and allure of the city by night” (2009, 189). 6. “Tōkaidō” is used as a metonym for modern, industrial, and high-tech Japan: Stretching from Tokyo in the east to northern Kyushu in the west, the Tokaido megalopolis, as it is sometimes referred to, houses the overwhelming majority of the Japanese population and productive capacity. Here … [is] where some 85 per cent of the GDP is produced, are concentrated the bulk of the country’s fixed assets, the main research and development labs, international communications facilities and global financial centers. The world’s best and most heavily travelled rail system knits the megalopolis together, allowing fast, safe travel between almost any two points within the area. (Sorensen 2002, 1) 7. Goldstein-Gidoni points out that, since the 1950s, official Japan “has been vigorously supporting and cultivating what has been described as ‘the alli- ance between corporate warriors and full-time housewives,’” adding that “[t]he Japanese state, in a close pact with Japan’s employment systems, 3 GENDER AND MOBILITY: TRACKING FICTIONAL CHARACTERS ON REAL… 91

engendered an insider/outsider divide between men and women and as a result, an enduring male-breadwinner gender contract” (2012, 91). The Tōkaidō line embodies the salaryman’s mobility—both from home to work (and back again) and while on the job. 8. There is, of course, no way for her to strike back at the groper who assaulted her on the train, since he is a stranger. 9. Terauchi says that she does not tell her parents about her experiences on the trains because she does not want to hurt their feelings for making her suffer: “As I continued to commute, before I knew it I was acting more adult than my own parents” (Kirino 2008 [2003], 151). For a more extended discussion of gender issues in Real World, see Thornbury (2011). 10. Although some station names in the film are fictionalized, the characters appear to have been riding a train on the Seibu Ikebukuro line—given that the woman’s home station is identified as Sakuradai. 11. The character Hermès is crafted as a fantasy figure for men attracted to women who combine financial viability with stereotypical self-effacing femininity (Angela Yiu, personal communication, 25 August 2019). 12. See Chap. 5, “Locating the Outsider Inside Tokyo,” for more on the topic of homelessness in Tokyo. See also McKirdy (2019). 13. The growth and spread of the train-dependent Tokyo megalopolis made for extremely crowded trains. “For many women, these packed trains were no laughing matter, and unfortunately the indignities and discomfort suffered by many a female rider on crowded commuter trains continue to this day” (Fujii 1999, 125). 14. As Angela Yiu rightly notes (personal communication, 25 August 2019), Train Man offers an urban fantasy to make up for a reality in which Tokyo train riding (commuting especially) is often an uncomfortable (even dehu- manizing) and impersonal experience. CHAPTER 4

Coordinates of Home and Community

In his 1909 novel And Then (2011, Sorekara), Natsume Sōseki had Tokyo in mind when he wrote: “Modern society was nothing more than an aggregate of isolated individuals. The earth stretched boundlessly, but the instant houses were built upon it, it became fragmented. The people inside the houses became fragmented, too. Civilization took the collective we and transformed it into isolated individuals” (2011 [1909], 91). The great writer’s observation is essentially being repeated a century later. “Being alone—literally, psychically, socially,” to quote anthropologist Anne Allison, “is the new human condition for Japan/ese in the 21st century” (2012, 346). This chapter delves into four ways that late twentieth- and early twenty- first-century Tokyo fiction and film map the social and spatial constructs of home and, by extension, community. The first is through the lens of memory—in Taichi Yamada’s novel Strangers, Makoto Shiina’s story “The Yellow Tent on the Roof,” and Haruki Murakami’s novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. The second is from the perspective of vulnerable children, with the focus on Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film Nobody Knows. The third is through the eyes of independent and not-so- independent women—in Mayumi Inaba’s story “Morning Comes Twice a Day,” Banana Yoshimoto’s novels Kitchen and Moshi Moshi, Hiromi Kawakami’s story “The Hut on the Roof” (2015, “Koya no aru okujō” 2005), Mitsuyo Kakuta’s story “A House for Two” (2015, “Futari-gurashi” 2006), and Osamu Hashimoto’s story “Vortex” (2015, “Uzumaki”

2012). And, finally, the fourth is as illusion—in Masayuki Suo’s film Shall We Dance? and Agata Hikari’s story “A Family Party.” The dozen works discussed here convey a yearning for reliable connectedness embodied in the concepts of home and community, while also cultivating the conceptual ground of a city that, like the one Sōseki was describing, is depicted as a place of social fragmentation and dislocation.

Through the Lens of Memory Early in Yamada’s Strangers, Hideo Harada, a recently divorced freelance television scriptwriter, emerges from a Ginza department store and decides on the spur of the moment to ride the subway to Asakusa rather than go back home to his condo in the opposite, Shibuya-bound direction. It is his forty-eighth birthday. With no one, including his emotionally distant college-age son to wish him “happy birthday,” Harada had sought solace in the act of buying himself a necktie as a present to mark the occasion. The awkward transaction at the department store with a younger sales clerk who suggests ties that he feels are either too subdued (as if meant for a much older person) or, conversely, too flashy (not his style) leaves him even more depressed. Seeing the Ginza-line sign for Asakusa at the entrance to the subway station suddenly calls forth memories lodged deep inside him. The Asakusa neighborhood is where he was born and where he lived until the day that his parents were killed on the street by a fast- moving vehicle. Only twelve-years-old at the time, he had to leave Tokyo to live with relatives until he could return to the city to go to college and move on with his life as an adult. Yamada portrays the middle-aged Harada as a successful urbanite who frequents Italian restaurants and does his shopping in the high-end stores of Tokyo’s Ginza and Jiyugaokā neighborhoods. He is a man whose eclec- tic taste in films ranges from Federico Fellini to Eddie Murphy, and who is a resident—given the geographic references the novel provides—of Setagaya Ward, a part of the city preferred by striving media-types like himself. The only areas of life in which he seems to have failed are marriage and family. Having initiated the divorce from his wife out of a feeling of “indiffer- ence,” he now experiences a sense of anxiety and displacement. Leaving the family house to his ex-wife and their son, he has moved into the condo that he had been using as an office. Although all of the apartments in the building are equipped as residences with kitchens and baths, most are solely used as daytime offices for small commercial enterprises.1 4 COORDINATES OF HOME AND COMMUNITY 95

Taking the subway to Asakusa, Harada feels as if he has been catapulted back to the place and time of his boyhood—in short, to the place where and the time when he was secure at home in the love and care of his parents. Yamada employs Asakusa as a shitamachi chronotope—insofar as Asakusa stands for both time and place2—by transforming the usually fast- moving, train- and taxi-riding Harada into a kind of slow-moving Baudelairian flâneur. Strolling through the back streets of Asakusa, Harada falls under the spell of what he perceives to be the days-gone-by, community-oriented friendliness of the area3—a feeling that reaches its climax when he comes upon the incarnation of his deceased parents. Yamada maps present-and-past Asakusa through Harada’s detailed rec- ollections of his childhood hometown neighborhood:

After passing through the massive [Kaminarimon] gate, I strolled between the shops flanking the approach to Sensoji Temple. I was okay with visiting the temple and the entertainment district immediately to its west, but I remained reluctant to extend my tour to those sections of Asakusa most intimately linked with my childhood memories. In all my previous visits, I had never once turned my steps toward the International Theater, or the streets around Honganji Temple or Tawara-machi Station. This being Tokyo, I knew that no matter how far removed they might be from the center of Asakusa, those neighborhoods could not possibly look much like they had more than thirty years ago, and yet I remained fearful of venturing into them. (Yamada 2003 [1987], 33)

As Harada well knew, even the most peripheral neighborhood in Tokyo would have undergone tremendous change in the past three decades. However, his fear that enough of the past remained even in the center of Asakusa to trigger deep-seated memories is well founded: wandering into the landmark Asakusa Variety Hall (Asakusa Engei Hōru), where an audience of mostly older folks is enjoying rakugo storytelling (a performing arts form that is itself a prominent element of the shitamachi chronotope), he meets a man who turns out to be the ghost of his father. He soon comes face to face with the ghost of his mother as well. Yamada sets Strangers around the time of the Obon festival,4 thus providing a logical context for deceased characters who have “come home” for a short while to the world of the living. Another ghost-character Harada encounters is a woman named Kei, who also resides in one of the condos in his building. Not realizing that she is no longer of this world, he begins a relationship with her. Originally from rural Japan, Kei had been 96 B. E. THORNBURY working in Tokyo until she committed suicide when she could no longer endure the “crushing” and “deep” loneliness she felt, having never achieved a sense of belongingness in the city (Yamada 2003 [1987], 23 and 26).5 Although Harada emotionally bonds with his ghost-parents and Kei, his contact with them threatens to cost him his life. There is, as he is aware, an “ancient taboo against communing with the dead” (ibid., 191).6 In the end, Harada is saved in a kind of deus ex machina ending by the intercession of a former colleague/friend, and the novel concludes on the optimistic note that going forward he will be able to reconnect with people, work again, and even be able to grow closer to his son—even if the two will never be able to emotionally embrace each other to the degree that Harada and his parents did when he was a boy. Although Harada cannot go home again permanently to his parents’ “beloved Asakusa” (ibid., 95) or have a “real” relationship with Kei, the reader is left with the understanding that his newfound capacity to move ahead in life is inextricably tied to memories of home and community rooted in Tokyo’s shitamachi. Like Harada, the narrator of Shiina’s story “The Yellow Tent on the Roof” is displaced from his former residence—although he had no choice in the matter. Fujii (only his family name is given) is a young office worker. The old and rundown (but still serviceable) apartment building that was his home in the Kinshichō neighborhood is rendered uninhabitable after a fire. Unlike Harada, Fujii has no alternative accommodations. As mentioned in the introductory chapter, his bid to seek shelter at a friend’s apartment in Tsukishima, an area built on reclaimed land near the mouth of the Sumida River, fails because the friend’s girlfriend is currently staying there. On impulse, just as he is being turned away at the door, Fujii asks the guy to lend him his camping equipment (including the yellow tent of the story’s title). In their high-school days the two young men used to go mountain climbing together—a pursuit that ended when they graduated from school and started working. Having no funds for more conventional housing alternatives (“[m]y salary was low and I had no savings” [Shiina 2004 [2000], 145]), Fujii winds up using the tent to construct a home— albeit a provisional one—on the roof of the multistory “mixed commercial building” (ibid., 135) that houses the small publishing company where he works. The building is located in, of all places, the world-famous shopping and commercial Ginza district—hardly a spot to imagine pitching a tent. At this stage in his early-adult life, Fujii cannot help but vividly recall when he was free from the obligations that are now encroaching on him more and more. In settling down in a job—in other words, in doing what 4 COORDINATES OF HOME AND COMMUNITY 97 is expected of a young guy starting out on the road to a successful life— Fujii feels that the world is already closing in on him. Despite having no particular interest in the tasks assigned him on the job, he nevertheless dutifully goes to work in order to live as an independent, self-supporting adult. He feels true affection for his girlfriend, but her family is pressuring him to step up in life and become a more attractive candidate as a son-in- law. Her parents had already expressed their disapproval of the poor quality of the now-damaged Kinshichō apartment—making clear their view that their daughter’s prospective bridegroom should live in a more polished, higher status place. His mother (there is no mention of a father or other family members or, for that matter, where the family home is) just wants him to return her phone calls, but her loving concern is not what he currently seeks. Home as a place where he can feel unencumbered by the demands increasingly being made on him is exactly what he finds when he begins camping out on the roof of his office building. It is not that he necessarily wants to be by himself. He muses that he would have liked to snuggle with his girlfriend in the sleeping bag, but he knows that she would not have been up for the adventure. The roof of the office building is one of Tokyo’s secret spaces. Fujii discovers that there is already a community of sorts up there, made up of others who have also put this secret space to use in their own private ways. A pair of lovers spends time embracing in the dark, a man comes to silently pray, and a woman in an office uniform shelters and cares for a puppy—which Fujii also befriends. He realizes that by default he, too, has become for the time being aligned with another community—that of Tokyo’s homeless population. “Ginza was strict about keeping homeless people out, but late at night quite a number came out on the prowl, foraging through the trash cans of backstreet restaurants. I never paid much attention to them before, but now I felt an affinity for them” (Shiina 2004 [2000], 140).7 Despite the lack of running water, exposure to the elements, and the risk of being found out, Fujii appreciates the roof’s practical advantages right away: it does not cost anything to stay there and his commuting costs are reduced to zero. He begins remaining at his desk well into the evening in order to qualify for the company-paid dinner delivery service available to those working overtime. What Fujii had never imagined was the psychological lift that sleeping out in the open, above the streets of the Ginza, would give him: “I emerged onto the rooftop and felt suddenly calm” (Shiina 2004 [2000], 136). The longer he stays up there, the more he feels a sense of liberating joy: “As I drank my whiskey and looked up at the 98 B. E. THORNBURY stars, I felt I wanted to go on living up here on my utility tower forever. … I was thrilled to discover it could be comfortable and pleasant not just in nighttime Tokyo, but in nighttime Ginza, the very heart of the city. If I could have my way, I thought, I’d like to keep on living here like this” (ibid., 146 and 155). The experience of being under the open sky and being able to see the Tanzawa mountain range off in the distance triggers memories of mountain climbing with his friend, of the days when his life was not so constricted. The puppy that Fujii befriends all too soon brings his blissful period on the roof, and the story itself, to an end when it rips apart his sleeping bag, resulting in a highly visible blizzard of feathers. Shiina is suggesting that, even though Fujii must necessarily give up this makeshift home and move on with his life in a more conventional dwelling, he can always return to the Ginza office building roof to capture some fleeting moments of nostalgic enjoyment in what for him was an ideal place to live in the city. The title character of Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is securely situated in a good job (designing train stations) and in the nice apartment that his now-deceased father bequeathed him in the upmarket Jiyūgaoka neighborhood. However, he does not feel at home there. Tokyo’s train stations—which exude the ineffable power of the vast city—are the only places where he seems to be able to find a degree of psychological repose. Toward the end of the story, Tsukuru reflects back on his life as he passes time sitting on a bench on one of the platforms in Shinjuku Station. He sips coffee while watching the trains and their passengers coming and going. He will soon find out if Sara, the woman he loves, will allow their relationship to go forward. Until then, he remains alone, with no particular place to go. Now in his mid-thirties, Tsukuru’s adult life has been shaped by memories of the four friends with whom he had been very close as a high school student in Nagoya. After graduating, he left Nagoya to attend the university in Tokyo that gave him the education he needed for his chosen career designing train stations, but he had frequently made return visits to his hometown. “At that point Nagoya was the place he needed to go back to” (Murakami 2014 [2013], 370). However, when his friends cut him off because one of them (falsely) accused him of sexually assaulting her, he no longer had a place where he felt he belonged, despite the fact that his family home “was still in Nagoya, his mother and eldest sister [were] still living there, [and] his room [was] the same as he’d left it” (ibid.). He dutifully visited his family now and then, 4 COORDINATES OF HOME AND COMMUNITY 99

but there was nothing he needed to talk to his mother or sister about, and being with them never brought back any nostalgic feelings. What they sought from him was the Tsukuru of old, a person he had left behind and no longer needed. To revive that person, and present him to his family, neces- sitated that he play a role that made him uncomfortable. The streets of Nagoya now felt remote and dreary. There was nothing there he wanted, nothing that called up even a hint of warmth. (Ibid., 370–71)

Desirous of a sustained relationship with Sara, but unsure if she will accept him, Tsukuru finds Tokyo no more fulfilling than Nagoya: it “was just the place he happened to end up. … In Tokyo he lived a well-ordered, quiet life. Like a refugee in a foreign land, not making waves, not causing any trouble, being ever cautious so that his residence permit was not revoked. He lived there as if he were a refugee from his own life. And Tokyo was the ideal place for someone seeking a life of anonymity” (Murakami 2014 [2013], 371). The question for Tsukuru is whether he can escape the restrictive grip of his memories. Sara, who has helped him take the first necessary steps toward doing so, holds the key to whether he has a place to go with her—a place that, together, they can call home. Murakami does not disclose the outcome, leaving the reader to wonder if Sara will choose a committed relationship with Tsukuru or perhaps stay with the man she was already dating before she and Tsukuru first met. In Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, as in Strangers and “The Yellow Tent on the Roof,” memory and home as a place of temporary respite are embedded in specific locations within Tokyo—Tokyo’s major train stations, Shinjuku in particular, for Tsukuru, Asakusa for Harada, and the roof of an office building in the Ginza for Fujii. Whether each of these characters will end up in a place where they find home and a sense of community for the long term remains an open question.

From the Perspective of Vulnerable Children Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows asks: What if a mother—a single woman and sole caretaker of her four young children—were to walk away? Even when there is someone who will take care of and assume responsibility for the children left behind, society is far less accepting of a mother than it is of a father who decides to seek a new life. The film is not just about “bad” mothers or fathers. It holds a mirror up to an entire society that ignores— does not even notice—children who are in harm’s way and require help. 100 B. E. THORNBURY

To be sure, taxpayer-funded agencies exist to help children in need, but, as the young siblings in the film themselves know, being taken into the custodial system will likely lead to their being separated from each other. The four children in Nobody Knows—the offspring of several different (and totally indifferent) fathers—have already had that experience, and it is something that at all costs they want to avoid going through again. Home, to them, begins with assurance that they can stay together. Community is the world outside—from which they are hopelessly disconnected.8 For Shigeru and Yuki, the two youngest, the journey to the family’s newly rented apartment shockingly begins in the interior of a suitcase. The family was forced out of their last abode because of noise the children made while playing. While the narrator of Inaba’s “Morning Comes Twice a Day” seems convinced that “[t]here were any number of rooms for women with children” (2002 [1996], 246), as opposed to a woman with a cat, single mom Keiko Fukushima and her four children have limited options. Their only source of financial support appears to be Keiko’s earn- ings from her job as a salesclerk at a department store. There are no fathers, grandparents, or other relatives in the children’s lives. When Keiko presents herself and her eldest child Akira to the couple who are the managers of the building into which they have just moved (a building that, like Fujii’s former residence in “The Yellow Tent on the Roof,” is old and rundown, but still serviceable), she glibly lies, telling them that her husband is now working abroad. And, she deliberately gives them the impression that she has just one child, the quiet and well-behaved twelve-year-old Akira. No one is to know that Shigeru and Yuki made the trip to their new home on a moving van hidden away inside suitcases—and that Kyōko, who is the second oldest, will arrive later by train under cover of darkness. It is Akira who, quickly learning the layout of the neighborhood, goes to fetch her. The move signals a fresh start for Keiko on her so-far-unsuccessful quest to find the “right” man. Having children, she knows, impedes her search. It is not uncommon that, when seeking a new partner, even a divorced or widowed man who himself has children would reject out of hand a woman who is already a mother. Keiko’s solution is to divest herself of her children, at least for the time being, by turning over responsibility for the household to Akira. She informs Yuki and Shigeru that they are to stay indoors at all times, invisible to the outside world. Given the task of doing the laundry, Kyōko is permitted to go only as far as the apartment’s 4 COORDINATES OF HOME AND COMMUNITY 101 small verandah, making sure no one sees her, in order to use the small washing machine installed out there. Only Akira is allowed to venture into the neighborhood so he can pay the household bills and do the shopping for the meals he must prepare for his sisters, brother, and himself. Although Akira and Kyōko desperately want to attend school, Keiko will not let them, dismissively saying that if they go they will be bullied because they do not have fathers. The sad thing is that she is probably right about the bullying, but the bigger point, of course, is that they have no place in the society that goes about its business around them.9 At first, Keiko leaves for the day (presumably to work) and comes back in the evening. Then she stays away for days at a time—culminating in a permanent absence. As Keiko disappears from the children’s lives, Akira and, to a lesser degree, Kyōko become the de facto parents to their younger brother and sister until the situation moves beyond their control. Not unusual for a twelve-year-old (and even younger children) in Tokyo, Akira is independently mobile. As long as he has money in his pocket, he can get around on his own and procure the necessities of life for his siblings and himself. Although the Tokyo neighborhood in which the apartment is located is not identified by name, it is near a train station and close to Haneda Airport. The monorail to and from the airport glides by on an overhead track, and there is a busy shopping area near the station lined with an array of shops. Although Akira goes to a large supermarket early in the film, he ends up shopping only at a small convenience store—where he can easily buy food (such as instant noodles) and occasional treats, and, while there is still enough money, pay the household bills using the cash-transfer capabilities of the ATM machine. As it transpires, the convenience store is also the place where Akira meets several schoolboys his own age whose momentary friendship he buys by divert- ing the rent and utility money to purchases that include videogames, toys, and snack foods. The convenience store in the film functions as a potent Tokyo cultural reference. Perhaps no city in the world has more such establishments per capita. Open around the clock, they are brightly lit spaces that serve urban dwellers of all ages. In addition to coolers stocked with moder- ately priced, ready-made food packaged in individual servings and shelves filled with all kinds of snacks and beverages and an assortment of personal-care products and other everyday items, they offer racks of the latest magazines and manga. Spatially, convenience stores are a kind of 24/7 community center—but the interactions are fleeting and of a com- 102 B. E. THORNBURY mercial rather than a social nature. The manager of the store where Akira repeatedly goes becomes a familiar figure in the film, but he is a prime example of an adult who focuses only on his own concerns—which, in his case, are to run the store efficiently. Akira is a customer, nothing more. When several boys slip stolen toy figurines into Akira’s shopping bag (unbeknownst to him) and he is apprehended by the manager, the man demands that he tell him the facts about himself—who his parents are and which school he attends, questions that Akira cannot answer. The situation is defused just in time: an observant clerk tells the manager that Akira was set up. The manager immediately releases Akira, and shows no further interest in him. Home in Nobody Knows is only partially about a fixed residential address. As Kore-eda takes pains to show, home encompasses the whole environment of a secure and productive life. For the children, it should have included the schools they attend and the neighborhood where they play and socialize with friends and learn how to navigate the city in which they live. Akira quickly gets to know the new neighborhood—but, under the rules that his mother laid out, that knowledge is to be applied only to the adult activities of shopping for the family and paying the bills. An intelligent boy, he is acutely aware that his anomalous situation as family caretaker requires caution. Because he is supposed to be in school at his age, he does not go shopping until relatively late in the afternoon, a time of day when it is natural for children to be out and about. It is possible, as any child would know, that an authority figure might apprehend him if he is seen in the streets during school hours. For Akira and the children, “home”—in the limited sense of the Tokyo apartment where they are staying—is a cruel prison. When the absent Keiko stops sending the household money, Akira desperately seeks out two men who were previously in relationships with her—neither of whom is his father but one of whom may or may not be Yuki’s. Neither one demonstrates concern when Akira tells them that his mother has been gone for a month and that he and the three younger children are living on their own. One is paradoxically a taxi driver. He is a man of the city, whose profession is to ensure that his customers can readily get wherever they want to go, day or night. When Akira finds him at the taxi garage, he is asleep in his vehicle. When he wakes up and leaves the car to head for the bathroom, he merely glances at Akira—walking wordlessly right past the boy, whom he no doubt recognizes. He does not offer Akira a ride nor does he offer to go help the children. There is no indication that he gives 4 COORDINATES OF HOME AND COMMUNITY 103

Akira money, either. The other man works in a pachinko game center. When Akira arrives and asks for money, he balks, telling the boy that his current girlfriend has put him in “credit card hell”—defensively adding (although Akira has said nothing on the subject) that Yuki is not his child. When the man saunters over to a vending machine, he blithely turns to Akira and asks for change to buy a drink. In the end, he reluctantly pulls a bill out of his wallet to give the boy—making it clear that Akira is not to return again asking for his help. There is one man in the film—the neighborhood school’s baseball coach—who gives Akira a fleeting sense of all that home and community might be. Escaping the confines of the apartment one afternoon, Akira sits forlornly at the school gate—on the outside looking in. Suddenly, he is beckoned inside when the coach, short of players, spots him and ush- ers him onto the team. For Akira, it is a dream come true. He gets to wear a sharp white uniform and be like the other boys. Most poignantly, the coach briefly becomes a father figure as he stands over Akira, gently holding his large hands over the boy’s in an effort to show him how to properly hold the bat and hit the ball. But there is a horrible segue to this feel-good scene, which is far from a harbinger of better things to come. When Akira goes back to the apartment, he discovers that Yuki, who has fallen from a chair, is lifelessly still. It is already summer. The apartment, now without electricity or running water because the bills have not been paid, is brutally hot. There is no food to eat. The children, cut off from the world around them, are afraid to seek the authorities’ help. Akira runs to the convenience store and, in panicked desperation, steals some random medicine off of a shelf, but of course it does nothing to revive the little girl. In an ending that defies belief, Akira and a young girl named Saki, who shortly before has become friends with the children, transport Yuki’s lifeless body to Haneda Airport in a suitcase filled with boxes of her favorite snacks. The goal is to bury Yuki in a place where she can forever watch the planes in the sky and dream of a life full of possibilities and without limit. Around Akira’s age, or a little older, Saki lives in a nice apartment building and dresses in a school uniform—a crisp white sailor-shirt-style blouse and pressed skirt—but she does not go to class. She is being viciously bullied, as is evidenced by the mock grave other schoolgirls leave behind for her to see. The viewer is left to infer that her parents do not know or do not care that their daughter is skipping school. Saki amplifies the “nobody knows” theme of the film. 104 B. E. THORNBURY

The core message of Nobody Knows is that it is not only the job of mothers and fathers, but also of society as a whole, to ensure the well- being of children within the framework of home and community. As Merry White points out in a study of mid- to late twentieth-century family life in Japan,

functions that had been managed in wider social units, inside and outside the household, were now left to a diminished unit with reduced resources of men, women, and children to manage them. Shrunken families had to take responsibility for their own “social welfare” in relative isolation, especially in neighborhoods where such nuclear households had limited and short-term ties with one another. Urban life, and most particularly life in large anonymous apartment complexes, did not tend to foster mutual cooperation among nuclear family units. (White 2002, 8–9)

The apartment building where the Fukushima children dwell is not so large, emphasizing all the more neighbors’ lack of concern for one another. The most egregious example is the wife who manages the building with her husband—a woman who apparently does little more than walk around nuzzling the little dog she holds in her arms. Even when she drops by the Fukushimas’s apartment to inquire about the long-overdue rent and sees with her own eyes the children’s utter plight, she just walks away with a shrug—her body language saying that it is not her concern. As White further states, “[t]his ‘privatized’ social welfare system contained in a very small and private family unit put pressure on individuals, marriages, and parent-child relationships; especially around the issues of support for dependent kin and child care, it meant a great burden for working mothers” (2002, 9). Kore-eda’s Keiko, a woman who throws off that “burden,” is an exception who proves White’s rule. Played by the actress You, Keiko is the embodiment of a mother easily—and rightly— condemned for neglecting her children. Her childlike nature (matched by You’s naturally high-pitched, childlike tone of voice) is perfectly expressed early in the film when she asks Akira what they will be having for dinner that evening. Even though the parent-child roles have been totally reversed, he replies to her query quite matter-of-factly—showing that he is already used to taking on adult responsibilities, such as making dinner for the family. Later on, when Akira gets upset after Keiko tells him that she will be leaving for a while (something she has obviously done before), she blurts out that she has a right to her happiness. However, the strength 4 COORDINATES OF HOME AND COMMUNITY 105 of the film derives from the fact that the adult world in its entirety should be condemned for its neglect of the children. The men to whom Akira reaches out are as immature as Keiko in their own way. They want to have a good time, and children in trouble are of no concern to them. Yūya Yagira, who won the best actor award at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival for his role as Akira, demonstrates the extraordinary range of his acting tal- ents. Although he does all he can to protect the children, he is unmistakably a child himself. By briefly asserting his right to his own happiness, he indirectly contributes to Yuki’s death. The Fukushima children just wanted to be able to go to school, freely play, and have a loving and secure home together. In the Tokyo that is the setting of Nobody Knows, there is a pressing need to find ways to extend “home” outward from the walls of units that merely provide a degree of shelter but not necessarily any real protection.

Through the Eyes of Independent and Not-so- Independent Women The basic element that defines home for the narrator of Inaba’s “Morning Comes Twice a Day” is the companionship of her cat, Mimi. As noted in the introductory chapter, the woman turns to a book of Tokyo maps when she is faced with the need to find a new place to live—having been displaced by her landlord’s son, who will soon be returning and laying claim to the garden cottage she had been renting from his parents. The reality not made clear on the maps that she consults is that, although rental units exist in plentiful supply, there are few within her budget that accept pets.10 When she does find one, it is invariably too inconvenient in terms of access to public transportation or too “filthy and utterly without charm” (Inaba 2002 [1996], 248). Inaba’s story takes in the expanse of Tokyo in chart- ing the narrator’s hunt for a new home. Although she and her cat had grown attached to the suburban cottage and its garden where they lived in Musashino, one of the cities within Tokyo Metropolis, the condo she finds centrally located in Shinagawa suits her: “My commuting time shrank and even when I worked late I was usually able to make the train. Even when I’d missed the last train[,] I could get back home from work in ten or so minutes by taxi” (ibid., 252). She helps Mimi make the adjustment to their new home by taking her downstairs to the building’s paved parking garage to play—in order to show the cat “that the earth of Shinagawa was connected to Musashino” (ibid., 255). 106 B. E. THORNBURY

Well settled into her career at a publishing company, the story’s narrator epitomizes the independent, professional Tokyo woman. She is so independent, in fact, that, except for her devotion to the cat, the woman appears to get along totally on her own. There are no references in the story to her socializing with colleagues or friends. Family visits are not alluded to either, although she receives a loan from her mother to buy the condo. She is not inclined, either, to strike up an acquaintanceship with the other residents of her building: “relations with my neighbors never went beyond a hello when we happened to run into each other. I passed my days in ignorance of the people who lived in the other units or what sort of people they were, and this did not inconvenience me in the least. On the contrary, the sense of isolation invited relief; on my days off I could loll about on the floor from morning to night with the cat, the windows wide open, reading books and listening to music” (Inaba 2002 [1996], 252). Actually, she does get to know one neighbor when the cat goes missing, an event that throws her into an extreme panic. Mimi had wandered into the neighbor’s apartment, and the woman there took her in—not knowing to whom she belonged. Although the narrator and the other woman establish a friendly bond after the incident, the relationship is short-lived because the neighbor soon dies. For this independent woman and her cat, the passage of time is an existential threat to life in their hard-won home. Although the title of the story refers to the illusion that morning comes a second time every day when late-afternoon sunlight reflects off of neighboring high-rises into the condo, there is no denying the passage of time in an absolute sense. Despite the relative brevity of the narrative, a considerable period (fifteen years) elapses from the first sentence to the last—underscoring the point that the inexorable flow of time cannot but profoundly affect the meaning of home for the narrator and her cat. The woman keenly notices time’s passing in the body of the cat: “I wonder if the aging cat notices. That fifteen years have gone by in the room with the stuffed jaguar [the cat’s favorite toy], that the tatami in the four-and-a-half-mat Japanese-style room and the dusky eat-in kitchen vinyl floor have been changed to a warm-colored cork floor, that the heated carpet that was always laid down in winter has been taken up because it had absorbed the sun and cat hairs and faded and begun to smell” (Inaba 2002 [1996], 260). The woman does not acknowledge that she herself—along with the world outside of her door—is changing, too. 4 COORDINATES OF HOME AND COMMUNITY 107

Renovations can turn back the clock in an aging apartment, but of course nothing of the sort is possible for aging cats and people. When the cat begins having increasing trouble performing its most basic bodily functions, the narrator gently and effectively massages her. The obvious question that Inaba asks is: Who will take care of the narrator when she begins to need help? Will she study her maps in search of another Tokyo home—not as a self-sufficient woman with a cat but as a woman alone and unable to reside on her own? It is a terrifying thought, given that the city through which she searched years before is far less open to a dependent older person than it ever was to an independent woman and her cat. “The cat, when she strayed into a stranger’s home upstairs, most certainly knew that that sign of old age, of being unable to find one’s way back home, was very close at hand” (Inaba 2002 [1996], 260). Inaba expresses aging as a fraying of the ability to independently map one’s literal and figurative pathways home. Like the narrator of “Morning Comes Twice a Day,” the character Mikage Sakurai in Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, which became an instant best- seller in Japan following its publication in 1988, is an independent and self-reliant Tokyo woman—but one who seeks close relationships with other people. The novel employs the physical space of home to tell the story of Mikage’s developing relationship with Yūichi Tanabe. While Inaba’s story strikes a melancholy chord with its evocation of time’s passage for the narrator and her cat, Kitchen beckons readers with its brightly positive philosophy of carpe diem in the face of tragic loss. Mikage and Yūichi, both university-student-age young adults, muster the psychological strength to find a place for themselves where, for the time being at least, death can be pushed back to the edges of consciousness. When the novel begins, Mikage’s beloved grandmother has just died. Mikage had been living with her grandparents since childhood, following the death of her parents. When her grandmother dies (her grandfather having already passed away), she is all alone—bereft of family and left behind in a big, empty Tokyo apartment. Mikage has an affinity for kitchens. Symbolic of nurturance and security, kitchens embody the essence of home as a counterpoint to social disconnection. “The place I like best in this world is the kitchen” (Yoshimoto 1993 [1988], 3), Mikage says at the very beginning of the story. “No matter where it is, no matter what kind, if it’s a kitchen, if it’s a place where they make food, it’s fine with me” (ibid.). Her love of such spaces extends to “even incredibly dirty kitchens … [with] vegetable droppings all 108 B. E. THORNBURY over the floor, so dirty your slippers turn black on the bottom” (ibid.). Mikage’s fondness for kitchens captures the gentle, homey quality of Yoshimoto’s novel overall. It is a style that draws readers to her, suffused as it is with an understanding of people’s everyday lives, their loneliness and fears. In Kitchen, Yoshimoto offers new possibilities in the quest for a place to call home. When Yūichi invites Mikage to move in with him and his “mother” Eriko—the loving and beautiful transgender woman who is Yūichi’s biological father—the reader cannot help but marvel over the utter logic and, at the same time, unconventionality of the arrangement. A part-time employee at the florist where Mikage’s flower-loving grandmother was a customer, Yūichi deeply mourned the passing of the older woman. He is a sensitive young man—“long-limbed … with pretty features” (Yoshimoto 1993 [1988], 8). Through Yūichi and Eriko, Yoshimoto offers a new view of a nonthreatening, feminized masculinity in contrast to the image of the “corporate warrior” salaryman who was driving Japan’s booming economy in the 1980s, when Kitchen was originally published. Yūichi and Eriko are to be trusted when they say that they just want to open their home to Mikage out of concern for a young person who is trying to regain her footing in life. They exemplify Tokyo as an idealized community ready to help those in need. Yoshimoto gives the Tanabes’s apartment a specific location on the Tokyo map. “My apartment building and the one where the Tanabes lived were separated by Chuo Park” (Yoshimoto 1993 [1988], 8), as Mikage tells readers.11 She makes the trip to what is to be her new temporary home “with directions [i.e., a map] in hand” (ibid.). Crossing through the park to the Tanabes’s “towering apartment building,” she undertakes a kind of magical journey: “inundated with the green smell of the night[,] I walked, sloshing down the shiny wet path that glittered with the colors of the rainbow” (ibid.). Even before entering the lobby, Mikage imagines that “their apartment on the tenth floor is so high, the view must be beautiful at night” (ibid.). On entering the residence, Mikage proceeds to map the interior space. Her attention is immediately drawn to the huge sofa on which “[a]n entire family could watch TV. … A dog too big to keep in Japan could stretch out across it—sideways. It was really a marvelous sofa” (ibid., 9). Her eyes also take in the plants and flowers that are arrayed everywhere. And, of course, there is the kitchen: “Lit by a small fluorescent lamp, all kinds of plates silently awaited their turns; glasses sparkled. It was clear that in spite of the disorder everything was of 4 COORDINATES OF HOME AND COMMUNITY 109 the finest quality. … Somehow it was all very satisfying. … It was a good kitchen. I fell in love with it at first sight” (ibid., 9–10).12 For Mikage, it is especially the Tanabes’s kitchen that assures her that these are people she can trust—and that she has potentially found a new home.13 But, Yoshimoto does not shortchange her readers when it comes to narrative drama. Although Mikage and Yūichi have embarked on a promising relationship by the time Kitchen ends, the way forward for them is far more challenging than Mikage’s initial walk to their apartment across the park. Needless to say, no matter how mobile the urban dweller may be—no matter how adept he or she is at reading maps—it is not easy to find one’s way emotionally. In the course of the story Eriko dies—murdered at her club by an enraged customer—and it seems that Yūichi is dangerously spiraling into depression. Spatially, the action loops outside of Tokyo into and through the Izu Peninsula—before carrying the reader back into the city. To all appearances, the story has a satisfyingly happy ending, with Yūichi and Mikage on track to finding home with each other. For the narrator of Yoshimoto’s Moshi Moshi, published just over twenty years after Kitchen, Tokyo’s Shimokitazawa offers the fulfillment of home and community. Such is the significance of the neighborhood to her tale that Yoshimoto made it part of the novel’s Japanese title: Moshi moshi Shimokitazawa. “Moshi moshi” here refers to the standard phrase people use when answering the telephone—as well as to what someone on the phone might say to signal to the person at the other end of the line that he or she is having trouble hearing what is being said. The narrator, Yoshie (or Yotchan, as she is called by friends and family14), mourns the loss of her father, who was the victim of a murder-suicide carried out by a woman with whom he was involved. For some unknown reason, the father left his cell phone behind when he departed home for the last time. Yotchan has recurring dreams of desperately trying to phone him—of saying and hearing “moshi moshi”—dreams that end with the depressing realization that he does not have his telephone with him. Yotchan goes to Shimokitazawa, leaving behind the apartment in the Meguro neighborhood where she grew up and where her mother still lives, in order to heal emotionally. She needs to find a home of her own and, with it, a sense of independence. On the first page of the novel, she attributes her warm feelings for Shimokitazawa to Jun Ichikawa’s film Zawa zawa Shimokitazawa (2000), which is especially remembered for its carefully delineated portrait of the neighborhood. Yoshimoto even has Yotchan quote a segment of the film’s voice-over narration: 110 B. E. THORNBURY

The clutter of [Shimokitazawa’s] streets and buildings, which seem to have been left to spread and grow without any thought—they sometimes appear very beautiful, like a bird eating a flower, or a cat jumping down gracefully from a height. I feel that what might seem at first sight to be carelessness and disorder in fact expresses the purest parts of our unconscious. When we start something new, at first it is very muddy, and clouded. But soon, it becomes a clear stream, whose flow conducts itself quietly, through spontaneous movements. (Quoted in Yoshimoto 2016 [2010], 1)

Yotchan finds psychological release by immersing herself in the environment of Shimokitazawa’s narrow streets that are chockablock with small houses, shops, and restaurants—and engaging with those who live and work there. Renting the second floor of a house owned by the mother of one of her friends, she stakes a claim to her own place in the day-to-day life of Shimokitazawa when she gets a job as assistant to a chef in a French bistro.15 “I was finally starting to be able to feel the joy in sitting down to a cup of tea, or just getting up in the morning. It was amazing what a difference a change of scenery made. I could wake up without my first thought being that Dad was gone” (Yoshimoto 2016 [2010], 6–7). In contrast to the make-do, recycle-oriented “bohemian vibe” of Shimokitazawa that so pleases Yotchan, Meguro (“not far from [upscale] Jiyugaoka” [Yoshimoto 2016 (2010), 9]), the location of the posh condo in which her parents raised her, signals polished, high-end consumption.16 Although Yotchan’s mother is not ready to sell the condo that was a grandparent’s gift to her and her husband on the occasion of Yotchan’s birth, she, too, seeks a newly independent life—and convinces her daughter to let her move into the Shimokitazawa apartment.17 For both of them, “Shimokitazawa was a little like a mountain cave in the outlands, where people who found it difficult to keep up with the vagaries of the world could live quietly, as they wanted” (ibid., 88). “[H]ere, in Shimokitazawa, Mom and I were living our truth. Breathing like ourselves” (ibid., 115). While mapping Shimokitazawa as a psychologically transformative space for Yotchan and her mother, Yoshimoto uses her characters to offer commentary on the obvious, real-life transformation that Shimokitazawa itself was undergoing. The area was already showing signs of becoming “a tourist destination” (Yoshimoto 2016 [2010], 32) for people seeking pockets of hip authenticity in Tokyo. It is Yotchan’s mother who first expresses her fear that big businesses will set up outposts in the neighborhood with a rotating staff of employees, and that relationships—which is 4 COORDINATES OF HOME AND COMMUNITY 111 to say, a sense of community—will be lost. “It takes time,” she says to Yotchan, “to get to know people, let alone to tell whether you like each other, so it really makes me wonder, you know, what you’re supposed to do if they just keep coming through like a revolving door … and you don’t even have time to figure out who they are? It seems like there are a lot of people in this town who’ve been here a long time” (ibid., 42–43). In some ways, she feels, Shimokitazawa is like Yanaka (ibid., 72), which today often tops the list of places where travelers who wish to get a sense of an old- fashioned Tokyo neighborhood are advised to go. Told by the chef-owner that the bistro must close because the old building in which it is located will be torn down, Yotchan is gripped by “real fear” at the “thought of losing Shimokitazawa” (Yoshimoto 2016 [2010], 123). Above all, Shimokitazawa had impressed on her “the sense of how much power an individual had” (ibid., 122), and she catalogues all of the many individuals who formed the community of which she had become part. Reconciled to past losses and determined to move forward with her life, Yotchan declares her sense of newfound independence with a final nod to the Tokyo neighborhood in which she found, at least for a while, home and community: “Thank you, Shimokitazawa. You wrapped me gently and let me rest and showed me what was true. No matter how you change, may you remain here forever, tenaciously sending up new shoots” (ibid., 200). It is a town, she says, “where the wind blew through, and people loved it and cherished it especially” (ibid., 201). Kawakami’s “The Hut on the Roof” also portrays a Tokyo neighborhood that offers residents a feeling of small-scale, street-level congeniality. The narrator, Taeko Karaki, is a forty-two-year-old divorced woman whose ideal home is a place that combines convenience (ease of commuting by train and procuring life’s daily necessities) with a measure of sociability. Taeko integrates herself into her Tokyo suburban neighborhood by becoming a familiar figure in the community of shopkeepers whose businesses she patronizes and whose company she keeps at the local pub. Though “only 20 minutes by rail or subway” from central Tokyo, it is an area where small stores specializing in fish, poultry, vegetables, and other everyday provisions still exist alongside the supermarkets that have opened to serve a growing population living in a “jumble” of “[n]ew apartments, older flats, and individual houses” (Kawakami 2015 [2005], 142). (The location is not named, although Kōenji springs to mind as a possibility.) Taeko’s full integration into the neighborhood comes when the fishmonger Heizō, whose habit is to address all female customers as “okusan” 112 B. E. THORNBURY

(“Missus”), strikes up a conversation with her. Slightly annoyed by his assumption that she is married, she informs him that she is not “okusan.” She wants Heizō and the world to see her as the independent, self- sufficient woman she believes herself to be, rather than as a husband- dependent housewife out doing the shopping for her family. Asking her name, he immediately goes too far in the other direction by calling her “Taeko-chan”—something like “dear little Taeko,” which might be appropriate had he known her since childhood. The cat is out of the bag, so to speak, and the owner of the shop selling poultry proceeds to adopt the even more familiar appellation “Tae-chan.” In a way she had not anticipated, Taeko has been drawn into the community. To a degree, too, she has been overwhelmed by the sociability she sought. Kawakami’s Taeko is basically a private, somewhat standoffish person. Names are revealing in this story: “The last time anyone had added the diminutive ‘chan’ to my name was kindergarten” (Kawakami 2015 [2005], 144), she recalls. “Since then with my good grades, my straight posture, and my crisp way of speaking, neither my male nor my female friends had called me Taeko-chan. Karaki-san. That was the name I’d been called all these years” (ibid.). Even lovers, she reveals, “only got as far as Taeko-san” (ibid.). The marriage on which she embarked in her twenties ended after just two years when she found that she could not fall asleep beside the man. She literally could not relax in his presence. She moves on to other relationships, and is now dating a man who is a fellow teacher at the central Tokyo cram school where she is employed. But, after one of the students where they teach tries to commit suicide, the same kind of insomnia begins to afflict her again. She wants connection, but there is something unsettling for her when it comes to forming close relationships. Taeko’s world expands when she gets to know three local shopkeepers— the fishmonger and the owners of the vegetable store and the one specializing in poultry. The bonds of community are manifested in the daily verbal interactions among them. They know each other’s stories. The fact that sociability is an ongoing process, not just a static state, is represented by the title of the story, which refers to the odd structure sitting on top of the three-story building that houses Heizō’s fish store (on the first floor), his living quarters (on the second floor), and an architect’s office (on the third floor). The “hut” is the residence of a man named Gen—who, Taeko comes to learn, was once the lover of Heizō’s wife Maki until she died of heart failure twenty years previously at the age of forty—two years younger than Taeko is now. 4 COORDINATES OF HOME AND COMMUNITY 113

Taeko becomes privy to her new community’s mysteries—the central one being: Why do Heizō and Gen live in such close proximity and have a kind of “odd-couple” relationship, symbolized by the photo of the famous friends Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau hanging on the wall of the fish shop? (Taeko recognizes the physical resemblance between Picasso and the shorter and somewhat stocky Heizō and between Cocteau and the taller and thinner Gen.) According to the account offered to Taeko by the woman who runs the vegetable store, over a relatively brief span of time, Heizō’s father and mother, Maki’s parents, and Heizō’s younger sister all died one after the other. When Maki also died, even though she had had a relationship with Gen, the two men felt a kind of bond. Gen quit his job at a pub and took on bookkeeping chores for Heizō. Taeko gleans first- hand evidence of the close association between the men when she sees them one day shopping together at the supermarket—using a single cart. The purchases they discuss as they proceed along the aisles are clearly for personal use, not for the store. Heizō is a university graduate who decided to forego the higher status and pay of white collar, corporate employment to take over the fish store that his father had opened after the war. In other words, he chose family and community over a life that would have weakened or perhaps even severed those bonds. He is the fish supplier to local restaurants and pubs and to neighborhood residents who, like Taeko, prefer a more old- fashioned, personal touch when they do their shopping. He cares about the community and can be counted on to provide a special kind of indi- vidualized service. When the futon shop owner brings over a family heir- loom—a large, decorative ceramic platter—as the vessel for the lavish array of sashimi that will be the centerpiece of a meal celebrating his son’s betrothal, Heizō gives the man the best possible selection of fish. He instructs his shop assistant to “use a lot of the good red flesh from the tuna. Just a bit of squid will do it. Bream, and then let’s splurge on the top-quality prawns. Garnish with plenty of wakame seaweed, too. After all, wakame was one of the traditional betrothal gifts, you know? Must be good luck or something, wakame. Damn, maybe that’s not wakame, maybe it’s konbu I’m thinking of” (Kawakami 2015 [2005], 141). It is not just Heizō’s good nature that is being illustrated here. The words also point to the fact that Heizō himself has no children—perhaps because the (physically and emotionally) weak-hearted Maki was not able to bear any. Thus, there is no one in the family to eventually take over the store as Heizō himself did. 114 B. E. THORNBURY

Transformed into Taeko-chan (and then Tae-chan), Taeko becomes a fictive child of the aging shopkeepers. All of them, owners of the property on which their stores sit, are a last generation that is just barely hanging on in the face of competition from the large supermarket chains and the other retail options that consumers have. The man who runs the poultry shop makes no secret of the fact that “[o]nly the places that own their premises have survived” (Kawakami 2015 [2005], 142). There is not enough profit to afford paying rent to a landlord. The small shops are struggling to survive, “putting up a good fight, and [so far] hav[ing] avoided closing down” (ibid.). Residents of the city want convenience, which includes 24/7 accessibility. Even if they have the time, they do not necessarily have the inclination to engage in community-building socializing. After revealing her name— and subsequently fielding nosy queries regarding her love life—Taeko instinctively, though momentarily, shies away from the community into which she has been drawn. One day she decides to just stop at a conven ience store to pick up something to eat, buying a bentō in place of food she would have prepared herself. The clerk microwaves the packaged meal for her, and the transaction is complete. “I can easily shop here, without needing my surname or my given name, I thought, relieved” (Kawakami 2015 [2005], 145). Although she finds the ready-made food palatable enough, she is soon back to the small shops. The local people have broken through her shield of privacy—and she is actually pleased. When the owner of the poultry shop, who regularly adds to her order a couple of skewers of grilled yakitori as a special, no-charge treat, gives her the unsolicited advice that she should spend Christmas with her lover, she is secretly delighted and heads home “feeling light-hearted. When I exhaled, my breath was pure white. It will probably snow tonight, I thought” (Kawakami 2015 [2005], 152). She has even decided that she will not be so quick to break up with this man next to whom she can no longer easily fall sleep. She wants more than ever, it seems, to have relationships that give her a sense of attachment and belonging. Home and community are also mapped in the eyes of not-so- independent women—such as the thirty-eight-year-old Ku-chan in Kakuta’s “A House for Two,” who has yet to leave her childhood Tokyo home. She lives with her mother, a controlling woman whose husband (Ku-chan’s father) left years before. The immediate family additionally includes Ku-chan’s younger sister, Mon-chan, who got out of the house as soon as she could. Now living with her husband and children just outside 4 COORDINATES OF HOME AND COMMUNITY 115 of Tokyo,18 she took a job after getting her university degree and, soon after, got married. Mon-chan has despised her mother ever since she discovered that the older woman was reading her diary and other private papers—and, when confronted, simply denied doing so. Ku-chan dealt with their mother’s prying—as she tells Mon-chan—by not having any secrets. She does not claim any private space; mother is privy to everything. A storied feature of Japan’s aging society is the growing number of older people whose children have “abandoned” them in order to go off and live their own independent lives. Kakuta’s tale depicts a woman who does not want to let her daughter become independent, a mother who, in essence, refuses to be left alone. Ku-chan’s mother is frighteningly adept at spinning a psychological web around her elder daughter, a person who thinks she is making her own choices about the trajectory of her life but is in fact giving in to the demands of a mother who will not let go of her. Step by step, Ku-chan relinquishes any chance for independence. Her default mantra is that men do not understand things—so, why get married? The implication is that only mother understands. The strange relationship between mother and daughter is encapsulated in the manner in which Ku-chan addresses her mother: she calls her Nobu-chan, as if the woman were a younger sister or a close friend rather than a parent. As the story begins, Ku-chan is just returning home from shopping at a department store in Shinjuku. She has bought expensive new underwear. It would be one thing if she simply showed her mother the items she purchased. But, it does not stop there: she changes into the garments, and shows them off to her mother, who goes so far as to comment on her daughter’s good physique. Having in the past had two chances at marriage with men who would have treated her well, Ku-chan turned them away— decisions unmistakably shaped by her mother’s input. The underwear purchase, in fact, takes place in advance of a lunch date with Haraguchi, a longtime acquaintance and the first man ever to have shown serious interest in her. Now divorced from the woman he eventually married, he wants to try again with Ku-chan. On her side, Ku-chan is in too deep a rut with her mother to meet him even half way. The pretty new underwear that she wears on the “date” with him was an ironic purchase. It was just a kind of private statement of self-assurance that, if she wanted to, she could attract a man—but, as she has convinced herself, she does not want to. No one she has ever gotten to know has pleased her—not realizing that it is her mother who always and inevitably sows the seeds of doubt (and ultimate refusal) in her mind. 116 B. E. THORNBURY

Despite the physically protective structure of the family home, life with her mother there has damaged Ku-chan. When she was years younger and just embarking on life as an adult, she had a job and was happy being out in the world. She savored everything, even Tokyo’s crowded rush-hour trains that made her feel that she was part of a new and exciting world. But her mother saw things differently. When Ku-chan told her about the other girls she observed during her commute, with their fashionable clothes and pretty jewelry, the older woman derisively referred to them as streetwalkers. Ku-chan accepted her mother’s viewpoint, and it came at a price. As time passed, it dawned on Ku-chan that her contemporaries were moving on with their lives—asserting their autonomy and independence. Mon-chan’s declaration that their mother was inflicting punishment on herself through Ku-chan as a kind of atonement for being rejected by Ku-chan’s father seems plausible. “Adopting Mother’s perspective made everything seem ridiculous” (Kakuta 2015 [2006], 42), Ku-chan reflects. “And that was a comfortable place to be. Just as Mother was convinced I was her, I suppose it was around then that I began seeing myself as Mother, too” (ibid.). It is not that men do not understand her; it is that Ku-chan—as her younger sister clearly sees—does not understand what has happened to her. Never having ventured too far into the outside world, Ku-chan totally retreats back into her childhood home. Relationships with men can never reach fruition, and even the job that gave her an entrée into the outside world is gone, too. When she reached her late thirties, she became an object of pity in the office where she worked. It was a state of affairs she could not abide, and she quit. “[I]t just became too stressful to have to adjust my values to those of the other people at the office. I simply couldn’t stand having people pry into my background as a 38-year-old woman with no boyfriend who lives alone with her mother—all their offering of advice and worrying on my behalf” (Kakuta 2015 [2006], 39). She notices that stress is causing her to lose her hair. Discovery of a bald spot is “what led me to quit. I haven’t told Mother about the bald spot. I suppose it’s my first secret” (ibid.). She does not want others nosing around in her business, despite the fact that the situation she finds herself in came about because she allowed her mother to control her life. Unlike Mon-chan, she never stopped her mother from prying—and never found her own home. “Futari-gurashi” (literally “two people living together”), the Japanese title of the story, is an ironic comment on a choice that Ku-chan does not make—that is, to become independent from her mother and to live 4 COORDINATES OF HOME AND COMMUNITY 117 together with a man. When she meets Haraguchi for lunch, he tells her about a condo he has just bought. He says he is looking for a “life- partner” (Kakuta 2015 [2006], 39) and glances meaningfully at Ku-chan. Although she has happily kept in touch with him for years, either she is oblivious to the signal or she is simply rejecting any change at this point. Life for her is with her mother. As in “Morning Comes Twice a Day,” “A House for Two” ends with an open question: What will happen to Ku-chan in the future? She is there for her mother, but who will be there for her? On the way home from lunch with Haraguchi, she strolls around her neighborhood a bit. She catches sight of an elderly woman, alone, “walking slowly with the support of a cart” (ibid., 44). Ku-chan feels a sense of unease, as if she is seeing her future self. The childhood home where she lives with her mother provides shelter, but not a sense of being at home. Masako, the central character in Hashimoto’s “Vortex,” is another not- so-independent woman. Although Masako’s husband shares the family house in Tokyo with her, its rooms have become “still and silent” (Hashimoto 2015 [2012], 115). It is a place that she feels has been “filled with a melancholy shadow since she’d agreed to let her daughter move out” (ibid., 116). “Let” is used ironically here, since Masako could not have held back her daughter, a university graduate, who departed to live on her own after beginning a fulltime job and who is now married with her own family. The house is without purpose for a woman who, like Ku-chan in “A House for Two,” is metaphorically not at home with herself. Although she successfully completed the course of study at a two-year college, school was something that she could take or leave. Exams, she felt, were one of “those tiresome obligations one had to fulfill before getting started on life” (Hashimoto 2015 [2012], 117). As it turns out, life for Masako becomes an endless series of obligations that, in the end, leave her feeling empty. Taking a job as an OL (an abbreviation for “office lady”—a term that usually refers to a young, unmarried woman who performs clerical tasks in Japanese offices), she “wasn’t one of those ‘OL’s who dreamed of marriage, nor an ‘OL’ who lived for her career, nor one who aspired to balance work and married life” (ibid.). Getting married, she performed her tasks as a fulltime housewife, raised her daughter, dutifully took care of her parents until they passed away, and now—left with a husband who seems content to sit in front of the television for most of the day—is faced with a profound sense of detachment. Her tasks are done and she has 118 B. E. THORNBURY nowhere in particular to be. It is as if Nancy Rosenberger had Masako in mind when she wrote in her book on Japanese women that “[t]he emotional tie of relationships and the judgment of others’ eyes pull women into prescribed actions as women, mothers, wives, and daughters-in-law. Opportunities abound, but so do tensions. … Women feel deeply the contradictions between explorations into more independent selves and concerns for virtuous selves caring for others” (Rosenberger 2001, 1–2). Some women “have taken the challenge to forge new kinds of personhood out of the new and the old” (ibid., 2), but others—like Masako—do not have the will, ability, or opportunity to do so. Hashimoto contrasts an increasingly expansive Tokyo with Masako, a woman who stands apart from the dynamism of the city around her. She remembers once feeling “bright and free” (Hashimoto 2015 [2012], 119) promenading with school friends in the middle of Ginza’s wide avenues when, for the first time, traffic was detoured, and the area became a pedestrian paradise.19 However, Masako’s view of the city—and her place in it—subsequently lacked excitement and color. Growing up, she felt that “Tokyo was just Tokyo,” which “neither had any noteworthy features nor posed any special hardships. … For the young Masako, Tokyo was the town that contained the house she lived in, and there was no need for it to be anything more” (ibid., 120). As she moved from stage to stage in her life, she could not help but perceive change reflected in the city around her: “As she stepped forward into adulthood, she felt that the town of Tokyo was blossoming apace with her progress” (ibid.). But, in the end, progress for Masako meant little more than doing what was expected of her—going to school, working for a while, getting married, raising a child, and taking care of her elderly parents. Inevitably, Masako’s “connection to the society she lived in gradually faded” (Hashimoto 2015 [2012], 122). After her daughter moved on with her own life, “there was nothing left for Masako to do” (ibid., 132). Her quiet, aging husband is of little help. The few half-hearted attempts Masako makes on her own to be part of a larger world fail. She tries calligraphy lessons at the local community center, but she winds up quitting because she does not like the others in the class. And, when she decides to attend a class reunion, her contemporaries look at her with surprise, “Darling, what happened?” (ibid., 134). They see in her an aging woman who has let time get the best of her. Like Ku-chan, Masako never gained independent self-worth. Failing to reach outside the walls of the house where she grew up or the one where she lived with her 4 COORDINATES OF HOME AND COMMUNITY 119 husband, she was unable to find a place for herself in Tokyo—despite all of the possibilities it may have offered her should she have wanted to take hold of them. And, as with Ku-chan, Masako is a woman for whom a house in Tokyo provides physical shelter, but it is not where she feels emotionally at home.

As Illusion The financially successful urban resident is “expected,” in Yōsuke Hirayama’s succinct formulation, “to move from a rental dwelling to an owner-occupied dwelling, and from a condominium to a single-family home”—preferably, with a garden (Hirayama 2007, 18). But, when is this house with a garden more the illusion of a home than a real one? Suo’s Shall We Dance? undermines the ideal of home ownership whatever the cost. Shōhei Sugiyama (played by Kōji Yakusho) is a middle-aged salaryman who has recently arrived at the storied top of the housing ladder, having bought the picture-perfect house (and garden) in the Tokyo suburbs where he lives with his wife and teenage daughter. Although the film was released in the mid-1990s, a time of post-bubble economic slowdown and recession, it is more reflective of a 1970s and 1980s sensibility. The seemingly endless economic expansion during those decades meant that real estate prices in Japan’s thriving urban centers (especially Tokyo) kept going higher and higher. At that time, home ownership for the average, striving white-collar family in which the husband/father was the breadwinner typically came to mean a lengthy commute for the man that, added to his long hours at his office in the city, exhausted him physically and psychologically and gave him very little time to actually enjoy the property his income made possible. It also came to mean spatial (and also, perhaps, social) isolation for stay-at-home wives/mothers left to raise the children and manage their households in an area that may have been more of an anonymous housing development than a close-knit community. The over- arching cost is the enormous mortgage that is the father’s—and, by extension, the whole family’s—literal debt to the society that pressures them to have a “proper” home.20 Suo portrays Sugiyama as a man worn out and weighed down by the daily grind of life with a large mortgage. Headed home one day on a late- evening train, he happens to see the beautiful Mai (played by ballerina- actress Tamiyo Kusakari) pensively gazing out of the window of her Tokyo ballroom-dance studio—and he is magnetically drawn to her. In short 120 B. E. THORNBURY order, he exits the train, climbs the steps up to the studio, and signs on as a student. Even though Mai unequivocally rebuffs his dreams of a liaison with her from the start, Sugiyama continues taking lessons in order to salvage his pride by making it seem that he actually had a genuine interest in dance. As it turns out, he discovers that he really does like the lessons— not least of all, because he is buoyed by the friendly and supportive community of fellow dancers he encounters at the studio. With dancing as his new, secret passion, he spends even less time at home. Shall We Dance? also undermines the ideal of the nuclear family anchored by the dedicated homemaker wife who spends more time inside of the house than any other member of the family. Masako Sugiyama (actress Hideko Hara) cannot compete in sexual attractiveness with Mai. Whereas Masako is a known quantity (a “typical” housewife), Mai is mysterious. Whereas Masako is of small-to-normal stature and tending toward middle-age plumpness, the vibrant younger Mai is tall and slender, her dancing beautifully lithe and swift. Wondering why her husband has started coming home much later than usual, Masako cannot bring herself to ask him what is going on. Fearing the possibility of an affair, she goes so far as to hire a private detective to clarify the situation. The reconciliation of the couple toward the end of the film, when Sugiyama teaches the tearful Masako a few dance steps in the small backyard of their suburban home, is emotionally unconvincing. The finale of the film, after all, is the splendid farewell party for Mai, who has decided to leave the dance school to go back into professional competition. The man she chooses as her last partner at this celebration in her honor—the person she hopes will arrive to take her in his arms—is none other than Sugiyama. His wife may have urged him to attend the party, but nothing has really changed for her except that she now knows what her husband has been doing with his time. The couple will not give up their house in the suburbs and Sugiyama will continue commuting to his job so they can pay off their mortgage. But, will Sugiyama encourage Masako to learn how to dance so that they can happily dance together in unison (as another married couple in the film do)? That scenario seems unlikely, given that, for Sugiyama, dance was an escape from all that “home” represents— which includes his homemaker wife. In Hikari’s “A Family Party,” the three-generation Tamiya family collectively tries to reconcile its idea of “home” with the structure that houses them. The Tamiyas have literally moved with the times. Selling their city- center, West Shinjuku house and land (that had been occupied by multiple 4 COORDINATES OF HOME AND COMMUNITY 121 generations of the family) to the developers of a high-rise hotel, they spend their newly acquired funds on a spacious property in the suburbs of Yokohama, a half-hour by train outside of Tokyo. As part of the deal to sell, they also negotiate rights in perpetuity to a “family room” on an upper floor of the twenty-story Planet Hotel (“Puranetto Hoteru”)—a name suited to an enterprise providing accommodation for well-heeled world travelers. In a deft stroke of chromatic metaphor, Hikari paints the Tamiyas’s hotel room black in the otherwise all ivory-colored building. It is as if it is a shadowy nonspace or a kind of negation of space befitting a city in which neighborhoods where families living in compact, single- family homes knew each other and felt that they were part of a community have given way to forests of towering buildings comprising atomized units stacked one on top of the other and occupied by residents with no ties to each other.21 “A Family Party” situates issues of home and community against the backdrop of the transformation of Tokyo urban space in the 1980s, as seen in the rapid increase in the number of high-rise structures in the city.22 The narrator reminisces that her West Shinjuku residential neighborhood had been a jumble of modest, old houses, “[a]nd yet, I was always relieved whenever I returned to it from the jungle of high-rise buildings [spreading out from Shinjuku Station]. It had been a neighborhood where browns and greys melted nicely together, and the natural colors were gentle on my skin” (Hikari 1991 [1986], 88). The fact that West Shinjuku, now one of the most concentrated high-rise areas in Tokyo, was exactly where the old neighborhood was, paradoxically kept it unchanged for longer than it otherwise might have been: “There was a reason this neighborhood had been left without any newer and more modern-style houses: by the time such remodeling had become popular among the residents of Tokyo, the inva- sion of high rises was already in progress here, making people reluctant to invest in their existing houses and stores” (ibid.). People knew that change was inevitable. The Tamiya grandfather, to whom the property officially belonged, had at first fiercely resisted giving up the land. Finally agreeing to the sale, he is the one individual in the family for whom the transfer to Yokohama does not work out well. A member of the older generation of people dismissed by some as being “hung up with extended families, hometowns and things like that” (Hikari 1991 [1986], 113), he cannot adjust to life in the new house. He declines mentally. “[O]ne day he began walking aimlessly on the street that leads to the highway” (ibid., 97), is struck by a car, and dies. 122 B. E. THORNBURY

For the grandfather, the move to Yokohama meant physical and psychological displacement from the Tokyo home and community that he had no desire to leave. Having had a voice in selecting a new place to live, the narrator (who is grandfather’s daughter-in-law) somewhat regretfully recalls:

My conditions were that it be convenient for Yūji [her husband] to commute to work, that it be an environment where Mother could feel comfortable and where the children could play safely. I said I’d always wanted to live near the sea. Although I felt strongly about the conditions for my husband and children, I didn’t consider Father. I thought it would satisfy him if all of us were happy. It was only much later that I realized the newly developed suburb was good for the children[,] but it had no pachinko parlor for Father to walk to. (Ibid., 103–4)

Here, pachinko parlor is a metonym for the Tokyo life left behind. The women, along with the younger generation of men (like Yūji), are depicted as having a clear perspective on the changes that were taking place around them in Tokyo as well as being much more adaptable to new surroundings and circumstances. They were also acutely aware that there was a definite downside to not selling out—that the forces of change arrayed against remaining in West Shinjuku were too strong. Once everyone else sells, Yūji remarked while discussions were still underway, “we’ll be the only ones left. And even if they change their plans and build around us, we’ll be right next to the high rise. I’ve heard about cases where gangsters pressure people and give them a real bad time” (Hikari 1991 [1986], 99). The family receives enough money to purchase a new property outright (in contrast to neighbors in their Yokohama development who, as the Tamiyas knew, were weighed down by sizable mortgages—as is the case with the Sugiyamas in Shall We Dance?). Not only is the Tamiya family mortgage-free, but the narrator and her mother-in-law discover some benefits in their new home. They may not have the access to the wide variety of “food prepared by the well-known old stores [in Tokyo]” (Hikari 1991 [1986], 97) lavishly and abundantly arrayed on the food floors of Shinjuku’s numerous department stores. “[I]n Yokohama,” however, as the narrator observes, “I have learned to enjoy picking edible grasses, like m[u]gwort, with Mother, and making cakes or pickling them. Mother discovered magnolia and dog sorrels not far from the house. She makes sushi wrapped with magnolia leaves and cooks young dog sorrel shoots” (ibid.). The land on which the house in Yokohama sits provides sustenance to the family in a way the central Tokyo 4 COORDINATES OF HOME AND COMMUNITY 123 property never did—and even binds the narrator and her mother-in-law closer together as they “forage” the land to nurture the family. When the mother-in-law starts to emerge from the initial period of mourning after the death of her husband, and puts energy into her “foraging,” the narrator-daughter-in-law is almost willfully obtuse when she says that she “couldn’t help worrying about her” when she sees her mother-in-law gathering grasses and leaves “as if she were trying to forget about Father” (ibid., 98). Rather than trying to forget, the older woman is expressing her will to go on with her life. On the eve of its public opening, the management of Hotel Planet invites residents of the old neighborhood to be the first guests in its rooms. The Tamiyas occupy their all-black room, with the extended family spill- ing out into another room across the hall. Without the presence of the family patriarch, it is a bittersweet occasion—and the family does its best to honor the man’s memory. There is a sense of uncertainty at the end of the story when the narrator’s young son Kōta bicycles all the way from Yokohama to West Shinjuku—and loses his way as he approaches the area, dense as it has become with high-rise buildings. The family, perched high above the city streets in their hotel room, have to guide him in as he calls from pay phones along the way. (There were, of course, no cell phones in widespread use in the 1980s.) But, it is not only Kōta who is the object of the family’s concern. It is also the deceased grandfather: “Grandma,” one of the children says to the narrator’s mother-in-law, “when Grandpa’s soul comes back here, it’ll get lost, won’t it?” (Hikari 1991 [1986], 118). The grandmother tries to reassure the child by saying that “[G]randpa’s seen lots of things that have changed” (ibid.). But, just as the child’s question echoed his own father’s wistful comment (“I wonder where my home is” [ibid., 114]), it is clear to everyone that, if the family had not left the old neighborhood, Grandpa may possibly be still alive. For him, the house and garden in a new Yokohama residential development could not replace the Tokyo home that he once occupied and the community of which he had long been part.

* * *

The novels, stories, and film discussed in this chapter foreground characters who are confronted with the challenge of finding a place of belonging and connection in the city. Hideo Harada of Strangers, Fujii of “The Yellow Tent on the Roof,” and Tsukuru Tazaki of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki 124 B. E. THORNBURY and His Years of Pilgrimage are individuals whose understanding of home and community is shaped by memory. A detour to Asakusa transports Harada back to the period of his childhood when he felt secure in the embrace of his parents. Taking refuge on the roof of his Ginza office building returns Fujii to the time in his life when adult responsibilities and expectations had yet to exert their pressure on him. For Tsukuru Tazaki, a sojourn on a platform in Shinjuku Station helps him take a measure of the relationships he lost and the one that he may soon have the possibility of gaining. For Akira, Kyōko, Yuki, and Shigeru—the vulnerable children of Nobody Knows—belonging and connections mean defending their right to stay together in a busy and crowded city that does not see, let alone protect or nurture, them. The narrator of “Morning Comes Twice a Day,” Taeko of “The Hut on the Roof,” Ku-chan of “A House for Two,” and Masako of “Vortex” are a cohort of independent and not-so-independent Tokyo women who keenly feel the passage of time as they reflect on the lives they have lived. In spite of the losses she has suffered, Mikage of Kitchen comes to thrive in a Tokyo where chance encounters can potentially lead to supportive and sustained relationships. Loss leads Yotchan of Moshi Moshi to embrace—and experience psychological healing—in the neighborhood of Shimokitazawa. Sugiyama of Shall We Dance? and the narrator of “A Family Party” bring to life a Tokyo where—despite the physical proximity of mothers, fathers, and children—even what looks to be the most perfect of family dwellings may be no more than an illusion of home. For a time, Sugiyama discovers in dance a feeling of joy that he could not find inside the walls of his hard-won, mortgage-heavy home-with-garden. The narrator of “A Family Party” is painfully aware that the new house in Yokohama bought with the proceeds from the sale of the family’s house and land in West Shinjuku came with a high, unrecoverable cost. Grandfather Tamiya, who agreed to let go of the property for the sake of his family, lost the home and community that were familiar to him—and, perhaps as a direct consequence, lost his own life. Like Kōta, his bicycle-riding grandson, all of the characters in the works examined here navigate their way, with varying degrees of success, through Tokyo’s disorienting vast- ness and density. 4 COORDINATES OF HOME AND COMMUNITY 125

Notes 1. It is not unusual in central Tokyo for condos equipped as residences to be used exclusively as offices. 2. See Chap. 2, note 2. 3. “That’s what’s nice about Asakusa,” Harada muses as he walks around. “You can still run into [affable] people … around here” (Yamada 2003 [1987], 42). 4. When Harada and (the ghost of) his father resurrect their family’s past by going out to play a game of catch in the street as they used to do when Harada was a boy, Yamada describes the thoroughfare as being mostly empty of traffic because it is Obon (2003 [1987], 99). 5. Kei, who “worked in the accounting department of a packinghouse” [in Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish-market district] had “been born and raised in a small farm village about an hour by bus from Toyama on the Sea of Japan coast” (Yamada 2003 [1987], 122 and 89–90). She explains to Harada that she initially sought out his company because one night “as I sat there in my empty apartment, all of a sudden I couldn’t stand being alone anymore” (ibid., 21). When she later invites Harada to visit her apartment, he is surprised by her “juvenile furnishings” (ibid., 177)—objects that, in retro- spect, indicated to him that she was a woman who had not psychologically found a home for herself in the city. 6. Although Kei can be viewed simply as an evil ghost who wants to take revenge on Harada because he, at first, spurned her advances (the tipping point for her suicide), both his parents and Kei seem to be killing him because he feels a loving attachment to them. In reference to Kei, Harada realizes that “she couldn’t drain my lifeblood unless I loved her from my heart. The laws of the other world were difficult to fathom” (Yamada 2003 [1987], 195). 7. As will be further discussed in the following chapter, homeless people in Tokyo commonly use blue, construction-site tarps as waterproof coverings for their makeshift shelters. In contrast, Fujii’s shelter is a store-bought tent—a relatively expensive item belonging to economically privileged individuals who have the money and time to go mountain climbing and camping. And, more significantly, it is bright yellow—thus declaring in an unmistakable way that the narrator is not to be seen as one of Tokyo’s homeless. The color yellow is for a guy with a recognized place in society who is just making a lifestyle choice. Fujii has access to the roof of the Ginza building because he belongs there (as an employee in one of its offices). Blue is for those who lack status in society and are consigned to a ground-level existence. 126 B. E. THORNBURY

8. In a way, Kore-eda’s more recent filmShoplifters (Manbiki kazoku 2018) takes a step beyond Nobody Knows by offering up the possibility of an ad hoc household that willingly embraces vulnerable children in need, like Shōta and Yuri. Although Kore-eda locates Shoplifters somewhere in the Tokyo area (given the distant views of Skytree tower), I focus here on Nobody Knows because it specifically defines the plight of Keiko Fukushima’s children in terms of the central Tokyo neighborhood where they live, largely ignored by and virtually invisible to those around them. 9. The issue is not limited to the presence or absence of a father. There is “strong prejudice,” as Chieko Akaishi writes, “toward bearing a child outside of marriage. … Unmarried single mothers face even stronger social discrimination than divorced mothers. Their wages are low, and their relatives often shun them” (2011, 129). Keiko’s desire for a new relationship was likely a quest for social acceptance as much as one for love: when Akira, with no one else to turn to, telephones her from a public payphone at one point, he clearly hears her (before getting cut off for lack of money to continue paying for the call) unhesitatingly answer the phone with the name of her new family. 10. In “Cat Cafés, Affective Labor, and the Healing Boom in Japan,” Lorraine Plourde notes that “Japanese apartments typically do not allow pets”—and that some cat lovers therefore patronize cat cafés, businesses that enable them to spend time with the animals (2014, 118). Inaba’s story predates the cat café boom, but, as the narrator discovered, the restriction on pets was very much in place. 11. While “Chūō Kōen” (Chūō Park) can conceivably refer to a different location in the Tokyo area, Central (Chūō) Park in Shinjuku is the one that most readily comes to mind here, given the presence of high-rise buildings along its periphery. 12. The furniture- and gadget-stocked rooms of the Tanabes’s apartment speak to the trend in 1980s Japan to turn living spaces into “containers for commodities” (Sand 2013, 15). 13. As Angela Yiu notes (personal communication, 25 August 2019), Yoshimoto’s use of the English word kitchen (rendered in katakana script) rather than the term daidokoro transports her Japanese readers into the glossy-catalogue world of spacious, well-appointed Western-style “system kitchens,” such as those marketed by the Lixil Corporation. (See, for example, https://www.lixil.co.jp/lineup/kitchen/.) It represents a well- heeled Tokyo that stands in marked contrast to the poor—and, eventually, desperate—living conditions in which the children in Nobody Knows find themselves. 14. Although “Yocchan” appears in the translation, I am using “Yotchan” instead because it is the more conventional way to romanize the nickname. 4 COORDINATES OF HOME AND COMMUNITY 127

15. In naming the bistro where Yotchan works Les Liens (French for “ties”— in the sense of the ties that link people together), Yoshimoto underscores the home-and-community quality of Shimokitazawa. As Yotchan says, “The bistro wasn’t in Ginza, where the best French restaurants were, or in an upscale neighborhood like Aoyama or Azabu. It wasn’t even in the fashionable areas of Jiyugaoka or Hiro’o” (Yoshimoto 2016 [2010], 25)— but its location in neighborly Shimokitazawa perfectly suited both its customers and Yotchan herself. 16. Although Meguro comes up short in comparison with Shimokitazawa in the novel, Yoshimoto takes pains to give the area its due. Yotchan muses: It was true that Meguro was exciting in its own way. An intellectual atmosphere prevailed there, as though it was full of people who’d only started trying to figure out how to enjoy life once they’d grown up and established responsible lives. And in the backstreets, there were old- fashioned Chinese restaurants and bars, and people from all different walks of life seeking different things. It wasn’t full of young people or tourists, like Shimokitazawa. I recalled a lot of well-heeled ladies, and very young children. (Yoshimoto 2016 [2010], 71–72) 17. Yoshimoto literally maps Shimokitazawa and the surrounding area in describing ways that Yotchan’s mother spends her days. With time on her hands, the woman becomes a kind of flâneuse who explores the city from her new home base. She wanders past (and, often, into) the shops and eateries of Shimokitazawa, sometimes going further afield: “I walk down to Sangenjaya to the big Tsutaya to browse magazines, or get bread from the famous sourdough bakery. … After that I go to the cute café round the back of the Carrot Tower” (Yoshimoto 2016 [2010], 40). 18. Mon-chan and her family live in a condo in Motoyawata, Chiba Prefecture. The exact location of the family home in Tokyo, where Ku-chan lives with her mother, is not given. However, it is close to a subway station (probably on the Ginza line, based on hints given in the story). At the beginning of the story, Ku-chan takes the subway back home after finishing her shopping at a department store in Shinjuku (transferring, if would appear, from the Marunouchi line to the Ginza line at Akasaka-Mitsuke Station). Later in the story, she strolls along the Kanda River near the family home. 19. In the summer of 1970 “pedestrian paradises” (hokoshā tengoku) were introduced in Japan: “major shopping streets in Tokyo and other Japanese cities [were] closed off to vehicular traffic for several hours on Sunday afternoons to create temporary public leisure zones” (Sand 2013, 51). 20. As Jordan Sand has written, “[t]he volume of housing loans continued to expand exponentially through the 1970s, as mortgages replaced cash payments. Yet what people acquired was farther away from center city, resulting 128 B. E. THORNBURY

in longer commutes and placing most suburbanites in districts where they had no social ties. Thus, as ever-growing numbers of urban Japanese sought private homeownership into the 1980s, the frustrations and inadequacies of this model of urban living came to be felt more keenly” (2013, 8). 21. In a pretend conversation with her as-yet unborn grandchildren, the story’s narrator (the daughter-in-law of the man who held the deed to the West Shinjuku property) tells them that, when the decision was made to sell their plot of land to the hotel developers, the Tamiyas “made it a condition that our family would have the right to use room 1801 as long as the hotel stands so that something would be passed down to you children. We had the right to decorate the interior any way we liked and to keep it for our use. So, you see, that room is our ancestral home in the sky” (Hikari 1991 [1986], 87). 22. Jordan Sand cites geographer Hiroshi Matsubara in noting that “the aggregate trend in Tokyo construction shifted around 1974 from horizontal sprawl of single-family housing on the periphery to vertical growth of office buildings and apartments in the central districts” (2013, 9). Hotels, as described in “A Family Party,” were also a significant element of that vertical growth. CHAPTER 5

Locating the Outsider Inside Tokyo

“For the last couple of decades, studies that undermine the supposed ethnic homogeneity of Japanese society have amassed” (2010, 8), Yoshio Sugimoto has written. Among them are Sugimoto’s own Introduction to Japanese Society, which attempts to counter ideologies of homogeneity that “hid[e] the experiences and even existence of various minority groups” (ibid.)—thus relegating them to the status of outsiders.1 As out- lined by Sugimoto, Japan’s main minority groups, making up approximately five percent of the population overall, are the Ainu, a relatively small group of indigenous Japanese people; burakumin, descendants of an historically outcaste population; permanent Korean residents, many of whom are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of men and women who relocated to Japan following its colonization of the Korean peninsula in 1910; and foreign workers, both legal and illegal, who began arriving in large numbers starting in the economic-bubble years of the 1980s, especially to fill the need for low-skill or unskilled labor (ibid., 6–7). Works of fiction and film that map the spaces occupied by the outsider inside Tokyo use the tools of artistic creation to help challenge ideologies of homogeneity in Japan. “[C]apital cities,” as Lucy Andrew and Catherine Phelps point out, are “representative of national identity”—an identity that “can be threatened by those considered ‘other’ within their midst” (2013, 3). Outsider characters in the novels, short stories, and films discussed in this chapter include those who, because of their ethnicity or

© The Author(s) 2020 129 B. E. Thornbury, Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34276-0_5 130 B. E. THORNBURY nationality, are not members of the majority Japanese population. They also include those who are part of the majority Japanese population but for whom factors such as homelessness, gender identity, sexual orientation, or even speech patterns place them outside of mainstream society as conventionally defined. What often binds together these outsider characters is the psychological and emotional trauma and, sometimes, actual physical violence they experience. In many cases, as noted in the chapter on gender and mobility, Tokyo is a space of limitation rather than of possibility, of danger rather than of safety and security. In the first section, “Spaces Occupied by the Foreign Outsider,” I focus on Natsuo Kirino’s novel OUT, Haruki Murakami’s novel After Dark, Kōji Fukada’s filmHospitalité , Satoshi Kon’s filmTokyo Godfathers, and Toshiyuki Horie’s story “The Owl’s Estate” (2015, “Fukurō no yakata” 2001). Then, in “Spaces Occupied by the Domestic Outsider,” I examine Shūichi Yoshida’s story “An Elevator on Sunday” (2015, “Nichiyōbi no erebētā” 2003), Hideo Furukawa’s story “Model T Frankenstein,” and Murakami’s novel 1Q84. I then return to Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers and Fukada’s Hospitalité and refer to Keigo Higashino’s novel The Devotion of Suspect X before looking further at Banana Yoshimoto’s novel Kitchen, Yoshida’s novel Parade, and Natsuo Kirino’s novel Real World. The section concludes with a look at Murakami’s story “Yesterday” (2017, “Iesutadei” 2014).

Spaces Occupied by the Foreign Outsider

From Brazil “‘I’m half-Japanese,’ he wanted to shout. ‘I’m a Japanese citizen.’ But to these people, anyone who didn’t share their facial features, who didn’t speak their language, just wasn’t one of them” (Kirino 2003 [1997], 119). The speaker here is Roberto Kazuo Miyamori, a character in Kirino’s OUT. In Kirino’s project as a writer, the global city as represented by Tokyo is a vast terrain of anger, frustration, and bewil- derment, where refuge from insecurity and disconnection seems impossible to find. The English word OUT—rendered in capital letters—appears on the title page of both the Japanese and English editions of the novel. It is a visual symbol of explosive emotion, an existential cry of despair for the four Japanese women—Masako, Yoshie, Yayoi, and Kuniko— whose life-stories collectively form the narrative, expressing the pro- 5 LOCATING THE OUTSIDER INSIDE TOKYO 131 found desire of each one to break free of the unhappiness in which time and circumstances have trapped her. As Amanda Seaman has com- mented, “Kirino presents us with individuals who are caught in a spatial and social double bind, denied access to the ‘center’ of the city, and hence to power, yet unable to find solace in the traditional roles and locales—mother, wife, and home—expected to protect or fulfill them in the past” (2006, 200). Kirino maximizes the metaphorical significance of the novel’s title by including two characters whose “out” was to enter Japan in search of the better opportunities they believed they could find there. One of them is Roberto Kazuo Miyamori. He is part of the cohort of young Brazilians of Japanese descent who, along with a large contingent of Japanese-born workers (including the four main women characters), hold low-wage, labor-intensive jobs in a bento ̄ factory assembling the kind of ready-to-eat packaged meals that are widely available at convenience stores and other points of sale. The geographic setting of the workplace is a desolate and semi-abandoned industrial park in Musashi-Maruyama, a city in Tokyo’s western suburbs. Kirino evokes an almost dystopian Tokyo Metropolis in the process of exploring urban society in Japan. Kazuo’s dreams of making good money at a decent job in a country where he was sure he would be welcomed as family are soon shattered, leaving him feeling isolated and rejected. The son of a Brazilian woman and a Japanese man,

Kazuo was twenty-five when he arrived in Japan as a guest worker on a two- year contract. But he soon found that the land of his forefathers didn’t pay much attention to the fact that its blood was running in his veins. At the airport, on the streets, he knew he was seen as a gaijin, a “foreigner,” and it burned him up. … The day he realized that his face and physique would forever consign him to the status of a gaijin, Kazuo gave up on Japan. (Kirino 2003 [1997], 119–20)

He is drawn to Masako, in whom he sees a strong figure of “feminine” compassion who can validate his worth. In the end, she does so, if only by entrusting him to hold on to her passport and money for a while when she enters the endgame of the novel’s narrative line. Although she gives him a gift of funds that will help ease his return to Brazil after he decides to go back there, she does not keep the piece of paper on which he writes his address in the hope that she will join him in his home country. 132 B. E. THORNBURY

Kazuo is a character of considerable significance through whom Kirino gives voice to Japan’s uneasy relationship with people from outside its borders—even those who stake a claim to Japanese ethnicity. Consistent with the description of the bento ̄factory as a “cold, unfriendly workplace” (Kirino 2003 [1997], 8), there are reports that women employees are being assaulted by one or more men on the road from the parking lot. It is an illustration of Jane Darke’s observation that “[w]omen know that city space does not really belong to them. They know that most cities are dangerous, that they may only use particular parts of the city and at certain times, and that even in those spaces where they are permitted to be (as guests) they must comport themselves in particular ways” (1996, 89). Suspicion immediately falls on the Brazilian factory workers who are deni- grated as untrustworthy outsiders despite their Japanese heritage. Rumors arise that the assailant is one of them. And, indeed, although Kazuo is not the attacker (who is never identified), he does forcibly embrace Masako early in the novel (Kirino 2003 [1997], 57). It is an ill-considered, rash act of anguished loneliness that he immediately regrets. He vows to spend the rest of his time in Japan learning enough Japanese so that he can ade- quately apologize to the enraged Masako. Despite the explicit invitation by Japan’s government to Brazilians of Japanese descent to return “home” to provide labor for its economy (especially in the boom years of the 1980s, a period that was still fresh in people’s memories when OUT was published in 1997), Kazuo proves that Japan does not necessarily welcome returning “family.” Kirino uses Kazuo’s backstory to dramatize the historical record. In 1953, at the age of nineteen, Kirino writes, Kazuo’s father emigrated to Brazil from rural Miyazaki (in southwestern Japan), one of the country’s poorest prefectures:

Thanks to an introduction from a relative, he had found a job on a Japanese- owned farm in the suburbs of São Paulo, and there he hoped to make his fortune. But he soon discovered that there was a big difference between the attitudes of the Japanese who had been educated in a relatively liberal postwar Japan and the more traditional prewar immigrants who had suffered in Brazil. Before long, Kazuo’s free-spirited father left the farm and headed for São Paulo, though he didn’t know a soul in the city. (Kirino 2003 [1997], 118)

The father “was taken in not by the Japanese immigrants with whom he had blood ties, but by a kindly Brazilian barber who put him to work as his apprentice” (ibid.). He married a Brazilian woman and they had a son, 5 LOCATING THE OUTSIDER INSIDE TOKYO 133

Roberto Kazuo. The father died when Kazuo was ten. “About the only things Japanese his father had left behind were Kazuo’s citizenship and his name” (ibid.).2 Growing up, Kazuo felt an affinity for Japan. While working in a print shop after graduating from high school, he saw a poster advertising jobs in Japan. Having heard that people of Japanese descent, such as himself, were being specially recruited, he decided to go there even though he did not speak any Japanese.3 Although lured by dreams of riches to be had in Japan (at that time, having the second-largest economy in the world after the United States), Kazuo’s immediate goal was almost pitifully modest: he just wanted to save up enough money to buy a new car. If he got lucky, he thought, he might even be able to get enough for a house. Unlike those economic migrants who seek opportunity wherever they can find it in the world but have no expectation of a warm welcome, Kazuo felt that he would be treated as kin in Japan—and his mother encouraged him in this belief (“his blood was half Japanese, she told him, so the people there would treat him as part of the family” [Kirino 2003 [1997], 119]). After six years in the print shop, he arrived in Japan with a two-year employment contract. Lacking fluency in Japanese and possessing just minimal educational credentials meant that the only work he could get was dreary, dead- end factory-assembly-line toil. There was no opportunity to learn new skills. And, just as his father was not accepted by the Japanese community in Brazil, Kazuo felt the same way when he arrived in Japan.4 Kazuo’s violent embrace of Masako in the factory parking lot, which initiates the link between the two characters in the narrative, is also a kind of anguished attempt to embrace the country that responds only by rejecting him as unequivocally as she does. Even though Masako’s attitude toward Kazuo softens by the end of the novel, he holds no attraction for her. She is drawn to the murderous Mitsuyoshi Satake, whom she winds up killing in an act of gruesome self-defense. She appears attracted to the “authenticity” of Satake’s misogynistic violence, as if it embodies in the most unvarnished way possible the depths to which relationships between men and women can sink. Kazuo’s ill-considered grab repels her. It does not occur to him that his feelings for Masako “might be nothing more than an attempt to find some comfort in the inhospitable country his father had come from” (Kirino 2003 [1997], 216). Even when Masako better understands Kazuo’s state of mind, she sees him as just having “followed her like a lost dog. … She knew he was hurt. … But what disturbed her most was the depth of his feelings. She had no need for such emotions 134 B. E. THORNBURY anymore: she’d left them behind” (ibid., 223). By the end of the novel, it is not so much a matter of Masako rejecting Kazuo per se, but rather the clarification that there is no common ground between them. Roberto Kazuo Miyamori is a lonely man who feels rejected by his “homeland” Japan.5 Tokyo offers him no solace. To escape from Japan, so to speak, he heads to Little Brazil “on the border between Gunma and Saitama prefectures … [where he] read soccer magazines. Then he bought a few ingredients he needed to make Brazilian food and looked in at the video store.” He becomes “thoroughly homesick. He missed São Paulo, missed everything about Brazil” (Kirino 2003 [1997], 120).6 Kirino lays bare Kazuo’s utter naiveté in believing that somehow Japan would welcome him, a person who does not know the language and culture, as if his name alone would give him an entrée into people’s hearts and minds. By the end of the novel, with his planned departure from Japan in sight (having sought an “out” in Japan, he now wants nothing more than to leave there), he has acquired enough Japanese to be able to communicate with Masako, who says she forgives him. And, although it is not money he has earned himself, he has the one million yen that Masako leaves with him as a kind of parting expression of thanks for his being the only person to whom she could entrust the items (her passport and her ill-gotten stash of money) that will enable her own “out.”

From China “Although East-West binarism may occupy the top of the list for compara- tive studies,” Kwai-Cheung Lo has written, “the encounter between East and East is actually far more complicated and historically implicated. … For many Chinese, Japan’s advanced economy and social progress are what China has been striving for over hundreds of years of revolutions and reforms” (2004, 271). Unlike Kazuo, who is ready to leave Japan after hardly a year has passed, OUT’s Anna Ri arrived from Shanghai on a student visa four years previously (“and even now her visa status suggested she should still be attending language classes” [Kirino 2003 (1997), 36]) to do whatever was required to accumulate enough money to open a bou- tique back in China. Anna’s youth, beauty, and exotic foreignness—while being familiarly Asian—made her a highly desirable person to employ in Tokyo’s hostess clubs, like the one owned by the same Satake who at the end of the novel fatally meets his match at the hands of Masako. Ever on the lookout for 5 LOCATING THE OUTSIDER INSIDE TOKYO 135 opportunity, Satake recruits Anna from another Tokyo club with the intention of grooming her to be his top money-maker. In exchange for an apartment, stylish clothes, frequent trips to the hairdresser, and an income that is doubtlessly far more than she could get even if her visa were to permit her to work legally, she chats (for an exorbitant hourly fee) with customers as she pours their overpriced drinks at Satake’s club—located in the infamous Kabukichō neighborhood. And, with Satake handling the arrangements, she provides sexual services for select, wealthy men. Satake “had almost thirty Chinese hostesses working for him, but Anna’s looks and brains set her apart from the rest” (Kirino 2003 (1997), 34). Unlike Kazuo, Anna can make a relatively good wage by not being Japanese. She is a foreigner for whom there is a welcoming space at the very center of Tokyo, in the hostess and gambling clubs where men such as Kenji, the husband of one of Masako’s factory coworkers, cannot resist the allure of women who are not their wives—even at the risk of losing everything. For Anna, there is even a welcoming neighborhood at the center of the city to call home during those hours when she is not at work. She lives in Ō kubo, a part of Shinjuku Ward, where large numbers of ethnic Koreans and Chinese people in fact live.7 Anna, like Kazuo, dreamt of finding economic opportunity in Japan. She “had come [to Japan] with the sole aim of making money, and the only tools she’d brought with her were her youth and beauty. She’d come with great expectations, attracted by the ease of it all, spurred on by the broker’s promises of riches to be earned in Japan” (Kirino 2003 [1997], 187). Kirino writes that Anna’s “love of ease” is her undoing—meaning that “a bright, sensible girl like her” who “had been a good student at school, and had even thought of going on to university” (ibid., 187–88) had options other than sex work. “[H]ere she was, making easy money just for spending time with Japanese men. She knew there was something sleazy about the whole business, but she couldn’t help herself” (ibid., 188). Successful in her quest to accumulate a substantial amount of money, she quickly finds employment in another club when Satake’s business is eventually shut down. Like Kazuo, too, Anna became painfully aware of her status as an outsider as soon as she set foot on Japanese soil—immediately feeling “overwhelmed by the economic prosperity … [and] the frenetic activity of [Tokyo]” (Kirino 2003 [1997], 187). She was especially “intimidated by the self-confidence of the rich young Japanese women. … It all seemed so unfair. And it was when she felt most frustrated with her situation, most 136 B. E. THORNBURY insecure and lonely, that she saw herself … as a frightened country girl lost in the big city” (ibid., 188). The streets of Tokyo, like those of all big cities, are the hunting ground of individuals on the lookout for young women like Anna—lacking connections and with few options when it comes to making money. Chauffeured by Satake (who drives an image- enhancing Mercedes) on her daily rounds to shop and get her hair done, Anna mistakenly interprets his seemingly solicitous treatment of her as a sign of real affection. As he makes brutally clear, she is no more than money-making property in his eyes. Kirino uses Anna’s emotional naiveté to underscore the character’s desire for validation as an individual with a place in society. A young woman from China, whose experience in Tokyo is portrayed in a far different way from Anna’s, appears in Murakami’s After Dark. Forced into sex work by a Chinese gang operating in Tokyo, the nineteen- year-old Guo Dongli is beaten, robbed, and stripped naked in the room of a love hotel by a client enraged that her menstrual period had started. An educated guess says that the novel’s “after dark” Tokyo setting is Shibuya— where chain restaurants such as Denny’s are open twenty-four hours, and love hotels, establishments that rent rooms by the hour, can be found in abundance.8 Dongli’s violent client is an elite corporate employee named Shirakawa whose specialty is information technology. He occasionally works overnight at his office when he needs uninterrupted access to the company’s computer systems. He takes breaks—to do calisthenics, get something to eat, and—sometimes—buy sex. When he is ready to return to his home and family in the suburbs (in the predawn hours before the trains begin running again), the company covers the price of a taxi. Shirakawa represents Tokyo’s globalized, highly mobile residents. Having reached Japan’s shores, Dongli can also be described, though in a cynical way, as globalized and mobile. She is one of several young women who appear in After Dark—although she is the only one who is not Japanese. It is when Mari, the main character (who speaks Chinese), tries to help and comfort her, that the hurt and frightened woman gives her name. Except for this one time, she is otherwise referred to in the novel as “the prostitute” or “the woman.” As Rio Ō tomo writes, the non- use of her name “deprive[s] [her] of her autonomy along with her name” (2009, 356)—to which should be added, her humanity—exactly the point that Murakami is trying to convey. Talking with her, Mari finds out that Dongli has been in Japan for two months—and, given her dialect, is probably from “Old Manchuria” (Murakami 2007 [2004], 41). “There 5 LOCATING THE OUTSIDER INSIDE TOKYO 137 emerges a picture in which Chinese men operate a human trafficking racket,” Ō tomo points out, “bringing in girls from Manchuria and selling their sexual services to Japanese men in Tokyo. The operation is provoca- tively described as organized through ‘phone orders’ with women being delivered to hotels on motorbikes, ‘hot’n’fresh, like pizza’” (2009, 357). It can well be imagined that Dongli, like Anna in OUT, had dreams of earning large sums of money in Tokyo. Whereas Anna’s parents—a taxi- driving father and vegetable-vendor mother—had enough income to satisfy their daily needs, Anna wanted more money so that she could carve out a place for herself in the world of fashion. Dongli may have wanted (or needed) the money just to help her family survive. She no doubt trusted someone’s promises to make her wishes come true, and they betrayed her. Although Murakami leaves to the reader’s imagination the exact circumstances that led to Dongli’s plight, she—like Kazuo and Anna—are outsider characters who take shape within a palpably real Tokyo.

From Here and There Around the World “Mobility is the order of the day” (1997, 360), Tim Cresswell has written. “Nomads, migrants, travelers and explorers inhabit a world where nothing is certain or fixed. Tradition and rootedness have the smell of death” (ibid.). The foreign outsiders who appear in Fukada’s filmHospitalité are a suggestively rich mix of “nomads, migrants, travelers and explorers”— figures through whom the director asks the viewer: How can Tokyo become open to the world? Despite its nostalgic associations, the shitamachi setting of Hospitalité marks a closed world within Tokyo. The camera maps that setting by first taking in the expanse of the Arakawa River. Shots of traffic moving along a riverside highway and a train crossing a bridge that spans the waterway are followed by a glimpse of jerry-rigged shelters that have been erected on the riverbank by people who likely have no other housing options. As noted in a previous chapter, the camera then pauses briefly in the Kinshichō train station area before shifting to the neighborhood where Mikio Kobayashi and his wife Natsuki live in an old two-story house. Their family unit also includes little Eriko (Mikio’s preschool-age daughter from his first marriage) and Mikio’s sister Seiko, who has separated from her husband and has moved back into the family home while she contemplates her next move. In an opening scene, the family, dressed in black, is seen returning from a memorial service for the father whose business and 138 B. E. THORNBURY

property his adult children, Mikio and Seiko, have inherited. Mikio has taken over the father’s in-home print-shop business, and both he and Seiko have joint ownership of the family house, even though Seiko does not usually live there. Hospitalité foregrounds issues of insider versus outsider, starting at the basic level of family. The viewer is thrown somewhat off balance early on when hearing Eriko address Natsuki as “sensei” (“teacher”), rather than by a term for “mother” or at least by her given name. It is as if Natsuki is not a member of the family. It quickly becomes clear that Natsuki regularly spends time trying to teach Eriko a bit of English—so, in that sense, she is “sensei.” Fukada uses this attention-getting term of address to make the point that Japanese society needs to find better ways for children of divorce and remarriage to relate to the adults in their lives. Despite Natsuki’s limited English abilities, her efforts show that she is trying to fulfill the role of a good parent by helping Eriko get a head start in coping with a system that now requires Japanese children to begin learning English in elementary school, as well as with an increasingly globalized world where English has become the lingua franca.9 With its connotations of respect—and, given the right circumstances, even affection—“sensei” as a term of address might conceivably help a small child relate to her father’s new spouse. There is no equally ready-made solution to enable Natsuki to find a place in the close-knit shitamachi community that exists outside of the Kobayashis’s front door, however. Natsuki is depicted as an active and highly visible participant in the family business. She keeps the books and helps with other aspects of the print shop—such as answering the phone, greeting customers and suppliers, and processing orders. Her workplace is the multifunctional chabudai—the family dining table that sits on the raised, tatami-covered floor of the family quarters at the back of the shop.10 However, it is Seiko, rather than Natsuki, who is entreated by the neighbors to attend the community “housewife association” (fujinkai) meet- ings. It is as if this second wife cannot help but remain an outsider, while the divorced Seiko will always be the insider. Seiko, after all, grew up in the neighborhood and shares ownership of the property and business with her brother—even if she is now just biding her time until she decides where life will take her. The figure who most shakes up assumptions regarding insider versus outsider status is Kagawa, a guy who literally walks into the neighborhood and into the Kobayashis’s life. Saying that he is looking for a new abode 5 LOCATING THE OUTSIDER INSIDE TOKYO 139 and gig, he claims a connection with Mikio through their respective fathers’ careers in the printing trade. Coincidentally, Mikio’s one employee develops health issues and can no longer work. Before Mikio realizes what has happened, Kagawa—who can operate the printing machinery—has himself a job in the print shop and a room in the Kobayashis’s house. Kagawa is a disruptor, a trickster who knows how the system works in Japan and takes delight in transgressing its rules. Like a pied piper, he leads the outside world into the Kobayashis’s house—and into the self-contained shitamachi community of which it is part. The first to follow Kagawa in is a woman named Annabelle. The facts about her background and relationship with Kagawa cannot be pinned down. At one moment she says she is from Brazil and at another she says Bosnia. At first, Kagawa refers to her as his wife. Then he says “not really.” Even her Japanese-language ability is uncertain: she may be able to speak and understand Japanese to a considerable degree or just a little. A growing group of people soon follows: from the homeless Japanese men who the Kobayashis’s neighbors wanted evicted from their riverbank encampment (supposedly to make the area attractive to visitors) to a gaggle of young men and women from around the world speaking a multitude of languages. The noisy climax of the film takes the form of a celebratory dance that brings the Kobayashis and their “guests” together—only to dissolve into a melee at the arrival of the police, the ultimate arbiters of the official, state-sanctioned insider/outsider social order, who are called in by the agitated neighbors. Along with all of the new arriv- als, Kagawa and Annabelle take off running. At the end of the film, Mikio and Natsuki are left to clean up the after-party mess the visitors leave behind in their house, and start anew. “Tomodachi no warukuchi o iwanai de kudasai” (“Don’t bad-mouth my friends”) is what Mikio ends up telling the neighbors—showing that he, at least, has literally and figuratively opened his door to acceptance of the outside world. Kon’s animated Tokyo Godfathers offers another cinematic take on the subject of the “foreign” outsider inside Tokyo, about which it is worth including a brief note. Here, the individual in question is a figure of inde- terminacy and threat: the man who holds up a yakuza wedding reception at gunpoint is not identified as being from any particular country. His skin is darker than that of the other characters in the film and Spanish is the only language he is heard speaking. Beyond his violent actions, there is no development of the man’s character. He is a foreign outsider who has entered the space of Japan’s domestic criminals. And, he wields a gun—a forbidden instrument in Japan. However, his wife (also Spanish-speaking) 140 B. E. THORNBURY and baby are brought into the story when he kidnaps the runaway teenager Miyuki and leaves her with them in an anonymous Tokyo neighborhood of labyrinthine narrow lanes. Perhaps he is just a desperate man trying to support his family. The audience never learns more about him, but his warm-hearted wife and Miyuki, who is soon safely reunited with her two companions, quickly establish a sense of connection even though they have little success communicating through words.

Privileged Outsiders In contrast to Hospitalité, Horie’s “The Owl’s Estate” portrays a selec- tively open Tokyo. The unnamed narrator of the story looks back at a time when he lived along the Seibu train line running west from its Ikebukuro Station terminus. Though a person of limited means who “worked for a daily wage” and had little “sense of purpose or understanding of what I wanted from life” (Horie 2015 [2001], 53), he was a self-styled intellectual who collected French books, literature in particular—which he ordered directly from dealers in France in order to save money, rather than pay the markup charged by Tokyo booksellers for the same items. It is not only French culture that commands his interest. He is also attracted to the Tokyo streetscape left over from a bygone age that stretched along the Seibu line: “About ten minutes’ walk from the commercial district that surrounded the station was an area of old houses that seemed preserved in time, where two-storey ramshackle apartments of wood and mortar sat close together, and it was here that, fascinated, I would slow from my normal pace to wander through the district” (ibid., 55).11 The narrator sees himself, like Harada in Yamada’s Strangers and Yotchan’s mother in Yoshimoto’s Moshi Moshi, as a kind of flâneur who strolls the city streets observing and reflecting on urban life. It is on one of these strolls that the narrator meets a young French woman named Isabelle. Glimpsing the owl trademark of a well-known French publisher on the bag he is carrying, she initiates a conversation. “Do you speak French?” she asks him (Horie 2015 [2001], 56). The encounter leads the narrator to discover that one of the old Tokyo houses he admires is occupied by a changing cast of young women from abroad. Besides Isabelle, the housemates currently in residence hail from Italy, Germany, the United States, Mexico, and China. Two are on student visas and enrolled at universities. The others are tourists just passing through Japan who make no secret of the fact that they hope to make some quick 5 LOCATING THE OUTSIDER INSIDE TOKYO 141 money before they continue on their travels. The house where they are staying is dubbed the “Ijinkan” (“foreigner’s [or foreigners’] house”)— rendered somewhat grandiosely in the translation as “Foreigner’s Estate” (Horie 2015 [2001], 61).12 It is the property of a woman who runs a hostess club in Tokyo’s upscale Akasaka district. She employs travelling women by way of providing a steady stream of fresh, young “talent” to pour drinks for and converse with her club’s well-heeled, male clientele (just as Anna did in OUT), making sure the women move on before there is trouble with immigration authorities for illegally employing those who are in Japan on three-month tourist visas. There is a wry tone to the story. The narrator is a Tokyo resident scraping by on his low pay while saving what he can (and sometimes having to free up money by selling previous book purchases) to buy reading material that will connect him to the world outside of Japan. Meanwhile, within the so-called Ijinkan, young women on a brief sojourn in Japan are paid at the incredible rate of 400,000 yen per month for spending a mere two evenings a week working at the hostess club (Horie 2015 [2001], 66). Isabelle, as the narrator discovers, also teaches English—a sardonic comment on the employment practices of language schools that in the heyday of the 1970s and 1980s would hire just about any attractive young foreigner to teach English, however limited their English skills (never mind their teaching skills or educational qualifications) might have been. The Japanese economy was on a roll—and businessmen were eager to increase their proficiency in spoken English, not wanting to get left behind in the competitive arena of world markets. If an English lesson were delivered by a sexually attractive female teacher, so much the better. The narrator is both fascinated and repulsed by Isabelle’s clichéd naiveté when she tells him that at the Akasaka hostess club (“members-only … with all kinds of CEOs and executives as clients”) “all we have to do is sit next to these guys and nod on cue. There’s nothing underhand going on, it’s a cinch” (Horie 2015 [2001], 65). There was so much that she did not understand. Akasaka clubs, which attract Tokyo’s power elite from nearby government offices and corporate headquarters, are a different world from the kind of middle-market Kabukichō club where Anna worked in OUT and the down-market club in Kinshichō where Yasuko in The Devotion of Suspect X, after aging out of the Akasaka club where she used to work, wound up before leaving the profession altogether. The women who are in the employ of hostess clubs across the board have to be attractive— 142 B. E. THORNBURY which, in large measure, means that they have to be young. In the pecking order within that milieu, fresh-faced Western women have particularly high value. The narrator has no illusions regarding the disparity in how foreigners are perceived in Japan. Observing that almost all of the young women staying in the Ijinkan are Westerners, he reflects that

the situation for these girls was entirely different to those from South-East Asia, who gave up on their own lives for the sake of their families. The system that supported Isabelle and the others was a pimp-like remnant of the boom-days of the bubble economy when Western women who were looking for a good time had flocked to Tokyo, becoming products for consumption, paragons of health that bore no relation to ideas of suffering or self-sacrifice and who were replaced in short, three-month cycles [when their tourist visas expired]. (Horie 2015 [2001], 66)

The situation for the young Chinese woman also living in the Ijinkan, “regardless of what she might have actually wanted … was marked from the outset as being external to it” (ibid.). In other words, the young Chinese woman—simply because she was not Western—would likely not have been employed at the Akasaka club, although, like Anna in OUT, she might have found a similar job elsewhere if she had the intention to do so. “The Owl’s Estate” offers a scathing critique of Tokyo as a beacon for young, privileged women from abroad who readily acquiesce to becoming objects-for-sale in a nightlife industry that primarily markets itself to men with money to spend. “I wondered what Japan would look like to Isabelle and the other girls” (Horie 2015 [2001], 67), the narrator thinks. “It might have been relatively easy for Westerners to find work in Tokyo, but it didn’t feel like something to be proud of, not if the city was just a conduit for enjoying the high life, even if it was only on a short-term basis” (ibid.). He expresses discomfort “about the way this influx of foreigners was being marketed as evidence of an increased cos- mopolitanism, even though they were only passing through, and only via backdoors that were like cheats in a computer game” (ibid.). The temporary high life for Isabelle and her colleagues is days spent shuttling from fitness clubs to their highly paid jobs at language schools and “upmarket” nightclubs. 5 LOCATING THE OUTSIDER INSIDE TOKYO 143

If Isabelle is representative, moreover, the young women staying at the Ijinkan are satisfied with knowing very little about Japan. As the narrator notes, she is someone whose “insights into Japan were limited to general observations” (Horie 2015 [2001], 64), a person who stares “wide-eyed at the mysterious line-up” (ibid., 57) of sushi in a take-out shop and does not see anything strange in offering a guest (sweetened) black tea to have with a meal of sushi (ibid., 61), and who is “amazed” (ibid., 63) when she sees that Japanese people bow to each other and, at the same time, readily expresses her view that Japanese people “behave so disgustingly” (ibid.) as they get on and off crowded trains. She went to a university in France, where she studied literature, but, when the narrator mentions Roland Barthes “and his writings on Japan” (ibid., 64), she answers “unsurpris- ingly with a stock answer: ‘I’ve heard of him, but I haven’t read his work. … I’d love to read [what he wrote on Japan], though, especially if it’s got something to do with bowing’” (ibid.). While the narrator never reveals the kind of work he does, Isabelle introduces him to her housemates as a sushi chef—a charade he goes along with. For Isabelle, the narrator is a local specimen. In her game-of-Japan, he is Mr. Japan, sushi chef. That it is just a game is shown when she disappears without a word to him—never returning one of the prized books that he had loaned to her. Isabelle is the epitome of the naïve, privileged outsider whose presence in Tokyo is mapped in specific geographic terms. The narrator muses: “I had never thought I might have to interact with a French national—maybe in Azabu or Hiroo [wealthy Tokyo neighborhoods preferred by status- conscious expatriates] or near Ochanomizu or Iidabashi with their profu- sion of language schools, but not here in this outreach of town” (Horie 2015 [2001], 56). The sudden encounter with Isabelle in the Ikebukuro area causes him to lose his bearings: “as a result I fell into a kind of daze, momentarily losing all sense of my whereabouts” (ibid.). The building that serves as the Ijinkan is set squarely in a “traditional” Tokyo neighborhood, signaling perhaps the geographic origins of the club’s owner. Making enough money at her Akasaka club to afford a more high-end residence, the owner no longer has any need for what may have been an old family home. The image is a potent one, with Horie suggesting that Tokyo itself has become a kind of Ijinkan—its wealth attracting a growing segment of “outsiders” who are just passing through with minimal knowledge of and little integration into the society around them. 144 B. E. THORNBURY

Spaces Occupied by the Domestic Outsider Ethnicity In Yoshida’s “An Elevator on Sunday,” Watanabe is a guy whose main interests in life are playing pachinko, drinking, and finding women willing to have sex with him. The occupant of a one-room apartment on the ninth-floor of a worn-down building just outside of Ikebukuro Station, Watanabe has little interest in holding down a job. If he does not get fired first from one of the low-skilled positions he manages to get, he winds up quitting out of sheer laziness. Riding the building’s elevator down to the ground level and back up again is just about the only mobility he has. Watanabe’s current girlfriend, Keiko, on the other hand, is a bright, hard- working young woman who, in the course of the story, successfully passes her medical boards and embarks on a career as a doctor. (Neither Watanabe’s given name nor Keiko’s family name is mentioned.) The question that immediately arises in the mind of the reader is: Why would a woman like Keiko want to spend time with a guy like Watanabe? After meeting at a bar where Keiko was taking a break from the stress of preparing for her licensing exams, the couple began a sexual liaison. However, the only thing they appear to have in common is a mutual dis- like of department store food floors. There is the hint of an answer to the question of why Keiko was dating him when one day, while Watanabe is idly playing “catch” with her purse while she is in the bathroom, it falls to the floor—and out spills her Korean passport: “He opened it up and saw Keiko’s photograph, her cheeks still plump, alongside some Hangul characters that he couldn’t read but which he supposed spelled out her name. So Keiko was Korean! It came as a bit of a shock, but then, come to think of it, she always had kind of looked like a Korean beauty, he thought” (Yoshida 2015 [2003], 168). When she emerges from the shower, Watanabe waves the open passport at her: “‘I never knew you were Korean,’ he told her. … She froze, but quickly recovered herself and smiled” (ibid.). Keiko had reason to freeze. However high-achieving she may have been, her Korean ethnicity consigned her to outsider status even though she was born and grew up in Japan.13 Keiko’s ethnicity was actually the second thing Watanabe found out about her. Knowing that she was in medical training, he had assumed that she was studying to be a nurse. It came as a surprise to him that she was actually planning to be a doctor. These were two “secrets” that—as Keiko well knew—might easily have 5 LOCATING THE OUTSIDER INSIDE TOKYO 145 driven Watanabe away from her at the outset. Her willingness to pursue a relationship with a low-achieving man like him may indeed point to the stereotypical unwillingness of more “qualified” men to become involved with women whose abilities and sheer determination exceed theirs. In her experience, however, the more likely scenario would be outright rejection by attractively credentialed Japanese men (or their families) of life- partnership with a woman of Korean ethnicity, whatever her intellectual or professional qualifications.14 The relationship between Watanabe and Keiko inevitably falls apart, with no single reason given as the cause. When Keiko jubilantly tells him that she passed her exams, she exults: “So that’s my future settled at last” (Yoshida 2015 [2003], 166). Yoshida has stacked the deck in his portrayal of the low-achieving Watanabe. Although Keiko’s future may be settled insofar as she has embarked on a life path that gives her a way to earn a good living, Watanabe’s is definitely not. When Keiko asks him if he might be interested in working in her father’s restaurant in Shibuya (notably, a location in central Tokyo that Watanabe might have found appealing), it is an offer that, not unexpectedly, he immediately rejects. For him, failure is what he is used to and is a state he appears to find preferable to one in which he would be dependent on someone’s help. Watanabe brings to mind the character Yūichi Shimizu in Yoshida’s novel Villain—another man in his twenties who stands on the periphery of educated, career- successful society. Despite her indisputable achievements within a system that prides itself on being a meritocracy, Keiko is relegated to outsider status because of her Korean ethnicity. Even though there was nothing— except the passport she carried—to distinguish her as someone who is not Japanese, Watanabe had tempered his “shock” of discovery by telling himself that he thought all along that she looks like a “Korean beauty.” Watanabe’s assertion (albeit one meant as self-congratulation for his aesthetic discernment) that he noticed a difference in her appearance from the beginning of their relationship reflects the official view that ethnic Koreans occupy a separate sphere within Japanese society. This view per- sists even if the individuals in question are in every sense of the word Japanese except for their Korean bloodlines—and, because of their bloodlines, citizenship. Yoshida does not leave Watanabe as unredeemed, despite all of his negative attributes. Encountering two little Japanese boys near Ikebukuro Station one day, he immediately sees that they are scared and hungry runaways. He gets them something to eat, but when he goes back to try to help them more, it is too late. They are gone. Keiko goes away, 146 B. E. THORNBURY too. She seemed to feel true affection for Watanabe, but he cannot accept her busy life (with little time for anything but work), let alone her achievements (that stand in stark contrast to his failures), and—it is implied—her ethnicity. At the end of the story, Watanabe’s relationships with outsiders continue, although they devolve into lonely, paid sex in a back-alley stair- well (Yoshida 2015 [2003], 164–5). Hideo Furukawa’s story “Model T Frankenstein” offers a satirical take on issues of ethnic identity. When the ferry crew opens the container in which they had placed the goat being shipped from Hachijōjima in the Izu island chain to central Tokyo, they discover that his transformation into a monster-man has taken place:

The man looks to be in his mid-twenties, and is to all appearances Japanese. But “Japanese,” as in a homogeneous ethnicity made up of the Yamato race, is just a political fabrication. Saying that this man is to all appearances Japanese is a near-total surrender to this fantasy. The only objective fact that could possibly serve as proof of his being one of these illusory “Japanese” is that he speaks in Japanese. When asked W-H-O A-R-E Y-O-U he answers I A-M A M-O-N-S-T-E-R. His answer is in Japanese. To these sailors, he might as well be declaring (or even affirming) I A-M A J-A-P-A-N-E-S-E M-O-N-S-T-E-R. I am a Japanese monster. (Furukawa 2015 [2010], 9–10)

The capital letters used in the translation are meant to indicate the way people often speak to outsiders—slowly and loudly. The goat was being transported (presumably to be slaughtered) from its home in “tertiary” Tokyo (the Izu Islands, which, as discussed earlier, are administratively part of Tokyo) to “primary” Tokyo. By the time the creature reaches the central city, he has become a monster-man who kills people at will and remakes himself with their body parts. Despite his human appearance, his essential goat-ness is revealed in his need to include a vegetable—ashitaba—in his diet. While he can get by “with ingredients purchased at supermarkets, or convenience stores, or delicatessens … four times a week without fail he must eat ashitaba. He cannot go without it” (Furukawa 2015 [2010], 12). Furukawa’s point is not that goats in Japan or anywhere else have to eat that particular vegetable (which health- conscious people buy for its nutritional benefits), but thatashitaba is part of the creature’s identity because he grew up eating it on Hachijōjima. Also, the search for ashitaba leads to the goat-man finding companionship in central Tokyo: 5 LOCATING THE OUTSIDER INSIDE TOKYO 147

[A]t one of the two supermarkets on the border between Shinjuku and Shibuya, the monster reaches for a package of ashitaba at the same moment that someone else is about to take it. … The person is a woman. She looks to be in her mid-twenties. The monster realizes that she has horns. … Human beings cannot see these horns. The monster gives an experimental bleat: Mehhh. She answers, Mehhh. The monster smiles and thinks, I’m saved at last. (Ibid.)

In addressing conceptions of Tokyo as a geographic entity that is both visible (central Tokyo and the Tama area) and hidden (the Izu and Ogasawara Islands), Furukawa also challenges assumptions regarding what it means to be ethnically Japanese. For Furukawa, hidden Tokyo is a suppressed Tokyo. The islands are part of Tokyo, but in most people’s minds do not count as part of the Metropolis. And, although it is accepted without question that a sine qua non of being Japanese is fluency in Japanese, there are those whose native language is Japanese—minorities such as ethnic Koreans—who are nevertheless metaphorically hidden insofar as they occupy a position peripheral to the majority Japanese population. The monster-man-goat of Furukawa’s story violently grabs a physical identity for himself—pieced together, as already noted, like an assembly- line Frankenstein monster—in order to hide in plain sight in central Tokyo. The violence is payback for his imprisonment on and forcible removal from Hachijōjima. In revealing that there is at least one other goat—a fellow consumer of ashitaba—in Tokyo, the story suggests that there are perhaps many more hidden “Japanese” like him, resisters pushing back against conventional definitions of what it means to be Japanese. When the monster-man-goat gets to central Tokyo, he goes from Takeshiba Pier to nearby Hamamatsuchō Station and boards the Yamanote train line for two circuits around and through the central city. Reassembled, he disem- barks at Shinjuku—a hidden being from hidden Tokyo at the epicenter of visible Tokyo. The outsider status of the character Tamaru in Murakami’s novel 1Q84 derives both from his ethnicity and sexual orientation—a topic I will look at further in a section below. Tamaru is the wealthy dowager’s bodyguard and right-hand man—a person whose past service in Japan’s Self-Defense Forces testifies to his desire to ensure that no one can ever question his right to be identified as Japanese. A physically powerful man who does not shrink from violence when he thinks it necessary, he is openly gay at this stage in his life—an element of his identity seen as a desirable job qualifica- 148 B. E. THORNBURY tion for a man whose duties include protecting the women (all of them victims of men’s violence) who have taken refuge in the dowager’s safe house for abused women on her property in Tokyo’s uppercrust Azabu neighborhood. Tamaru is one of several characters in Murakami’s fiction who help remind—or, for the first time teach—readers about Japan’s wartime history. “I was born on Sakhalin Island the year before the war ended” (Murakami 2011 [2009–10], 405), he tells Aomame, whose safety the dowager asks him to ensure after she assassinates the Sakigake cult leader. “The south end of Sakhalin was a Japanese territory called Karafuto, but the Soviets occupied it, and my parents were taken prisoner. My father apparently had some kind of job with the harbor facilities. Most of the Japanese civilian prisoners were returned to Japan soon enough, but my parents couldn’t go to Japan because they were Koreans who had been sent to Sakhalin as laborers” (ibid.). Murakami is referring here to the population of Korean people who were brought to Japan as laborers following Japan’s colonization of the peninsula. When the war ended in 1945, Korea regained its independence, and Korean people in Japan were no longer recognized as Japanese nationals. Although the Koreans sent from Japan to Sakhalin may have wanted to return to their previous lives in Japan, as Tamaru goes on to tell Aomame,

The Japanese government refused to take them. Once Japan lost the war, Koreans were no longer subjects of the empire of Japan. It was terrible. The government didn’t have a shred of sympathy for them. They could have gone to North Korea if they wanted to, but not to the South, because the Soviet Union at the time didn’t recognize the existence of South Korea. My parents came from a fishing village near Pusan and had no desire to go to the North. They had no relatives or friends up there. (Murakami 2011 [2009–10], 405–6)

Tamaru was still a baby when the war ended, and his parents decided to hand him over to a couple returning to Japan. He understands why his parents might have let him go. It was clear that those left on Sakhalin would likely face starvation and other cruelties at the hands of the Soviet army. The other couple, likely with no resources of their own, took the baby Tamaru to Hokkaido and in turn handed him off to an orphanage near Hakodate. “Some Catholic organization ran the orphanage, which was a very tough place. There were tons of orphans after the war, and not 5 LOCATING THE OUTSIDER INSIDE TOKYO 149 enough food or heat for them all. I had to do all kinds of things to survive” (ibid., 406). The orphanage filed papers to formally adopt him as a Japanese citizen. Stripped of his Korean names, he became Ken’ichi Tamaru (ibid.). Tamaru grew up to become a man who takes pride in belonging in Japan—all the while conscious of the fact that the facts of his birth, along with his sexual orientation, negated his claim to full membership in its mainstream society. When Aomame asked him to get her a gun, which he did, Murakami fashions his reaction to her as a bit of tongue-in-cheek commentary aimed at readers outside of Japan from a writer who has spent considerable time in the heavily armed United States: “You do know that it is illegal in this country,” Tamaru says to her, “for an ordinary citizen to own a handgun, don’t you? … And just so you know, let me say this. … I have never once been charged with a crime” (Murakami 2011 [2009–10], 403). It is a humorous riff, with Tamaru hinting that his actions may not have always been within the letter of the law: “as least as far as the written record is concerned, I’m a good citizen. Honest, upright, pure. I’m gay, but that’s not against the law. I pay my taxes as ordered, and I vote in elections. … I’m enrolled in the National Health Insurance system … and I carry both an American Express card and a MasterCard. … I could be called a pillar of society without the least bit of irony” (ibid., 403–4). As a member of a Self-Defense Forces Ranger unit, Tamaru pro- tected Japan.15 Now his everyday task is to provide security for the dowager and the women in her care who are victims of society’s violence. There is more to Tamaru’s “outsider” story as a child of Korean parents. Despite the suffering he endured early on, he helped defend those less strong than himself. “There was a boy in that orphanage two years younger than I was. He was mixed: half Japanese, half black. I think his father was a soldier from the American base in Misawa [in Aomori Prefecture, not far from the orphanage]. I don’t know about his mother, but she was probably a prostitute or a bar hostess [who abandoned him]” (Murakami 2011 [2009–10], 643). The child was not very smart, according to Tamaru, and was bullied by the other children “mainly because his color was different. … I wasn’t Japanese, either, so it fell to me one way or another to be his protector. Our situations were similar—a Korean evac- uee and the illegitimate mixed-race kid of a black guy and a whore. … [I]t did me good: it toughened me up. Not him, though. He could never be tough. Left on his own, he would have died for sure” (ibid., 643–4). And, as he did for the boy in the orphanage, he tells Aomame, “I will do 150 B. E. THORNBURY

everything I can to protect you. … Win or lose, I won’t abandon you” (ibid., 646). That he will support Aomame in her fight against those who would distort and control Japanese society is a noteworthy declaration made by an individual whose early life was irrevocably shaped by the aban- donment of his Korean family by the Japanese state.

Homelessness People with no officially registered, fixed address—the homeless—are the focus of Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers.16 By using the medium of animation, Kon allows viewers a certain degree of distance and even comfort as they watch the story unfold. At the same time, as Kerin Ogg has suggested, Kon’s animated films (including Tokyo Godfathers) generally “have a markedly ‘realistic’ look: the action takes place against photorealistic backgrounds, movement is weighty and credible even when not perfectly fluid, and characters as a rule have normally proportioned bodies and faces” (2010, 158). The photorealistic backgrounds in Tokyo Godfathers include depictions of the striking Kenzō Tange-designed Tokyo Metropolitan Government building—Tokyo’s city hall. In the film, the blue-tarp-covered shelters of homeless people erected in the landscaped grounds close by contrast with the soaring heights of the city-hall building and the other towers of West Shinjuku that exude power and wealth.17 The leading characters in the film are two homeless, middle-aged adults—the transgender Hana, who after an altercation fled the club where she was once a popular singer, and the alcoholic gambler Gin, who abandoned his wife and daughter. They are accompanied by Miyuki, a girl in her mid-teens who has been living on the streets since the day she attacked her policeman father with a knife during an argument at home. The trio add up to an unconventional family group. When the film opens, it is Christmas, a holiday that has come to have significance in Japan—especially as a family celebration and a time to give gifts to children. By chance, Hana, Gin, and Miyuki discover an abandoned baby. Instead of going to the authorities, because Hana insists on cradling the baby in her arms as long as possible, they take it upon themselves to find the parents. The characters’ identities as a transgender woman, an alcoholic gambler, and a teenage runaway intensify their status as outsiders. However, it is the fact that they are homeless that most powerfully illustrates what it means to be an outsider—in the most literal sense—inside Tokyo. Without regular access to bathing and laundry facilities, Hana, Gin, and Miyuki 5 LOCATING THE OUTSIDER INSIDE TOKYO 151 cannot conform to Japanese society’s strict standards of personal cleanli- ness. In a scene in which they are riding with the baby in a crowded train— a signal indicator of life in Tokyo—their bodily smells repel the other passengers. Also, living out on the street leaves them vulnerable to attack— as when young toughs beat Gin in an act of “New Year cleaning.” On the positive side, the multitude of convenience stores that are open 24/7 are lifelines that enable the survival of people like them who do not have refrigerators or pantries. And, the strict sell-by dates on ready-to-eat packaged food sold in those stores—and the general wastefulness that is characteristic of all large and wealthy cities—means that sustenance is available to those willing to search through the trash. Even Tokyo’s cemeteries offer material comfort in the form of offerings (such as baby diapers) occasionally left for the deceased that can be forgivably purloined for the living. In the end, Tokyo Godfathers leaves viewers feeling that the characters’ problems have been solved. There are reunions all around: the baby with her parents, Gin with his daughter, Hana with her “mother” (the owner/ manager of the club where she used to work), and Miyuki with her father. Giving Gin a winning lottery ticket that can provide the money he needs to get off the streets, Kon even goes so far as to suggest that Gin and Hana might stay together out of affection for each other. To be sure, these are all “Christmas miracles” rather than realistic outcomes for Tokyo’s homeless population. Nevertheless, Tokyo Godfathers stands out as a work that foregrounds Tokyo’s homeless population and, as Susan Napier observes, “offers a richly imagined alternative to the loneliness and fragmentation of contemporary Japan” (2008, 47). Fukada’s Hospitalité is another work that spotlights homeless people as outsiders inside Tokyo. The homeless shelters erected on the banks of the Arakawa River that are shown in the first frames of the film, with sunflow- ers brightly blooming in gardens planted at their entrances, are the very ones that little Eriko Kobayashi looks at with childlike curiosity when she is out on a walk with Natsuki and Kagawa. They, too, are the same shelters that are dismantled and carted away at the behest of the neighborhood association. The residents of these shelters do not appear in person until the latter part of the film, when they become part of the larger group of visitors invited by Kagawa into the Kobayashis’s home—with Kagawa peremptorily telling Mikio to take care of obtaining their official residence certificates as live-in employees. Domestic outsiders among the foreigners passing through Japan, they will be homeless no longer should such an idealistic scenario actually come to fruition. 152 B. E. THORNBURY

Homeless people are also key to Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X. Living in shelters along the west bank of the Sumida River, they are represented as the vulnerable victims of a society that sees them as lacking connections and dispensable. Despite his own social isolation, high school math teacher Ishigami uses one of them in his murderous plot to shield Yasuko from the police for her role in the strangling death of her ex- husband. Ishigami, who walked by the homeless shelters on his way from his apartment to the bento ̄ shop where Yasuko was employed, got to “know” the homeless men—but only as caricatures to whom he assigned appellations such as “Can Man” and “Engineer.” Although figures of importance in the narratives, the homeless people—all middle-aged males—are not distinguished by name or given anything to say in either Hospitalité or The Devotion of Suspect X. In contrast, Tokyo Godfathers gives them individuality and places them at the center of the story.

Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation The “Full Moon” chapter of Yoshimoto’s Kitchen opens with the straightforward news that “Eriko died late in the autumn” (Yoshimoto 1993 [1988], 44). The circumstances are then explained:

A crazy man became obsessed with her and killed her. He had spotted her on the street and liked what he saw; when he followed her he discovered that the place where she worked was a gay bar. Shocked to find out that this beautiful woman was a man, he began writing her long letters and hanging around the bar. The more persistent he was, the colder Eriko and the people at the club became. One night, screaming that he had been made a fool of, he lunged at her with a knife. Eriko, wounded, grabbed a barbell off the bar—it was part of the club’s décor—with both hands and beat him to death. “There!” she said, “Self-defense, that makes us even.” Those were her last words. (Ibid., 44–5)

Eriko is both a product of urban culture and a generator of that culture—and, in Yoshimoto’s hands, a larger-than-life character. When Mikage sees her for the first time,

I was so stunned, I gaped. Though she didn’t seem young, she was truly beautiful. From her outfit and dramatic makeup, which really wouldn’t do for daytime, I understood that hers is night work. … I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Hair that rustled like silk to her shoulders; the deep sparkle of her 5 LOCATING THE OUTSIDER INSIDE TOKYO 153

long, narrow eyes; well-formed lips, a nose with a high, straight bridge—the whole of her gave off a marvelous light that seemed to vibrate with life force. She didn’t look human. I had never seen anyone like her. (Yoshimoto 1993 [1988], 11)

Eriko is the person who takes the initiative to ensure that Mikage, the novel’s narrator, can find comfort and security after her grandmother dies. She welcomes Mikage without reserve, igniting in the younger woman a “warm light … softly glowing in my heart” (ibid., 12). Mikage responds with equal warmth and understanding when Eriko’s son Yūichi tells her that Eriko is his biological father whose body has been transformed by plastic surgery. The character of Eriko is constructed in a way that portrays Tokyo as a realm of possibility even in the saddest of circumstances. Raised by foster parents, Eriko as a young man named Yūji eloped with the foster sister with whom he grew up. Her untimely death precipitated a desire in him to change his life completely, leading him to become a woman and open a nightclub. Eriko is thus transformed into a consummate outsider from the perspective of “ordinary” Japanese society—a character who is at the same time defined by her place, as Yūichi’s devoted parent, in the traditional family structure. In forming the bonds that are essential to a fulfilling life, Yoshimoto is saying, people should have the courage to find their own solutions—even if they fly in the face of convention. The bond that develops between Yūichi and Mikage is—presumably—Eriko’s lasting legacy. Both Satoru of Yoshida’s Parade and Yūzan of Kirino’s Real World are young people trying to forge their identities as outsiders in the city—identities rooted to a greater or lesser degree in their homosexuality. They tell their stories in novels that are similarly structured using the voices of several first-person narrators. Eighteen-year-old Satoru of Parade engages in behavior that is against the law—taking drugs, selling sex, breaking into private residences, and generally trespassing in areas that are off limits. Although temporarily staying in an apartment with four other young people, he appears to have no fixed address. Neither in school nor employed at a legitimate job, he candidly describes the life he leads:

I went out to Shinjuku, after ten, and [my friend] Makoto and I did our usual thing, taking speed in a public restroom and then hanging out, high, in the park. In less than five minutes this guy who stuck his tongue out like a lizard picked up Makoto, and I figured this night I was out of luck, but 154 B. E. THORNBURY

then Sylvia, a regular customer, picked me up. … I went with Sylvia—who’s shooting up so many hormones she’s pretty emotionally unstable—to her place, serviced her, and finally fell asleep near dawn. (Yoshida 2014 [2002], 141–42)

Satoru occupies urban space in ways that defy society’s norms. Under cover of darkness, he sneaks past locked park gates in search of drugs and opportunities to trade sex for money. He also ignores other conventional boundaries. Near Hatagaya Station, a few minutes by train southwest of Shinjuku, one morning, he sees a young woman leaving her condo building, likely on her way to work. He watches as she checks her mailbox before going out—which enables him to ascertain her apartment number. Within minutes he enters the building (catching the front door before it closes as an unsuspecting resident leaves) and makes his way to the apartment of the girl he had seen going out. The unit’s locked door is no impediment to Satoru: “with the handy wire I always carry with me, [I] prized open the door to her place in under two minutes” (Yoshida 2014 [2002], 142). “There are many ways to occupy and claim urban space,” as Jordan Sand has written (2013, 53). Satoru’s goal is to simulate the experience of belonging—even momentarily—through what Sand refers to as “spatial appropriation” (ibid., 49). His purpose is not to steal or to destroy anything. In fact, he takes care to leave everything as he finds it. He begins by making himself “comfortably at home” with a cup of tea. He then proceeds to get a sense of the apartment’s location in Tokyo—a city that he repeatedly experiences and observes from vantage points accessed through acts of trespass:

I left the cup with the tea in the sink and went into the bedroom. I looked outside through a gap in the light pink curtains and could see the skyscrapers of Shinjuku off in the distance, and right in front of them the Metro Expressway. … From this girl’s apartment on the seventh floor it was easy to see the traffic-clogged highway. The double glazing, though, muffled any sound. It was like the sound had been completely removed from the city. (Yoshida 2014 [2002], 143)

Satoru is keenly aware that he is an outsider inside Tokyo. “When I’d first sneaked in, the apartment looked very appealing, but in two hours’ time I was bored with it. I hardly ever find a place I’d like to stay in for long” (Yoshida 2014 [2002], 150). He is a solitary youth—free to go 5 LOCATING THE OUTSIDER INSIDE TOKYO 155 anywhere, but belonging nowhere. Suddenly, he begins to feel that the apartment occupied by Ryōsuke, Koto, Mirai, and Naoki, where he had been sleeping on the couch, has morphed into a place he might consider “home.” After leaving the apartment into which he had trespassed, he phones Koto—by way of checking in. He ends the call by telling her “I guess I’ll go home then” (ibid.)—meaning that he will be heading back to the roommates’ apartment, giving in to the first glimmers of connection and belonging that he senses within himself. Satoru began appropriating others’ spaces as temporarily his own when he was a child. “The first time I sneaked into another person’s house was when I was five. My father was unemployed then and the two of us were living in public housing in Tama New Town” (Yoshida 2014 [2002], 164) in Tokyo’s western suburbs. The father woke up from a nap, and found the boy gone. He had entered the apartment of a neighboring couple. “I sneaked inside, watched TV, and had fallen asleep” (ibid.). Years later, he continues slipping into places where he does not belong. Sometimes he takes others with him, as when he led Mirai into the Hibiya Park amphi- theater after the gates are closed for the night. Satoru even scouts out new locations in advance: one day he followed an older man from Shinjuku to the man’s home near Soshigaya-Ō kura Station, knowing that he could come back and enter the house at a later time. Turning increasingly self- reflective as the novel proceeds, he finally gets to the heart of his angst: “These days all I seem to do is walk away from somewhere. From the park where I find customers, from hotels where I stay with them, from their apartments, from saunas where I can’t sleep well, from Makoto’s apartment, where he’s been wetting his bed these days because he’s overdosing on speed. … I walk away from all sorts of places, always walking away, but never arriving anywhere” (ibid., 166). Satoru’s entrée to the apartment he now calls home was through Mirai, whom he met at a gay bar she frequented in the Shinjuku 2-chōme neighborhood. Mirai grew up witnessing the raw, sexual violence that her father targeted at her mother. Now in her twenties, she drinks heavily by way of self-medication and chooses to socialize with gay men because they will not be sexually aggressive toward her. (See Yoshida 2014 [2002], 102). Although Mirai was in a drunken state the night she brought Satoru back with her to the apartment, she instinctively viewed him as someone she wanted to help. Once he is in their midst, the other three roommates follow suit. Koto accepts him as a kind of younger brother and friend with whom she can watch movies and otherwise pass the time waiting for her 156 B. E. THORNBURY boyfriend’s infrequent phone calls. Ryōsuke enlists him as someone through whom he can assuage feelings of guilt stemming from his own past. Back home in Kyushu, Ryōsuke had a friend who asked for his help in preparing for high school entrance exams. But, unlike Ryōsuke himself, the friend did not succeed academically, and his life was cut short in a motorcycle accident. Although Satoru protests that he did not even attend high school, Ryōsuke determinedly moves forward with a plan to help him prepare for university entrance exams—which Satoru could in fact take despite the gap in his formal education. Naoki, too, steps in to improve Satoru’s lot in life by first getting him temporary clerical work at his office and then proposing him for a more permanent slot. Over a bite to eat one day after work, Naoki goes so far as to act in a fatherly way toward Satoru—tentatively asking him if he had run away from home: “I figured you’d run away from home, and that’s why you sleep at different places. I don’t know why you ran away, but I do think you should give your folks a call. Parents get worried, you know” (ibid., 155–6). Naoki even offers to make the call. It is from his position as outsider that Satoru winds up helping the roommates. He provides companionship for Koto as she waits for her boyfriend’s rare telephone calls and he gives Ryōsuke the second chance he wants to help a young man succeed in life. It is true that Mirai responds with shock and fury when she discovers that Satoru betrays her trust by going into her room and taking a cassette tape on which she had recorded rape scenes from films, lest she ever permit herself to forget what she wit- nessed in her own life. Satoru has violated her privacy, but—by accidentally recording over the tape—he has effectively released Mirai from her endless loop of pain. At first, she is insistent that he be ejected from the apartment, but, after she calms down, she changes her mind. And, indeed, Satoru himself wants nothing more than to stay. His desire to retain his place in the apartment (while taking temporary refuge in Ryōsuke’s car from Mirai’s anger) is made explicit in the episode in which he witnesses Naoki’s vicious attack on a woman walking through the neighborhood at night. Yoshida confronts the reader with the knowledge that Naoki is the man who has been attacking women just going about their business. Although Naoki appears to want the punishment that he deserves, Satoru uses the car as a space to clean the bloody evidence off of Naoki and return him to the everyday world. Naoki, after all, is the one who holds the lease on the apartment. Even when the three others leave—Ryōsuke, to return to Kyushu after graduating; Mirai, to take a new job in Hawaii; and Koto 5 LOCATING THE OUTSIDER INSIDE TOKYO 157 to return to her parents’ home in Hiroshima—Naoki will still remain there. In effect, Satoru, ironically among those men whose homosexuality allowed Mirai to feel safe, has made a cynical pact with Naoki-as-the- devil—a solution apparent only to someone such as Satoru who for so long has been looking in from the outside and now does not want to lose his newly gained foothold in society. On a more positive note, Satoru’s experience of spending extended time with people who evince concern for him (even if it stems from their own psychological needs) starts to change him. A factor that drew him to the girl whose apartment he illicitly entered is her resemblance to Koto—who personifies for Satoru the roommates’ apartment as a place of belonging. “Last night I went to the park for the first time in a long while[;] … business was good. In the morning I was going to take the first train, but going back home to Chitose Karasuyama seemed like too much trouble, so I stayed over at a sauna in Kabukicho” (Yoshida 2014 [2002], 161). He may not go “home” at that point, but he sees himself as having a home to which he can return. Ryōsuke’s educational overture and Naoki’s vocational overture touch a chord in Satoru. His minimal formal education makes him an outsider in highly educated Japan in another profound way. Having gotten only as far as junior high, he tells Ryōsuke that he cannot even do fractions. “To tell the truth,” Satoru reflects wryly at the conclusion of the chapter he narrates, “I might have stayed here too long. If I go along with playing house anymore with them I might find myself not just taking the entrance exam but working for some top corporation” (ibid., 173). He is suddenly struck by the feeling that he can possibly make up for lost time—a feeling that, for the time being at least, he wants to nurture, despite the pact-with-the-devil he has made. Whereas Yoshida uses Satoru’s homosexuality to help portray a character who does not conform to conventional social norms, yet fits in easily with the group of four apartment roommates he joins, Kirino employs Yūzan’s homosexuality as a tool to distance her from the other four first- person narrators in Real World. The crux of Yūzan as a character is that she does not know how to reconcile her homosexuality with the world as it exists around her: “I was faced with two choices: either deceive everybody, or come out of the closet. But I still hadn’t decided which route to take” (Kirino 2008 [2003], 54). Like the other narrators in the novel, Yūzan is a high school senior, on the verge of graduation. She went on answer- seeking forays to a lesbian bar in Shinjuku in the summer before her senior 158 B. E. THORNBURY year of high school “to make sure I wasn’t the only one who was like me” (ibid., 42). On the night that she had decided “would be the last time during summer vacation I’d come home at dawn and make my dad go ballistic,” she had a violent encounter in the street with a male crossdresser who mocked her biological female-ness and berated her for coming “to a man’s part of town” (ibid., 47–8). The physical bruises healed, but she was left feeling that she had no one—family or friends—in whom to con- fide her psychic pain.18 Saying that her mother’s relatively recent death made her “lonelier, lonelier than anybody” (ibid., 39), she is drawn to the character Worm—as if a teenage boy who killed his own mother somehow holds the key to all that she does not comprehend. For Yūzan, the 2-chōme neighborhood of Shinjuku, the center of Tokyo’s gay and lesbian subculture—“housing the world’s largest concen- tration of gay bars” (Suganuma and McLelland 2007, 248; see also Suganuma 2011)—is a place where she can escape from the expectations of conventional society. (The 2-chōme neighborhood is likely where Eriko in Yoshimoto’s Kitchen had her nightclub as well as the location of the establishment where Hana in Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers once worked.) As Toshi says in the last segment of Real World, after the death of Kirarin, the suicide of Terauchi, and the capture of Worm, “Yuzan fell off the grid. Once she called from a bar in Shinjuku 2-chōme and said she had a new girlfriend and wouldn’t be coming home anytime soon, and I wasn’t to worry if I didn’t see her for a while. She was apparently going to lean on her new lover and heal that way. It was also clear that Yuzan had decided to come out of the closet” (Kirino 2008 [2003], 200). Yūzan’s destination in 2-chōme was a small bar where older women customers seek the company of younger girls. The very first time she went there—that summer before senior year of high school, she immediately encountered

a couple of people like me who were curiously, nervously looking around. We all sported short haircuts, T-shirts, shorts, day packs, and sneakers—girls dressed just like your typical high school boy. They were junior and senior high school girls who had also found the bar on the Internet and had come to check it out during their summer break. The bar was well aware that summer vacation meant more junior and senior high school girls coming by, and they were nice enough to allow them to hang out till morning, like it was a onetime summer experience for them, for the price of a can of beer. (Kirino 2008 [2003], 42) 5 LOCATING THE OUTSIDER INSIDE TOKYO 159

There are two girls in particular whom Yūzan gets to know. One is called Boku-chan—boku being a masculine first-person pronoun sometimes used by young women as “an empowerment or gender-distanciation tool” (Dubuc 2012, 298) and chan being the diminutive form of san often appended to female names. She is from distant Kōchi Prefecture on the island of Shikoku. “Her dream was to make a living as a transvestite in the infamous Kabuki-chō district [in Tokyo]. She made it obvious she was looking for a rich older woman” (Kirino 2008 [2003], 42). The other girl whose acquaintance Yūzan makes adopted the in-your- face nickname Dahmer (after the American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer). She “was from Saitama [Prefecture], where she was a top student in an elite high school” (Kirino 2008 [2003], 42). As her nickname suggests,

[s]he was interested in cruel murders and dead bodies. … Dahmer’s parents had gotten divorced and, like me, she was an only child. It was just her mom and her now, and her mom, she said, did all kinds of jobs and wasn’t home very much. That person—that’s how she referred to her mother. That person’s fairly good-looking, she’d say. That person’s a slacker. That person’s got her own life to live. There was something similar about my mother’s death and the way Dahmer referred to her mother. With both there’s a sense of distance from the reality we live in. Like they’re people who live in some far-off other country. (Ibid., 43–4).

Yūzan relates that Dahmer was in love with her young female math teacher in high school—a person “who made fun of anyone who was less than a mathematical genius” (ibid., 44). Dahmer pushed herself in math, so that she would stand out in the teacher’s eyes. She tells Yūzan that when her grades started to fall once—going below the class average—“she got drunk and felt so humiliated she slashed her wrist with a knife” (ibid.). Both Boku-chan and Dahmer amplify Yūzan as a character acutely aware of her outsider status and in search of a sense of acceptance and belonging. Yūzan’s family home ceases to be, if it ever was, a locus of refuge. It is merely a place where her father, who had pleaded with her to go on to college so that she might get a good job in the future, “couldn’t tell the difference between keeping an eye on me and standing guard” (Kirino 2008 [2003], 50). It is also a place where her grandparents’ “hopes and sympathies are all directed at me. Which is a royal pain, too, and kind of disgusting. Every night I said a little prayer that they might die soon” (ibid.). She feels that to survive into adulthood she has no choice but to 160 B. E. THORNBURY flee back to a part of Tokyo that can potentially provide a new home for her. In Parade, Yoshida does not clarify the exact circumstances that first brought Satoru to Shinjuku 2-chōme. The reader is left to imagine a young man seeking a part of Tokyo in which he, like Yūzan (and her acquaintances Boku-chan and Dahmer), could feel that he was accepted and belonged. In Real World, on the other hand, Kirino provides extensive details about Yūzan’s life and psychological state—the context for understanding why she was drawn to 2-chōme as her place of refuge on the map of Tokyo.

Speech Patterns “To my ear,” Tanimura, the narrator of Murakami’s “Yesterday,” remarks, “Kitaru had an almost pitch-perfect Kansai accent, even though he was born and raised in Denenchofu, in Ota-ku, in Tokyo. As for me, although I was born and raised in Kansai, I spoke almost perfect standard (that is, Tokyo-style) Japanese. The two of us definitely made an odd pair” (Murakami 2017 [2014], 42). Murakami’s story turns on the fact that speech patterns characteristic of areas of Japan outside of the capital region—almost as much as those characteristic of foreign cultures—are a definitive marker of Tokyo-outsider status. The two young men did indeed make a very odd pair of friends. Tanimura, from Ashiya (near Kobe), had rid himself of his native Kansai accent in order “to become a totally different person” (Murakami 2017 [2014], 45) when he moved to Tokyo to start his freshman year at Waseda University. For Kitaru, from the well-to-do Tokyo neighborhood of Denenchōfu, the motivation to deliberately adopt a Kansai style of speech stemmed, he says, from being a diehard fan of the Nishinomiya (also near Kobe)-based Hanshin Tigers baseball team. However, the non-Tokyo speech pattern is only one tool Kitaru uses to counter others’ expectations of him. Despite being an academically proficient guy, he does not want to follow the assumed route of testing into a good university (such as Waseda), securing a respectable job, and, finally, getting married to his longtime girlfriend Erika and having a family. In short, he wants “out”— and, as it transpires, he eventually winds up leaving Japan altogether. It is regarded as understandable—laudable, even—for an individual from outside of Tokyo to replace his or her local dialect with the standard, Tokyo speech pattern. The contrary is not true. Erika erupts in frustration at Kitaru, saying that “[y]ou were born in Tokyo, yet all you speak is the 5 LOCATING THE OUTSIDER INSIDE TOKYO 161

Kansai dialect, and every time you open your mouth it’s one annoying thing after another. … There’s no way a weird person like you can get along well with normal people” (Murakami 2017 [2014], 55). When Kitaru retorts that Tanimura is “from Ashiya but only speaks the Tokyo dialect,” Erika’s comeback is simply “That’s much more common” (ibid.). Kitaru then asserts that “[t]he Tokyo dialect’s no better than Kansai,” with Erika then capping off her side of the argument with the indisputable point that “since the Meiji Restoration the way people speak in Tokyo has been the standard for spoken Japanese” (ibid.). For Kitaru and Tanimura, the arsenal of weapons available to a teenager who wanted to reinvent himself was limited. For Tanimura, “[j]ettisoning the Kansai dialect was a practical (as well as symbolic)” way to remake himself “[b]ecause, in the final analysis, the language we speak constitutes who we are as people. At least that’s the way it seemed to me at eighteen” (ibid., 46). Looking back on his life, Tanimura knew that the views he held decades earlier were naïve. Language alone did not constitute Kitaru’s position as an outsider any more than it did Tanimura’s, an insider. When Tanimura reflects on Kitaru’s feat in mastering the Kansai dialect, he is “impressed. So there were people who studied the Kansai dialect as if it were a foreign language? That was news to me. It made me realize all over again how huge Tokyo was, and how many things there were that I didn’t know” (Murakami 2017 [2014], 43). Kitaru, the smart, but rest- less, guy from a solidly middle-class family (who has yet to pass his university entrance exam), wants to escape a Tokyo that he finds stifling, while Tanimura, the ambitious, elite-university student, sees Tokyo as a place to begin “a new life … with a clean slate as a brand-new person” (ibid., 45). Both of them take deliberate steps to achieve those ends. They succeed in their respective quests because they have the intellectual skills and socioeconomic resources to do so.

* * *

The huge size of Tokyo that impresses Tanimura is manifested in the cartographic reality of a city that does much to obscure its population of outsiders. Fiction and film, however, give visibility and voice to that population. The outsider inside Tokyo is mapped in locations around the metropolitan area—Musashi-Maruyama for Roberto Kazuo Miyamori in OUT, Ikebukuro for Isabelle in “The Owl’s Estate” and for Keiko in “An Elevator on Sunday,” Shibuya (probably) for Dongli in After Dark, 162 B. E. THORNBURY

Denenchōfu for Kitaru in “Yesterday,” Azabu for Tamaru in 1Q84, the banks of the Sumida River for the homeless men in The Devotion of Suspect X, and Kinshichō for the folks who follow Kagawa into the Kobayashis’s home in Hospitalité. There is also the contingent of characters who gravi- tate to Shinjuku: Eriko in Kitchen, Anna in OUT, Satoru in Parade, the monster-man-goat in “Model T Frankenstein,” Hana, Gin, and Miyuki in Tokyo Godfathers, and Yūzan in Real World. A distinct line may separate outsider from insider: one is foreign and the other is Japanese. There can be a much less distinct line, however—those with or without a fixed address, those who appear to be Japanese but occupy a separate space because of their ethnicity, and those for whom gender identity and sexual orientation place them outside of the mainstream. While outsider status may at times work to a character’s advantage, as it does for Isabelle and Anna, such status more often works against an individual: homeless people may be scorned, displaced from their temporary abodes, attacked, or even murdered; the folks from abroad may be trafficked by criminals or treated poorly even if they are legally working in Japan; and people may feel they have to hide their true selves or may even become the victims of physical attack because of their gender identity or sexual orientation. In mapping the spaces occupied by this diverse population in Tokyo, stories, novels, and films help challenge notions of social homogeneity within—and beyond—the borders of Japan’s capital city.

Notes 1. A basic assertion of Nihonjinron (“theories of Japaneseness”), a discourse that became widespread in the 1980s, is the supposed unique homogeneity of Japanese society. See, for example, Hegemony of Homogeneity: An Anthropological Analysis of ‘Nihonjinron’ (Befu 2001). 2. Until recently, Japanese nationality was automatically conveyed only if a child’s father was Japanese. (It is now automatically conveyed through either the mother or father.) Kirino amplifies Kazuo’s outsider status by giving him a Brazilian mother, while also establishing his patrilineal claim to Japanese nationality. 3. Kazuo entered Japan on a special type of visa developed in the 1990s to help alleviate continuing labor shortages. “Aimed primarily at Brazilians of Japanese ancestry,” the visa permitted “a three-year stay during which time the visitors were allowed to work in low- and unskilled jobs” (Flowers 2012, 518). 5 LOCATING THE OUTSIDER INSIDE TOKYO 163

4. “The consequences of Japanese Brazilian labor migration to Japan,” Keiko Yamanaka has written, “demonstrate that Nikkeijin ethnicity [being of Japanese descent] has been a double-edged sword. … For the Japanese state, the policy of embracing Nikkeijin ethnicity was a convenient means to maintain ‘racial’ purity while responding to the domestic labor shortage. But it has also spawned a populous minority community with a distinct and alien culture and identity, thereby subverting the very purpose of the policy” (2003, 192). Yamanaka echoes Kirino when she writes that the apparent “promise [of] privileged access to economic opportunities and cultural integration in Japan” instead “relegated [immigrants from Brazil] to the position of a disad- vantaged ‘ethnic’ minority in the society. Despite the official definition of Nikkeijin as ‘Japanese’ based on their ancestry, most Japanese citizens regard [immigrants from Brazil] as behaviorally strange and culturally inferior as a result of their Nikkeijin ethnicity and their third-world nationality” (ibid.). 5. Kazuo’s experience, to build on Yamanaka’s analysis (see note 4), is articulated in a study written by Takeyuki Tsuda: The dramatic change from positive to negative minority status that the Japanese Brazilians experience when they migrate to Japan is accompanied by an equally significant transformation in their ethnic consciousness. As members of a negative immigrant minority, they confront considerable ethnic exclusion, socioeconomic marginalization, cultural difference, and “discrimination” in Japan. In response to such negative experiences, many of them distance themselves from their previous transnational ethnic affili- ation with the Japanese and assert a much stronger Brazilian counteriden- tity in opposition to Japanese society. (Tsuda 2003, 155) 6. The place Kazuo visits takes him two hours by train and bus from his factory dormitory in Musashi-Maruyama. Little Brazil is a commercial area within the town of Oizumi-machi, located near the city of Ota in Gunma prefecture, northwest of Tokyo, where the Subaru automobile corporate headquarters are. In the 1980s Subaru hired a large number of Brazilians on short-term contracts. The factory and its suppliers still employ a sizable number of foreign laborers from various parts of the world. See “Subaru’s Hometown Transformed by Foreign Workers” 2015. 7. In an ethnographic study of Ō kubo, Petrice R. Flowers writes that “[e]couraging the growth of an ethnic town in Ō kubo allows the [Japanese] government to demonstrate its ability to manage foreigners in a country that insists on not being or becoming an immigrant country … [and] to preserve the myth of a homogeneous Japan” (2012, 516 and 518). 8. “Enthusiastic readers,” as Rio Ō tomo notes, “identified the setting of [After Dark] as either Shibuya or Kabuki-chō in Shinjuku, in a debate on 164 B. E. THORNBURY

the internet by Tokyo residents” (2009, 356). I agree with Ō tomo’s assessment that it is Shibuya, especially given the hilly terrain that Murakami describes. 9. English has been part of school curriculums since the immediate postwar period, but there has been an increasingly urgent sense that good Japanese parents do whatever they can to help their children learn English, which, as Stephen Greenblatt puts it, has spread “on the wings of international capitalism” (2010, 5). School systems generally allow children (at least in the upper grades) the choice of learning a language other than English, but almost everyone takes English. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to get into a competitive high school and university in Japan without adequate English skills. 10. For a discussion of the symbolism of the chabudai, see Sand 2013, 114–15. 11. As a result of the “massive internal migration from [Japan’s] countryside to [Tokyo]” from the late nineteenth century into the first half of the twentieth, as Jamie Coates has written, “Ikebukuro became a major hub for cheap[,] small-scale wooden housing”—much of which was destroyed following the earthquake in 1923 and the wartime fire-bombings in 1945 (2018, 168–69). 12. The term ijinkan is most commonly associated with the Kitano-chō district of Kobe, where it refers to the Western-style houses, some dating back a hundred years or more, still standing there. 13. Most zainichi (literally, “Japan-resident”) Koreans such as Keiko “adopt South Korean nationality primarily out of convenience,” Sonia Ryang has written. “Without South Korean nationality they would have no passport” (2009, 68). Ryang goes on to note that the permanent residence that Koreans in Japan have been entitled to since the early 1980s, whether or not they possess South Korean nationality, provides them with only a makeshift laissez-passer called a “reen- try permit” to Japan, and travel to all destinations except North Korea requires a preissued visa. … Overseas tourism or study abroad has become a relatively stable component of the lives of Koreans in Japan, as with any peoples in the industrialized world, and[,] therefore, a passport has become imperative for many Koreans in Japan. (Ibid., 68–69) 14. Yamanaka contrasts the experience of Japanese-Brazilian immigrants in Japan (see note 4), with that of permanent residents of Japan of Korean descent. She writes that, like many Japanese-Brazilians, people of Korean ethnicity “are physically indistinguishable from the dominant population” (Yamanaka 2003, 192). However, unlike the Japanese-Brazilians, “they have assimilated to Japanese language and culture and are therefore behaviorally scarcely distinguishable from the dominant population” (ibid.). Nevertheless, as is echoed in “An Elevator on Sunday,” 5 LOCATING THE OUTSIDER INSIDE TOKYO 165

the Japanese state regards Korean descendants as foreigners based on their nationality (or lack of Japanese citizenship), while Japanese citizens treat them as culturally inferior based on their foreign ancestry. As a result, nearly a century after their forebears began to arrive in search of a better life, Koreans remain socially stigmatized and economically segregated by the nation in which they and their parents were born and raised, whose language they speak, and whose culture they largely share. (Ibid.) 15. This aspect of Tamaru’s background is first revealed when the dowager tells Aomame that he is a veteran of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces (Murakami 2011 [2009–10], 433). 16. Writing about the growing number of homeless people congregating in Tokyo’s parks as the post-Bubble-era economic malaise deepened, Thomas R.H. Havens writes that many who lived “beneath blue tarps [waterproof, construction-site plastic sheeting used to cover makeshift shelters built out of scavenged cardboard, plastic, and wood] denied their own marginality and believed they were contributing to family and nation by living on their own, not relying excessively on relatives or the state to survive” (Havens 2011, 176). He further notes that, although the Tokyo Metropolitan Government banned makeshift shelters from parks in 2004 and moved a large number of individuals into public housing, “many soon sought the greater freedom of the streets and parks, getting by on pensions and aid from support groups” (ibid., 177). In addition to streets and parks, numerous homeless people also fabricated shelters along the city’s riverbanks. In-depth studies focusing on Tokyo’s homeless population include Nishizawa 2005 and 2011. 17. “The blue tarpaulins of the homeless,” as Paul Waley has written, “form ironically colorful clusters in numerous parts of urban Japan, telling a very poignant story of a move away from the social compact that had once seen the fruits of economic prosperity fairly equitably distributed across society” (2007, 1471). 18. Kirino’s portrayal of Yūzan is sociologically accurate. “Many sexual minorities” in Japan, Ikuko Sugiura writes, “report that a critical factor distin- guishing them from other minorities is their loneliness: no one else in their families knows about their status. Many young people—aware of the social homophobia around them—opt not to disclose their true selves even to their own families for fear of rejection” (2011, 171). Although Yūzan’s cohort of friends have guessed her “secret” and are accepting of her, she is clearly afraid of forthrightly talking about herself. As Sugiura also notes, it was not until the decade of the 1990s—not long before Real World was originally published—that the lesbian community in Japan became more assertive in making its existence known (ibid., 167–68). CHAPTER 6

Tokyo Cartographies of Mystery and Crime

“[T]he distance of self from deeper impulses, desires, and fears continues to be a theme in understanding the urban condition” (2000, 10), Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson write in their introduction to A Companion to the City. “Here we encounter the relation of the imagination to the sub- conscious. Deep desires and fears can emerge in the city—hence its representation as a crucible of civilization, as promethean, but also as the site of sin … or as unruly spaces that have to be managed” (ibid.). Narratives of mystery and crime map a Tokyo where the deep desires and fears to which Bridge and Watson refer are made manifest. Events arising from them unfold, as they do in the short stories and novels that are the focus of this chapter, across telephone lines, in the bedrooms of luxury condo buildings, on the city’s watery margins, in a crowded train car in full public view, within the walls of fraying apartments and those of well-tended homes, on the streets of prosperous neighborhoods, in the shadows of the city made visible on the dark web, beneath the surface of the city’s pavement, and within an alternate world. The works discussed here include Kōji Suzuki’s story “Beyond the Darkness,” Tomotake Ishikawa’s novel Gray Men, Keizō Hino’s novel Isle of Dreams, Fuminori Nakamura’s novel The Gun, Keigo Higashino’s novel The Devotion of Suspect X, Natsuo Kirino’s novel Real World, Shūichi Yoshida’s novel Parade (with reference to Murakami’s novel After Dark), Tetsuya Honda’s novel The Silent Dead, and Haruki Murakami’s story “Super-frog Saves Tokyo” and his novel 1Q84. These works variously

© The Author(s) 2020 167 B. E. Thornbury, Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34276-0_6 168 B. E. THORNBURY expose extreme and unrelenting bullying, sexual abuse and exploitation, domestic violence, random attacks on women walking alone at night, and, of course, murder for multiple reasons and taking multiple forms. They also extend to fearsome events arising out of the natural world. Collectively, the materials exemplify Philip Howell’s point that works of crime fiction— to which I would add mystery fiction broadly defined—“can be taken … as alternative epistemologies of the city, worthy of as much consideration as radical geography’s urban knowledge” (1998, 358).

Across Telephone Lines Suzuki’s “Beyond the Darkness” simultaneously speaks to a millennial and post-Bubble moment. For young people coming of age in the last decade of the twentieth century, good jobs were hard to come by and getting ahead was becoming increasingly difficult. Despite the odds, Yoshiaki and Eriko Fukazawa have come a long way. They are a happily married couple who, when the story opens, are living in their newly purchased condominium and expecting their first child. Their success can be plotted on the Tokyo metropolitan-area railway map: college-graduate Yoshiaki works in a corporate office near Tamachi Station in the central part of the city. He and Eriko, who resigned from her job in the healthcare field to “nest” at home prior to baby Aya’s birth, have recently taken a step up on the real estate ladder, moving from their small rental apartment in Nakameguro to a larger condo of their own near Hiyoshi Station in Kanagawa Prefecture. At the age of thirty-one, Yoshiaki is working long hours in the career-track job that has enabled the couple to afford the ten-million yen down payment and to cover a monthly mortgage payment that is several times the amount of their former rent. Money is not the only cost. The new home has increased Yoshiaki’s commuting time by a half hour each way. The couple understood the tradeoff: the longer the commute, the more money they would have to pay for the relatively spacious place they wanted. Although at first lulled into believing words of assurance that they could buy a condo with a mortgage payment equivalent to their former rent, it rapidly became apparent that they would have to spend much more than before to find a home they liked within what they considered to be an acceptable commuting range. Returning home early one day, Yoshiaki “dream[s] of a less hectic life, of how happy he’d be if he could come home at this hour every day” (Suzuki 2014 [1995], 107). Like Sugiyama in Shall We Dance?, Yoshiaki is stuck with his debt and his long daily 6 TOKYO CARTOGRAPHIES OF MYSTERY AND CRIME 169

journey from home to office and back again. “Burdened with a 25-year mortgage … quitting his current job at a major insurance company to find other work was, realistically speaking, an impossibility. … As for the home, sparkling new and spacious, it gave them greater satisfaction than they’d anticipated. To wish for further luxury would be a sin” (ibid.). Unlike the older Sugiyama, who is barely a presence in the lives of his wife and daughter and for whom home ownership appears to offer little joy, Yoshiaki is devoted to Eriko and Aya and takes great pride in the newly acquired condo. Despite the “ever-satisfying chime” (Suzuki 2014 [1995], 107) of their doorbell, a current of unease runs through the Fukazawas’s lives. Eriko, who is at home every day taking care of newborn Aya, starts receiving menacing telephone calls from a man whose mocking voice has followed the couple from their previous apartment in Nakameguro to their new residence in the suburbs. The culprit is Yūji Hikuma, who makes a scant living by picking up exposed film early in the day at camera shops and convenience stores, transporting it to a center where it is developed and printed, and delivering the finished product in the afternoon back to the shops and stores for retrieval by customers. (The story was originally published before the spread of digital cameras.) With plenty of time on his hands and unencumbered by direct supervision, Hikuma invades the privacy of those customers by looking through the photographs they send for developing. He makes note of their names and telephone numbers, which are written on the processing envelopes. He recognizes Eriko as someone he knew—and bullied—in the past. And, he has the information he needs to reach her, unseen, across telephone lines and to torment her once more. Hikuma “follows” Eriko and Yoshiaki from their old apartment to their new condo by using the identifying information on the envelopes containing the film that Yoshiaki, who strongly feels the need to photographically document family life, regularly drops off at a shop near his office. Hikuma carefully studies the contents of the pictures, too—gleaning information that makes it seem as if he has a direct window onto their lives. With Eriko on the verge of a psychological breakdown as a result of his taunting phone calls—and with their hard-won life, along with their hopes and dreams, at risk—Yoshiaki springs into action. It does not take him long to solve the mystery. As Yoshiaki is dropping off a roll of film one day, it suddenly dawned on him that “[a] photo instantly relayed visual info about the inside of their apartment as if the viewer had actually been inside” (Suzuki 2014 [1995], 123). The two-dimensional photographs provide an 170 B. E. THORNBURY

unobstructed view into the three-dimensional space of Eriko’s adult life— and Hikuma enters that space through the telephone lines in order to destroy her happiness. Bullying is a well-documented issue in Japan. Hikuma’s actions are a continuation of the suffering he and several other students inflicted on Eriko while they were in junior high school. Almost thirty years old now, the bully is well into adulthood, and his geographic territory has expanded. Eriko, whose earlier misery had caused her to quit school, where she had been a top student, eventually embarked on the path that led her to become a nutritionist in a hospital—where she and Yoshiaki met. Together they forged a fulfilling life for themselves that would have seemed unimaginable to Eriko while she was the object of school-age bullying. And, now, the bully has reemerged. Hikuma’s actions—like the behavior of all abusers—are meant to destroy the sense of security and safety on which a person’s contentment rests. There is no place for his victim to hide. Eriko’s first assumption— one that is reasonable enough—is that her family is being spied on from a neighboring building. The likely spot is a municipal housing project, but, when Yoshiaki goes to investigate, he finds that it would not be possible for anyone to see from there what is going on in their rooms. When Eriko suggests that they leave the condo, “Yoshiaki felt blood rush to his head. ‘We have to move? Are you kidding? Did you forget how hard it was to get this place?’ He knew yelling at her was a misdirection of his rage, but remembering how difficult it had been to scrape together a down payment and all the hardships they’d gone through, his tone got rough. … He didn’t want to go back to square one” (Suzuki 2014 [1995], 115–16). Eriko does not want to go back to square one either, but, as she points out, Yoshiaki is not the one who is home all day, cringing every time the telephone rings. The story spatially encompasses the sweep of the Tokyo metropolitan area—from Kanagawa Prefecture through central Tokyo and out to Chiba Prefecture. With the goal of discovering where Hikuma lives and confronting him there, Yoshiaki spends an entire day following the guy as, photo processing orders in hand, he makes the trip eastward to Nishi Funabashi, where the processing plant is. Like Ryō in Tsujihara’s “My Slightly Crooked Brooch,” Yoshiaki is portrayed as an agent of decision and action. Although career-track men like them may be chained to a two- and-a-half-decade mortgage, the house—along with the wife (and children) inside—are material proof of their success in life. In the “Afterword” 6 TOKYO CARTOGRAPHIES OF MYSTERY AND CRIME 171 to Death and the Flower (Sei to shi no genso ̄ [lit. “Illusions of Life and Death”]), the collection in which “Beyond the Darkness” appears, Suzuki characterizes the stories as “express[ing] a balance of the maternal and the paternal by placing symbols of femininity and masculinity side by side” (Suzuki 2014 [1995], 221). The maternal is represented by “[t]he soft- ness and warmth of diapers,” while the paternal is symbolized by “the speed power of a racer’s motorbike” (ibid.). In the earliest days of his writing career, Suzuki notes by way of explanation, he stayed home doing childcare and housework while his wife was out earning money. However, his remarks posit a world in which men are those whose role is to take action—whatever form such action may take. When Yoshiaki finally confronts Hikuma in his rundown apartment, he understandably feels murderous rage toward the bully—especially given that at the very moment Yoshiaki bursts in on him he was phoning Eriko yet again. Pressing a lit cigarette to Hikuma’s skin, Yoshiaki mimics what he saw Hikuma inadvertently (but with no regrets) do to a baby on the day he followed him to Nishi Funabashi. Although Hikuma never bothers Eriko again, there is a twist to the story’s ending. Happily setting out on a day trip with his wife and daughter, Yoshiaki spots a newspaper report that Hikuma, who carelessly smoked in bed, has died in a house fire. Struck by the weight of the man’s wasted life, the news brings tears to Yoshiaki’s eyes. He decides not to tell his wife about Hikuma’s demise— assuming that, for her sake, it is best to let bygones be bygones. The effect, however, is to leave the reader with the uncomfortable feeling that Yoshiaki’s anger has morphed into a kind of mysterious sympathy for Hikuma despite his relentless cruelty to Eriko.

In the Bedrooms of Luxury Condo Buildings Ishikawa’s Gray Men is a ringing indictment of Japanese society—one in which the powerful either protect criminals or are criminals themselves— and in which the “little guy,” who just wants to lead an ordinary life and have a modicum of happiness, is not only without power but also without redress. The little guy in the story is Ryōtarō Sakuma, an employee of a jewelry store, who clocks in over a hundred hours of unpaid overtime each month. “Worked to exhaustion day after day, he no longer maintained any meaningful personal relationships” (Ishikawa 2013 [2012], 10). Moreover, he is bullied by his co-workers “day in, day out … with no escape” (ibid., 8). Ryōtarō cannot take the pain anymore. One morning he rides the 172 B. E. THORNBURY

Keihin-Tōhoku train line as usual, but, instead of heading to the store for another workday, he changes to the Tōkyū-Tamagawa line at Kamata Station, riding it westward as far as Tamagawa Station near the Tama River. He has resolved to die. Running along the border between Tokyo and Kanagawa Prefecture, the Tama River symbolizes the edge to which Ryōtarō has been driven. The quiet, riverside environs of the ancient gravesite Kamenokoyama Kofun—a national historical site—seem to him the right place to end his life. The tomb figuratively connects Ryōtarō to the larger flow of time and the possibility that, even if he is unseen in life, he will not be forgotten in death. But, before he can act, he encounters a strange man who has inferred his suicidal intentions and offers him an alternative course of action. Gray, as Ryōtarō calls him, gives him a new life with purpose. Gray is planning revenge on a massive scale. It is simultaneously against those individuals who, for their own sadistic pleasure, kidnapped, tor- tured, and murdered his wife and child (and who were barely punished for their crimes thanks to the high-level connections they had) and against the entire corrupt system of powerful individuals who get away with and let others get away with criminal behavior. Ishikawa places Gray’s headquarters, where the revenge is being plotted and planned, in a building near Tokyo Station—at the geographic epicenter of Japan’s political, legal, corporate, and media power-systems. The Imperial Palace, just steps away, symbolically validates the standing of those who wield influence and exercise authority within the Japanese state. Ishikawa’s novel gives Tokyo urban space a dystopian edge—most vividly represented by a high-rise condominium building near Ikebukuro Station called “The Tower,” where “[t]he main entrance was carpeted and lit up like a five-star hotel. The surrounding walls had been polished to a mirror-like sheen and the lobby was designed with a central black motif that gave the space an angular feel. It was intimidating” (Ishikawa 2013 [2012], 54). When the then-teenage girl named Sayuri, whose life will also be saved by Gray, sees the apartment into which she has been lured for the first time, “[t]he splendor of the room nearly took [her] breath away. … The room stank of money” (ibid., 56). Everything is over the top, exceeding ordinary human scale. The offices and suites in the upper reaches of tall buildings affirm the position of the already-powerful and allow others who enter those realms to temporarily bask in the illusion that they, too, have acquired status. The room where Sayuri, who was unwittingly imprisoned in a web of high- 6 TOKYO CARTOGRAPHIES OF MYSTERY AND CRIME 173 stakes sex work and murder, winds up “was high enough to make her knees buckle, and the whole world seemed to be beneath her. She felt that the city, in all its neon glory, lay in supplication before her” (Ishikawa 2013 [2012], 57). Owners of the wealth that can build such structures, as she sees, demand a cocoon-like existence within an environment that constantly validates their own inflated self-regard. Such individuals have no need for the communal ties made possible in areas of lower, closer-to- street-level housing. The word “tower” is a component of tawā mansion (“tower mansion”)—a Japanese term for high-rise condo developments with all of the most up-to-date facilities and amenities. In Gray Men, The Tower is the sex-and-violence playground of men who are referred to as “Benefactors.” Sayuri, ensnared as one of the sexual victims of these men, is at first deluded into believing that The Tower is a place where young women—referred to as “Flowers”—will be treated “like princesses” (ibid., 57). The so-called Flowers are physically attractive young women—still just teenagers—who have troubled home lives. Recruiting begins when they are approached by a friendly-seeming individual, someone young like them who appears to possess money beyond their wildest dreams—and offers them an escape from their difficulties. When the young women find out that the “only” job they have to do is sleep with men, it is a tradeoff they are willing to accept—as if it were just a form of enjo kōsai (“compensated dating”), whereby older men pay high-school or even younger girls to spend time with them in karaoke establishments or other locations, including the rooms of love hotels. Scorned by a society that simply shrugs its shoulders at the behavior of the men, the girls are said to welcome the money to buy brand-name accessories and other luxury items.1 Ishikawa takes enjo kōsai to its logical conclusion of raw horror. The Flowers of the novel are not just made to sleep with men. They are drugged so that the men can do with their bodies what they will without resistance. The ultimate act for the man—an act for which he bids an enormous sum—is to kill the girl. By connecting the men who do this to society’s control- centers, Ishikawa goes for the jugular of Japan’s patriarchal system. The bullying directed at Ryōtarō is bad enough, but pales in comparison to the “sport” of raping and murdering young women that is depicted as the entertainment of powerful men. The security of the men who patronize The Tower requires that all of the signals that normally connect people to one another in Tokyo and to the world at large have been blocked. There is no access to televisions, 174 B. E. THORNBURY radios, or computers. The girls’ cell phones are lifeless. The only communication is through a room telephone with an unseen front desk. The woman at the other end of the line tells Sayuri: “If you have money and power, you have no need for superficial information, values, or entertainment. You can just create it all yourself” (Ishikawa 2013 [2012], 73). Sayuri and the other Flowers are part of that entertainment being created outside of the reach of society’s values. Gray Men pulls no punches. In the scene when Sayuri is initiated into her role as a Flower by the character named Chū (who rapes her), she is described as being in the throes of sexual pleasure. The reader may be meant to understand that the makeup she is forced to wear in order to transform her appearance into that of a sexually attractive woman has also transformed her body and emotions. Deprived of parental affection, Sayuri was raped by her mother’s boyfriend—and subsequently attacked by her mother who walked in on the assault. Ishikawa constructs in Sayuri a character who is so emotionally damaged that she yearns to be the object of anyone’s—even Chū’s—attention. And, indeed, after he is finished with her physically, Sayuri entreats him to stay with her, although he just walks out as she lies naked on the bed. Another episode in the novel centers on a woman who is a female correlative of the men who buy young girls’ bodies in The Tower. “There was one customer [of the store where Ryōtarō worked] who was very good for business. A middle-aged woman, her body flabby from expensive food, who lavished herself with expensive jewelry” (Ishikawa 2013 [2012], 23). A million-dollar client of the store, the woman invites Ryōtarō to dinner in a “glamorous hotel” (ibid., 24) and takes him after the meal to the hotel’s priciest room. “But when the time came [Ryōtarō] found himself shaking uncontrollably. Before he realized it he had fled the room, overwhelmed with disgust for the woman and disbelief in himself. As he made his way home, still flustered, he fully considered himself to have made the right choice” (ibid.). Even though Ryōtarō was able to escape from the woman, the sexual assault and the job-related, punishing consequences of not bending to the will of an important client of the jewelry store are major factors leading to the suicidal despair he feels prior to Gray’s intervention. The critique of Japanese society in Gray Men is manifested in the Tokyo cityscape. Even if The Tower in Ikebukuro can be dismissed as just a product of the author’s imagination, the ultrahigh-priced boutiques of the Ginza cannot. Early in the novel, the young woman who procured Sayuri takes her on a shopping trip to the Ginza by way of attempting to allay 6 TOKYO CARTOGRAPHIES OF MYSTERY AND CRIME 175 doubts Sayuri feels about her role as a Flower. But the scheme backfires. “Getting out of the taxi, [Sayuri] felt it keenly. The buildings and people of Ginza were her polar opposite. Haves filled the streets, glamorously dressed. They walked like they owned the place, their rights granted by money. Ginza was generous to the haves. It didn’t reject others outright, but it left them feeling alienated. … A feeling only understood by the outcasts”—such as she regards herself as being (Ishikawa 2013 [2012], 84). Ishikawa uses the Ginza as a metonym for a society crushed under a corrupt, oppressive weight of its own making. The revenge finally carried out by Gray and those in league with him (from their base of operations near the Ginza in the Tokyo Station area) bestows its legacy on Ryōtarō and Sayuri, extending to them the possibility of a more open and accepting Tokyo that can offer healing and security.

On the City’s Watery Margins The surge in high-rise construction that was transforming Tokyo in the last two decades of the twentieth century is vividly delineated in Hino’s Isle of Dreams. Shōzō Sakai, the late-middle-aged employee of a corporation in the building industry, reflects in the first pages of the novel that he “and his generation had constructed soaring towers of steel and concrete that stood on their own strength alone”—replacing the old, one- and two- story “[h]ouses of wood and paper, frail huts that might come crashing down—were they not leaning on one another, built as though designed to grovel on the earth in obedience to gravity” (Hino 2009 [1985], 7). In Shōzō’s eyes, the high-rise structures were objects of beauty—especially when seen from the shores of Tokyo Bay. He “thought Tokyo was at its most beautiful when glimpsed from the end of Harumi Wharf. … Beyond the ever blue-black rolling surface of the bay, the high-rises surrounding Tokyo Tower were all that could be seen. He had often gone on solitary sojourns to the wharf and stood gazing at the urban silhouette until darkness fell. Each time there were more buildings. The sight of the burgeon- ing capital bolstered his spirits” (ibid., 11). An encounter with a mysterious female motorcyclist, however, gives Shōzō a new perspective on the city—drawing his attention away from the skyscrapers to the manmade islands in the bay. These, too, had transformed the cityscape, but in a wholly different way from the vertical edi- fices. As Shōzō begins to see the manmade islands as a fundamental reordering of nature, he, too, undergoes profound change. “[T]aking out 176 B. E. THORNBURY his map of the districts bordering Tokyo Bay, Shozo was astonished at the extent of the reclaimed land: it was much greater than he had imagined. … [T]he bay was for him a complete blind spot” (Hino 2009 [1985], 24). Material for the reclaimed land came from dirt and rocks, of course, but also from the garbage that was the byproduct of twentieth-century consumption. “It seemed to Shozo as though land reclamation had advanced, quite beyond the reality of the capital’s increasing refuse outflow, as though some immense and invisible force had suddenly begun filling in what the water had once gouged away. … Shozo had quite consciously taken part in the transformation of Tokyo, but now he felt a force that utterly dwarfed his tiny self” (ibid., 24–25). That ineffable force, unleashed in the course of the reclamation process, begins to dominate Shōzō’s thoughts:

The mountain of refuse that Tokyo spewed forth was creating the land for the Tokyo of the future. It struck Shozo as a circular flow, an immense yet invisible cycle—devised, planned, and carried out by humans, to be sure, but nonetheless driven by a mightier power behind it all. … Tokyo was expanding (vertically, having already reached its horizontal limits), brimming over with commodities (devoid of either the light or the shadow of history), the ever-increasing refuse (with many items unnecessarily discarded) brought to life again between the water and the light. (Ibid., 45–46, 48)

The mystery woman embodies that mightier power to which Shōzō finds himself ineluctably drawn. An overwhelming feeling that he wants to embrace the woman—“[h]e was startled to find kindled in him a feeling bordering on the sexual” (Hino 2009 [1985], 28)—lures him out into the bay. Shōzō’s explorations first take him to the now built-up island of Odaiba and its landmark Museum of Maritime Science. It is a voyage of discovery. As the bus he rides to get there goes through a tunnel, “he could hardly believe that they were really under water. Tokyo’s tentacles extended even to the ocean bottom” (ibid., 27). Eventually forming a connection with the woman, he is drawn further out into the bay—seeking “the soil that our garbage is forming. Is it not a new homeland for the likes of me, a man betwixt and between? That burial ground for the entropic waste excreted by Greater Tokyo” (ibid., 81–82). His final destination is a small island just off of Isle of Dreams—Yumenoshima—“[w]hoever had come up with the name [Isle of Dreams] must have been wonderfully imaginative. Or perhaps bitingly cynical” (ibid., 82)—a wild place rife with “[b]irds, mice, lizards, and plenty of bugs” (ibid., 107).2 It is the 6 TOKYO CARTOGRAPHIES OF MYSTERY AND CRIME 177

manifestation of what he had only previously imagined, a place where “the wilderness of weeds will in due course turn into an immense forest or an entirely new city, one that is more than mere stacks of concrete” (ibid., 82). In reality, however, the island is a dystopian hell of tangled vines and fishing lines that have caught and killed waterfowl. Attempting to free the birds leads to Shōzō’s death, when he slips and is himself helplessly ensnared. At his funeral, the mysterious woman (Yōko is her name), can only silently scream “no!” as one of Shōzō’s colleagues solemnly eulogizes him with words that might have once fit the man, but were far from appropriate to the Shōzō who died: “You devoted your life to building a new Tokyo from burned-out ruins [after the end of the war]. And now we see here the most modern city in the world. Today, too, the high-rises that you loved tower majestically into the sky. … True to your will and wish, we shall go on building more such buildings—even taller and more beautiful” (Hino 2009 [1985], 155). In the end, unbeknownst to his former coworkers, Shōzō had turned away from the majestic, high-rise city that he helped construct. His attention was newly focused on the land in Tokyo Bay that was formed from the detritus of that city—and he became the unwitting victim of the mysterious forces that lured him into the watery realm, where he wound up lethally trapped.

In a Crowded Train Car in Full Public View Out walking along the banks of Tokyo’s Arakawa River one rainy night in Nakamura’s The Gun, university student Tōru Nishikawa comes across the body of a man who had just taken his own life with a gun. Nishikawa impulsively decides to pocket the weapon. With few exceptions, private possession of guns and even bullets is a serious crime in Japan. Despite knowing (or, more likely, because he knows) the risk he is taking, the gun becomes the obsessive focus of his existence.3 Nakamura depicts Nishikawa as a guy for whom “reality always meant tedium” (2015 [2003], 14). To be in secret possession of a gun excites him, making it seem as if his life suddenly has meaning. It is not just bore- dom, however, that had gripped the twenty-one-year-old. He has long harbored anger at his biological parents—recalling his mother as “some woman I’d never known, who had disappeared” and his father as “that bastard” (ibid., 123), who gave him up when he was just six years old. It is an anger that never subsided despite his relatively speedy (and fortunate) adoption by loving foster parents.4 Despite outwardly denying his own 178 B. E. THORNBURY emotions, so great is the wrath he feels that when he reluctantly visits his critically ill biological father in the hospital (at the behest of the director of the orphanage that first took him in), he responds to his father’s plea for forgiveness by dismissively telling the man that he is not his son. “‘Wrong person, sorry,’ and I left the room” (ibid., 127). The police are looking for the gun—the trigger of which Nishikawa feels the urge to pull. He kills a cat in a neighborhood park, an act that quickly leads the authorities to identify him as someone in possession of a gun. In confronting Nishikawa on the doorstep of his apartment, the officer on the case is portrayed as an individual who just wants to get illicit guns out of circulation, knowing that people’s fascination with firearms makes them likely to fire the weapons. Convinced from the outset that Nishikawa has the gun, but would never just hand it over (which would lead to immediate arrest and criminal charges), the officer advises him to disassemble and dispose of it. “You’re still young,” he says to Nishikawa, “there’s no need to ruin everything just for a little fun, is there?” (Nakamura 2015 [2003], 152). Having the gun paradoxically gives Nishikawa the psychological push he needed to get his life back on track. He begins to “savor [his] own existence” (Nakamura 2015 [2003], 191). He works out at the gym and applies himself to his university studies. The only task he has left to tackle is divesting himself of the weapon: “In order to maintain my current state of mind, I needed to get rid of the gun. … I still loved the gun, and I felt like banishing that sentiment would take a long time … [but] I was trying to be satisfied with my current state of mind, and to be satisfied, I couldn’t have the gun with me” (ibid., 192). Rather than take it apart and throw away the pieces in random locations, as the police officer had suggested, he decides that he will take it to the mountains “and dump it in a pond or river” (ibid., 193)—sensing that the journey would satisfy the desire “to keep the gun with me a little bit longer” (ibid.). Nishikawa blatantly violates the law and social expectations of safe travel within the Tokyo transportation system by getting on a train with a loaded gun in his jacket pocket. The gun “seemed to be unmistakably asserting its existence” (Nakamura 2015 [2003], 194) and he begins to feel “something akin to sympathy for this man-made thing that had been created for the sole purpose of killing people” (ibid.). Despite reminding himself that he must throw it away, Nishikawa loses control when a man who is “filthy and dressed like a bum” (ibid., 195) and noisily chewing gum begins a loud cell phone conversation (another flagrant violation of 6 TOKYO CARTOGRAPHIES OF MYSTERY AND CRIME 179 social expectations on Tokyo trains). “Right then and there, I decided that this guy was the scum of the earth” (ibid.). An argument ensues, Nishikawa pulls out the gun, and seconds later he has killed the man—who, no doubt, called forth the image of his own father. The only choice left for Nishikawa is to eliminate himself as well. However, his trembling fingers prevent him from loading the gun with the one remaining bullet which, before getting on the train, he had intended to hold back as a souvenir. The Tokyo that had offered Nishikawa the possibility of a bright future, if he had been able to take hold of it, wound up leading him down the path to his destruction.

Within the Walls of Fraying Apartments Tetsuya Ishigami, the protagonist of Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X, was a caring son who looked after his elderly parents at the end of their lives—and is now a solitary, middle-aged man. As a university student, his brilliance in the field of mathematics greatly impressed his professors. However, his chance at a university career—like the one his fellow alum- nus Manabu Yukawa (the amateur detective nicknamed “Galileo”) achieved—was lost because his family responsibilities precluded going on to graduate school.5 To bring in needed money for the household, he ended up becoming an instructor at a high school in Tokyo’s shitamachi, teaching math to teenagers who cared little about the subject. At the same job years later, he lives alone in a fraying downtown apartment building, his principal joy in life being the pursuit of solutions to complex math problems. He does not seek professional recognition as a mathematician— only the satisfaction of possibly working out problems that have con- founded others. Ishigami is so socially isolated that, at one point, he decided to commit suicide by hanging himself in his apartment:

Not very long ago, he had been reduced to the terrible conclusion that his life had lost its meaning. If his only talent was for mathematics, he had rea- soned, and yet he could make no progress along that path, what was the value of his existence? Every day, he’d contemplated death, feeling that if he died, no one would be sad, or really much inconvenienced. He doubted anyone would even notice. … There would be no particular meaning to his death. Just like there had been no particular meaning to his life. (Higashino 2011 [2005], 290) 180 B. E. THORNBURY

Despite living and working in the sort of shitamachi neighborhood (the specific location is Fukagawa, along the Sumida River) that professes its “downtown neighborliness” and community bonds, Ishigami can see that, in some ways, he is no different from the homeless people encamped on banks of the Sumida. He frequently walks by their shelters on his way to an early-morning stop at Benten-tei, the shop where he buys a freshly made bento ̄ lunch-to-go from employee Yasuko Hanaoka, the woman- next-door with whom he is secretly in love. Ishigami may have a respectable full-time job and a secure place to live, but he has no social connections—no one who, he feels, would miss him if he disappeared from the face of the earth. Two murders take place in The Devotion of Suspect X. The first is dra- matized at the very beginning of the novel. Yasuko’s violent ex-husband, Togashi, who has discovered where she lives and works, wants money from her. An altercation involving Yasuko’s junior-high-school-age daughter, Misato, ensues when he visits the apartment where she and her mother reside, and the women strangle him in self-defense. The second is revealed at the end of the novel. It turns out that Ishigami killed a homeless man to use as a prop in a scheme he devised to help Yasuko and Misato by covering up their involvement in the death of Togashi. Yukawa, who reconnects with Ishigami as the case unfolds, realizes after strolling with the math teacher along the Sumida’s banks that Ishigami “had plenty of time to consider the homeless who lived there and their lives. Why were they living at all? Were they just killing time, waiting there [on the edges of the Sumida] for the day when they would eventually die? When they died, would anyone notice? Would anyone care? That’s what I imagine him thinking” (Higashino 2011 [2005], 275). Yukawa intuits that Ishigami likely rationalized that the homeless people’s lives were not much different from his own—and, thus, he could use them to carry out his plan.6 In her own way, Yasuko, too, is a figure of disconnection within Tokyo’s shitamachi. She is a twice-divorced woman, who—if only she could be so lucky—wants a stable relationship with a good man. Despite being described as physically attractive, her self-deprecating assessment of her appearance reflects society’s view of a woman “of a certain age”—even if she is still only in her thirties. She was, she felt, just “an average middle- aged woman with hardly any redeeming qualities, and certainly no great allure” (Higashino 2011 [2005], 283). Allure is frequently what gives a woman (in Japan as elsewhere) status in society—which often also trans- 6 TOKYO CARTOGRAPHIES OF MYSTERY AND CRIME 181 lates into employability. After her first divorce, it is Yasuko’s looks and relative youth that enable her to get a job as a hostess at a nightclub in the pricey Akasaka district (the same area where Isabelle and the other young women in Horie’s “The Owl’s Estate” were employed as hostesses). Being a hostess was probably Yasuko’s best option for well-paid employment, despite the reputation of nightclubs as a “shady business” (ibid., 6), in the words of ex-hostess Sayoko—Yasuko’s friend and the owner of Benten-tei. After her second divorce, Yasuko resumed hostess work, although this time it was at a club in the shitamachi neighborhood of Kinshichō. She is getting older and is forced to move lower in the pecking order of Tokyo clubs.7 Higashino underscores the point when detectives Kusanagi and Kishitani visit the Kinshichō club in the course of the investigation. They remark on its down-market feel in contrast to Ginza (and, similarly, Akasaka) night spots that more prosperous men would patronize. Kuniaki Kudō, a customer of the Akasaka club who several years before helped Yasuko get her divorce from the abusive Togashi, had followed her as a client to Kinshichō. The well-to-do owner of his own business, he could easily afford to spend his money in any hostess club of his choosing, no matter how expensive. Higashino makes the reader wait until the end of the novel to find out what initially precipitated Ishigami’s devotion to Yasuko—and, thus, his desire to help her and her daughter escape punishment for the killing of Togashi. Just at the point that Ishigami was about to hang himself in his apartment, there had been a knock on his door. Having just moved into the building, Yasuko and her daughter engaged in an act of old-fashioned, shitamachi-style neighborliness by going around to each of their neighbors’ apartments to introduce themselves. Their appearance at his door pulled Ishigami back from the brink: “How beautiful their eyes are, he thought. Until that moment, he had never been carried away by beauty of any kind. He didn’t even understand art. But in that moment, he understood everything. The very same beauty he found in unraveling a mathematics problem was standing right there before him” (Higashino 2011 [2005], 291). Thoughts of taking his life vanished from Ishigami’s mind. Ishigami’s feelings toward Yasuko will, he knows, never be recipro- cated. Just as she thinks of herself as lacking “allure,” Ishigami is certain that an unattractive man such as himself could never win the affection of a woman like Yasuko—and, as the novel shows, he is right. The man who is Yasuko’s ideal is Kudō, the prosperous, polite, and understanding indi- 182 B. E. THORNBURY vidual who has long been attracted to her. Kudō’s Tokyo is a newer, more stylish one than Ishigami’s shitamachi. Kudō ranges widely throughout the city. Driving his Mercedes or going by taxi, he patronizes upscale establishments like the Italian restaurant in Shiodome, a part of Tokyo dense with gleaming skyscrapers, where he invites Yasuko and Misato for dinner, and the posh hotel lounge in Shinagawa where he and Yasuko have afternoon tea. Having lost his wife to illness, Kudō seeks out Yasuko after he learns about the death of her ex-husband. Although somewhat hesitant (because she cannot believe that she can really escape punishment for her ex-husband’s murder), Yasuko welcomes Kudō’s attention. On his side, Ishigami did not for a moment consider trying to approach Yasuko before devising the cover-up scheme that brought him into her life. Prior to that, he simply found a measure of contentment in knowing that Yasuko and her daughter were next door and that he could exchange a few words with her by stopping off at Benten-tei in the morning to buy his lunch. The daily transaction alone gave him emotional satisfaction. Until after the violent confrontation with Togashi that took place in Yasuko’s apartment at the start of the novel, there is no ongoing communication between the two neighbors outside of the transactions at Benten-tei. The Devotion of Suspect X takes place on the margins of Tokyo—literally. If the dead man’s body had been discovered on the east side of the Edogawa River instead of the west side (where Ishigami lured and killed the homeless man after dismembering Togashi’s body and disposing of it in the Sumida River), the case—as Inspector Kusanagi ruefully notes— would have been in the hands of the Chiba prefectural police rather than in those of the Tokyo force. In a figurative sense, too, the space of crime for Ishigami in The Devotion of Suspect X is located at the city’s margins. Ishigami is so solitary a man that he might have ended his own life. And, in the course of taking a homeless man’s life in an attempt to “prove” Yasuko’s innocence by designing a “mathematical problem” that he thinks no one can ever solve, Ishigami ensures that his own life as a free man must come to an end. Higashino links Ishigami, Yukawa, and Inspector Kusanagi by making all of them graduates of the fictitious, but elite-sounding “Imperial University”—an indication that they were all winners in the competitive race to get into the best schools and on track to embark on the careers of their choice. That Ishigami gets marginalized as a direct result of being a good son (another kind of devotion) adds a special kind of sadness to the portrayal of the character. 6 TOKYO CARTOGRAPHIES OF MYSTERY AND CRIME 183

Within the Walls of Well-Tended Homes In Kirino’s Real World, Worm is the single male narrator among the five high-school seniors whose first-person accounts make up the novel.8 It is Worm’s crime—bludgeoning his mother to death with a baseball bat in their well-tended, upper-middle-class home in a prosperous part of Tokyo—that sets the story in motion. The Suginami Ward neighborhood in which the home is located is described on the first page of the novel through the voice of Toshi, Worm’s next-door neighbor and another one of the narrators: “I live in a crowded residential area. … It used to be a nice, laid-back neighborhood, but all the old, larger houses got torn down, replaced by smaller single-family homes and apartments. … Nice-looking families moved in, and on week- ends you’d see them out walking their dogs or driving around in expensive foreign cars” (Kirino 2008 [2003], 3). Both the house and the surrounding area suited Worm’s mother very well. Before moving there, the family lived in an apartment in an unnamed part of the wider Tokyo metropolis.9 Worm relates that his mother “hated the apartment. She said it was constructed shabbily, that you could hear people talking through the walls and sounds from above and below. Her real complaint, though, was that this apartment didn’t measure up to her idea of the good life. Which to her meant a single-family home within the Tokyo city limits” (ibid., 80). Here, the Tokyo city limits refer specifically to the twenty-three-ward area—what Furukawa in “Model T Frankenstein” labels primary Tokyo. In the new neighborhood, Worm’s mother loved shopping at Peacock (a chain of supermarkets in Tokyo): “‘They have my favorite salad dressing there!’ she’d say. ‘And can you believe it—they carry pie sheets! It’s a much higher class of customers here’” (ibid., 83). Worm views his mother as a woman with strict views on what constitutes success in life. She runs the household, while sending her husband and son out into the world to do competitive, status-seeking battle. She pressures Worm to get into a prestigious high school and wants her husband, a doctor, to rise to the top of his profession. Although Worm scores high enough on the entrance exam to make it into high-ranking “K High School,” he struggles academically there, his grades placing him near the bottom of his class. And, his father never quite achieves the standing that would satisfy his wife.10 There is more to the woman’s disappointment, however. Worm’s teenage sexuality has found expression in a predilection to spy on neighboring women. In the apartment where the family used to 184 B. E. THORNBURY live, he was seen trying to steal the neighbor’s panties from the laundry hanging on her veranda (Kirino 2008 [2003], 81–82). And, in the new home, where he was supposed to leave the embarrassing past behind and make a new start, his mother catches him gazing out the window at Toshi as she gets into the bath (ibid., 78). This ignites the woman’s fury at her son, and, in response, his murderous rage towards her. Taking off after murdering his mother allows Worm to temporarily escape from Suginami Ward (and from Tokyo in its entirety). His escape is from a world where people—his mother in particular—told him what to do: Now “I’m free to change my world any way I want to. No more being told what to do, having people lay a guilt trip on me. I’m in control” (Kirino 2008 [2003], 116). The house in Suginami was the point on the map from which Worm’s mother wanted him to step out into the world, the base from which she would bask in his reflected glory. If her husband did not attain the status that she wanted him to, her son would. Kirino uses the Peacock supermarket—the source of the curtains in Worm’s room and the pajamas the mother wears (ibid., 78 and 111)—as a stealth comment on the limits of the woman’s taste. Establishments like Peacock are arbiters of middle-class taste. What Peacock sells is what the middle-class person implicitly knows he or she should want. Real World foregrounds people’s unwitting propensity to shape their lives in conformity with the advertisements directed at them, just as it foregrounds Worm’s fatal illusion that the instrument of freedom is a baseball bat wielded against his mother.

On the Streets of Prosperous Neighborhoods To all appearances, the twenty-eight-year-old Naoki in Yoshida’s Parade has all of the attributes of Tokyo success. He is well educated, well traveled, and holds what others might consider a dream job at a Tokyo film distributor—a position that requires good communication and negotiation skills and that gives him access to key figures in the global film world. He declares his love for the job. Back at the apartment that is the main setting of the novel, he is the friendly-seeming, go-to guy for his roommates. Koto turns to him in panic after being duped into signing a contract for products she neither needs nor wants. Naoki knows consumer law, and instructs her on how to extricate herself from the predicament. She again turns to him when she discovers that she is pregnant with her boyfriend’s baby. Taking the role of medi- 6 TOKYO CARTOGRAPHIES OF MYSTERY AND CRIME 185 ating big brother, Naoki willingly meets with the man to broker an understanding between the couple. When Mirai is scared, she turns to Naoki, who attentively listens to her, and when Ryōsuke needs money, he goes to Naoki, who gives him the funds. Ironically, it is Satoru, the world-weary, homeless teenager who finds refuge in the apartment, who “saves” Naoki after he viciously attacks a woman on the street, although being shielded from punishment is not something that Naoki necessarily wants. All of the characters in Parade have dark secrets, but the darkest one of all is that the outwardly upstanding Naoki is a psychopath. On five different occasions he has targeted women walking alone in the nighttime streets of the Chitose Karasuyama neighborhood where he and his apartment-mates live, battering their faces with rocks and leaving them for dead. Coincidentally, most of the attacks occurred within the brief period since Satoru started staying at the apartment. It is unimaginable to society that Naoki might be the suspect. After the police begin handing out maps showing where the attacks have taken place and go door to door in the neighborhood to warn young women about the incidents, Mirai suddenly wonders if the attacker might be the newly arrived Satoru—given the tim- ing. She goes to Naoki for advice, Yoshida writing that “Naoki’s expression stiffened” (Yoshida 2014 [2002], 133) when Mirai broached the topic. Mirai has to dismiss her suspicions about Satoru when she realizes that she was actually with him exactly at the time that the third attack happened a few days before. As Naoki well knows, the onset of the attacks was actually just before Satoru’s arrival. Yoshida does not offer an explanation for Naoki’s pathological acts. At one point Naoki tells Satoru that he once ran away from home, riding a train into the countryside. Walking through the woods, he came upon a cabin and used a rock to break a window so he could go inside and stay there for a while. It appears to have been his first act of transgression. More hints, though none explicit, are contained in the history of his relationship with Misaki, a woman he dated for two years. Together they rented the apartment where Naoki and his roommates now live. When their relationship began to fail, Misaki brought in Mirai as a fellow tenant. As a counteract, Naoki acceded to an acquaintance’s request that he permit Ryōsuke to live there, too. In the end, Misaki left altogether—taking up with a new boyfriend. Koto soon moved in, sharing a room with Mirai and becoming the fourth tenant in the apartment. And, eventually, Satoru joined the group. It seems that, even though Naoki and Misaki broke up, 186 B. E. THORNBURY his life is going well. He and Misaki are still friends, and he is sociable with his apartment roommates. They even go out on picnics together. He enjoys his job and is generous to others—as when he offered Satoru the chance to do some temporary work at his company. Naoki appears genu- inely concerned about Satoru (solicitously asking if he has run away from home) and secures a regular gig for the teenager at his company when a part-time position opens up. In some ways, Naoki is similar to Shirakawa in Murakami’s After Dark. Both are securely on the career track. Both have social connections: Shirakawa is married, and Naoki, although without a steady girlfriend at the moment, apparently thrives in the companionship of his apartment-mates. Also, he has a boss who is willing to introduce him to women, although he says “no, thanks.” Both Shirakawa and Naoki are physically fit and take pride in their lean physiques. Shirakawa takes a break to work out in the office during his nightshift. At night, too, Naoki goes on long runs through the city. They are strongly driven to dominate—to the point of destroying—women’s bodies. Naoki recalls when he and Misaki had once entered an off-limits area of an elementary school (that was being used as a polling place for an election) and had sex in one of the classrooms. “We couldn’t bring ourselves to strip completely naked, but when I saw her white breasts spill out when she pulled up her T-shirt it was so sexy and obscene I wanted to trample on them” (Yoshida 2014 [2002], 201). Naoki and Shirakawa exemplify Bridge and Watson’s observation that “[t]he fabric of the city might provide glimpses of deeper psychic drives but it might also operate to keep them in check” (2000, 10). The parts of the city where Naoki reveals his deeper psychic drives encompass the forbidden space of the elementary school classroom and the dark, nighttime streets. For Shirakawa, they extend to the rooms of love hotels. The spaces of office and home as well as the city during the daylight hours hold these drives in check. Even more than holding these drives in check, these spaces allow the individuals—as Naoki says—to “take a step forward” (Yoshida 2014 [2002], 229) along the path of life. After the attacks they go back to being the people who society is certain they are. They move on, leaving their victims bloody and broken. When Naoki’s criminality is discovered by Satoru, he feels that this time there will be no taking a step forward—and he even expresses relief at the prospect. He seems to want Satoru to turn him in to the police. But Satoru does no such thing, if only because doing so, as noted in the previous 6 TOKYO CARTOGRAPHIES OF MYSTERY AND CRIME 187 chapter, would cause him to lose his newfound home in the apartment. He makes sure that Naoki will once again just move on—and keep renewing the lease on the apartment. Back at the apartment, Naoki looks around him:

Ryosuke was on the sofa; Koto and Satoru, the good friends, sat side by side; and Mirai was still planted in front of the TV—all of them were laughing, ignoring me. I was left hanging, by the doorway, unjudged, unforgiven, null and void. It was as if they had already—in place of me— felt regret, repented, and asked for forgiveness. We’re not going to give you anything, they seemed to be telling me. You can forget about the right to explain yourself, confess, or apologize—we’ll never give it to you. It felt like they hated me, their disgust implacable and unrelenting. (Yoshida 2014 [2002], 230)

Satoru has convinced Naoki that the others already know what he did. But that is Satoru’s ruse—the streetwise kid’s way of manipulating Naoki into letting himself go free. (That Satoru is not concerned that he is accessory to a crime by not turning in Naoki is consistent with his character. He has long been breaking laws with impunity.) There is no need for Naoki to turn himself in, if everyone already knows what he did. In the abstract sense that society has created Naoki, everyone does know. Murakami suggests punishment for Shirakawa: Kaoru, the manager of the love hotel, provides his photo (culled from security camera footage) to the gang whose sex-trafficked young woman Shirakawa assaulted when she could not give him what he wanted. One day they will spot him—and they will enact their own form of “justice.” Yoshida, however, suggests no such equivalent for Naoki. The city brings out in Naoki, as it does in Shirakawa, the dark psychic drive about which Bridge and Watson speak. Naoki paradoxically muses, “If, say, there were another Tokyo in this world, and that woman [the person he most recently attacked] were lying there, I’m sure I would rush off to rescue her” (Yoshida 2014 [2002], 230). In the “real” Tokyo of the novel, Naoki mercilessly pummels an innocent woman. In an imaginary Tokyo that is the creation of the fictional Naoki, he would rescue her— from himself. Would he have stopped himself from striking even the first blow? For Yoshida, there is no “other” Tokyo—only ones in which the blows struck by individuals like Naoki and Shirakawa—are all too real and irreparable. 188 B. E. THORNBURY

In the Shadows of the City Made Visible on the Dark Web In Honda’s The Silent Dead, a site on the dark web allows individuals to witness murder taking place in real time—somewhere in geographically real Tokyo. The dark web works as a kind of metaphor for Tokyo, with the novel itself functioning as the special software needed to shed light on the secret depths of the city. Two parallel Tokyo cartographies operate in The Silent Dead: one centers on Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department Lieutenant Reiko Himekawa. Not yet thirty years old, Himekawa is a homicide detective whose extraordinary determination and skills have already elevated her to the rank of lieutenant in charge of one of the squads in TMPD’s Homicide Division. The other centers on Yukari Fukazawa, a young woman whose drug-addicted father repeatedly and cruelly abused her as her drug-addicted mother impassively looked on—until the day she fought back, fatally slashing both parents with a box cutter. To cover up the acts after getting Yukari safely out of the house, her brother set fire to the structure—an act for which he was sent to juvenile detention, although it was never proven that either he or his sister (who subsequently cycles among orphanages, the street, and mental institutions) had a hand in the deaths of their mother and father. Two of Reiko Himekawa’s spatial points of reference are TMPD headquarters in Sakuradamon (where, as Honda wrote in Soul Cage, his second Himekawa novel, “[t]he canteen overlook[s] the Imperial Palace grounds” [2017 (2007), 23]) and the Tokyo Medical Examiner’s office in Ō tsuka, Bunkyō Ward, where she gets valuable guidance and advice from her mentor, Coroner Sadanosuke Kunioku. Both locales are mark- ers of Reiko’s career success. The other spatial point of reference is her parents’ home in Minami Urawa, Saitama Prefecture, just north of the Tokyo city limits, where she still lives and commutes to work in Tokyo when she is not on overnight assignment in connection with a homicide investigation. Her parents’ home represents the family support and stability that enable her to excel in what is a very physically and emotionally stressful career. In contrast, Yukari Fukazawa’s spatial points of reference are the orphanage where she was sent after her parents’ deaths, the mental hospitals to which she is committed on and off, and the streets that are her refuge of last resort. In a segment of first-person narration rich in Tokyo place names, she recalls that she headed onto the streets “looking for 6 TOKYO CARTOGRAPHIES OF MYSTERY AND CRIME 189 something” (Honda 2016 [2006], 112)—although she was not quite sure what that something was:

Shibuya was too flashy for me; Roppongi and Harajuku even worse. Ikebukuro was getting there, but it was Shinjuku that hit the spot. Shinjuku was perfect. Incredibly filthy, incredibly noisy, incredibly crowded. As chaotic as the inside of my own head. At night, Kabukicho, the red[-]light district in Shinjuku, was a blaze of neon, while its back alleys were sunk in darkness. There was light and there was dark. Plenty of both. Kabukicho was stark black and bright white, never gray. Nice and clear cut, how I liked it. The district was crawling with yakuza. That gave me a buzz. My favorite place was this big park [Chūō Kōen], because of the sense of hidden danger. It was crawling with homeless people. Occasionally I came across one like me there—standing at the roadside, yelling their heart out at the world. Shinjuku was the place where I could connect with my pain. (Ibid., 112–113)

The Tokyo geography is detailed, realistic, and instructive. Yukari finds hints of human warmth on the streets, where danger and violence also lurk. First, an older man in the park gives her a black leather bodysuit, which keeps her warm. But, the man dies, and the “cardboard village” (Honda 2016 [2006], 113) where he, along with Yukari and others had been staying, is dismantled by the police. Then, in Kabukichō, she makes the acquaintance of a woman her age named Mako who provides guidance and understanding—and gives Yukari a place in her gang. One day, however, Mako is raped and murdered by members of another gang in a tunnel near the Imperial Palace (ibid., 116). The site is multiply significant: the palace is both Tokyo’s cartographic center and Japan’s symbolic civili- zational center—and it is just steps away from the TMPD headquarters.11 It takes Yukari a few days, but she eventually finds the attackers and kills the individual who ended her friend’s life. Reiko and Yukari move without impediment through the metropolis, but their points of reference diverge—mostly. Reiko operates as a law- enforcement agent of official Tokyo; for Yukari, the ultimate act of criminal violence, killing, is the only way she knows how to assert her own life force. Reiko, the survivor of a rape, emerged from that trauma determined to work on the side of those who seek justice. Yukari’s past, however, leaves her standing outside of mainstream society and out of direct sight. The murder show of which she is the “star” takes place in a corner of the city (in Ikebukuro)—and is visible to its clients on the dark web up until the moment of its climactic exposure and collapse. 190 B. E. THORNBURY

Beneath the Surface of the City’s Pavement Rachael Hutchinson and Leith Morton write in their introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature “that some novels by Murakami Haruki could be classified as thrillers or mysteries” (2016, 3). In fact, in much of Murakami’s fiction, geographically-real Tokyo provides the setting within which mystery and even crime often play out. In Murakami’s writing, to quote Matthew Strecher, “a realistic narrative setting is created, then disrupted, sometimes mildly, sometimes violently, by the bizarre or the magical” (1999, 267). The Shinjuku—specifically, Kabukichō—neighborhood of “Super-frog Saves Tokyo” is Tokyo’s iconic space of mystery and crime. Murakami succinctly describes it, to repeat a line from the story cited earlier, as “a labyrinth of violence: old-time gangsters, Korean mobsters, Chinese mafia, guns and drugs, money flowing beneath the surface from one murky den to another, people vanishing every now and then like a puff of smoke” (2002b [1999], 118). Katagiri, the central character, is a banker with an impressive-sounding title: “assistant chief of the Lending Division of the Shinjuku branch of the Tokyo Security Trust Bank” (ibid., 114). His actual job, however, is less impressive: he is a debt collector whose business brings him into contact with the hardboiled characters who set up shop in Kabukichō and resist paying back the money they (or the clients they represent) owe to their lenders—like Katagiri’s employer. Forty-year-old Katagiri, who lives in a “cheap apartment house” with “thin walls” (Murakami 2002b [1999], 115), is a single guy who put the welfare of his younger brother and sister above his own happiness as they grew into independent adults. Although he has a long history of working hard for others, Katagiri is “unappreciated and unpromoted” (ibid., 121). And yet, as his visitor Frog observes, he does not complain. Moreover, Katagiri approaches life without fear. He is successful collecting bad debts precisely because he is steadfast when gangsters threaten him. He is not afraid of dying. Frog entreats Katagiri to help save Tokyo from an earthquake that will be set off by a monster called Worm “close to the Shinjuku ward office” (Murakami 2002b [1999], 117). The plain-speaking (and quite sizeable) amphibian spells out the horrific damage a large earthquake will cause in the capital city. After enumerating the probable death toll and the massive collapse of the rail system, roadways, and buildings, Frog sums up his appeal for Katagiri’s help by forthrightly stating that “[p]eople will be 6 TOKYO CARTOGRAPHIES OF MYSTERY AND CRIME 191 made to realize what a fragile condition the intensive collectivity known as ‘city’ really is” (ibid.). The source of the ultimate danger that humans face in “Super-frog Saves Tokyo” lies where no one can see, understand, or control it. It is underground—specifically, lurking right below Kabukichō. “One of the great pleasures in reading Murakami lies in imagining just what links might unfold between [the] two worlds of banal realism and underground phantasmagoria,” Richard Powers has noted (2014, 190). Murakami is tapping into the deep-seated and unshakable fear that a large earthquake is “due” to strike Tokyo. When it may happen, of course, no one knows. The Kobe earthquake of 1995 (to which “Super-frog Saves Tokyo” and all of the other stories in the collection of which it is part refer in one way or another) was, in contrast, not expected—and its level of destruction stunned Japan and the world beyond. Murakami casts Katagiri, a middle-aged “nobody” (or, perhaps, everyman), in the role of an unseen, unselfconscious hero. No matter how readers interpret the figure of Frog or how they view Katagiri’s sensation of being shot by a gun prior to his promised meeting time with Frog, it is impossible to deny Murakami’s observation that the city is indeed a fragile collectivity. What is not fragile is the will of a person like Katagiri to go on living in a positive way despite being alone, uncared- for, and unrecognized. It is all too easy to see a place like Kabukichō as a dystopia, when the real dystopia—in the context of “Super-frog Saves Tokyo”—was in the boardrooms of the banks that greedily and heedlessly chased after profits until those profits turned into unrecoverable losses. It is “ordinary,” powerless people like Katagiri who are sent in to pick up the pieces, no matter how dangerous the assignment. As Katagiri says, when he at first assumes that Frog has been sent by a gang to negotiate a loan repayment: “Well, if you’re here to negotiate a repayment, you’re wasting your time. I have no authority to make such decisions. Only my superiors can do that. I just follow orders” (Murakami 2002b [1999], 114).

Within an Alternate World Murakami’s 1Q84 is an enormously long and complex novel, but the basic structure is straightforward: the narrative builds toward the reunion of the characters Tengo and Aomame and to their escape from the alternate world of 1Q84 in order to resume their lives in the year 1984. The geographic focus of the work is central Tokyo. Aomame 192 B. E. THORNBURY enters 1Q84 when she finds a way out of the fenced-in area at the bottom of an emergency staircase that she uses to get off of elevated Metropolitan Expressway 3. She was on her way to the Shibuya hotel room where she successfully carries out her mission to end the life of a man whose abuse had led to the death of his wife. She undertook the mission at the behest of the woman referred to as the dowager, a wealthy widow who lives in a house “atop a steep slope in the fashionable Azabu neighborhood” (Murakami 2011 [2009–10], 95). Although located in the heart of the city, the area is one of the hidden spaces that are a feature of Murakami’s fiction: “[t]he streets up here were narrow and crooked, and few cars came this way. The tall trees gave the quarter a gloomy feel, and time seemed to slow when you stepped inside. Some embassies were located here, but few people visited them. Only in the summer would the atmosphere change dramatically, when the cries of cicadas pained the ears” (ibid.). Tokyo locations fill the pages of the novel, pulling the reader back and forth between the palpably real city and the mysterious world of 1Q84. There are, for example, the Ō kura Hotel, where Aomame ends the life of the cult leader, and Kōenji, the location of Tengo’s apartment and the safe house that the dowager has instructed her bodyguard and right-hand man Tamaru to prepare for Aomame’s use. Fleeing from the Ō kura and mind- ful that she would likely be followed, Aomame reaches the safe house by first taking a taxi to Shinjuku Station and then taking another one from there to Kōenji. Her escape from the hotel to the safe house takes place in torrential rain that floods Akasaka-Mitsuke Station and causes the Marunouchi subway line to stop running. When the taxi deposits her at Shinjuku Station, it is “horribly congested. Because the stalled Marunouchi [subway] Line connected with the National Railways here, the flow of passengers had been disrupted, and people were wandering in all directions” (Murakami 2011 [2009–10], 614). Shinjuku Station has the distinction of being the busiest in the world in terms of passenger traffic—so the phrase “horribly congested” has real meaning. Murakami makes effective use of Kōenji as the neighborhood where Aomame is sent to hide out and where Tengo happens to live. Unlike upmarket Azabu, where the dowager resides, it is home to a mix of families, couples, and single people who occupy the old and new apartments and single-family houses that are packed closely together there. It is in a geo- 6 TOKYO CARTOGRAPHIES OF MYSTERY AND CRIME 193 graphically real and ordinary area like this that extraordinary events—such as the appearance of the two moons in the night sky of 1Q84—have greatest impact. 1Q84 is an ode to Tokyo. Walking to Shinjuku Station at one point, Tengo reflects on “[t]he bustle of people combined with the traffic [that] created the liberated sound unique to the city. A fresh early-summer breeze swept down the street. [He] was mystified: where could such a wonderful-smelling wind come from to reach the crowded streets of Shinjuku?” (Murakami 2011 [2009–10], 261). Similarly, when Aomame opens the curtains in the cult leader’s room at the Ō kura Hotel, “[n]ight- time Tokyo poured its light into the room. Tokyo Tower’s floodlights, the lamps lining the elevated expressway, the moving headlights of cars, the lighted windows of high-rise buildings, the colorful rooftop neon signs: they all combined to illuminate the hotel room with that mixed light unique to the big city” (ibid., 519). To ensure a future with each other, if not literally to save their lives, Aomame and Tengo had to escape from 1Q84. There is no question, however, that they would never leave Tokyo itself.

* * *

Some seventy years ago, French urban theorist Gilles Ivain (writing under the name Ivan Chtcheglov) famously railed against the “banaliza- tion” of the city: “Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit” (quoted in Pinder 2005, 2).12 For Chtcheglov, as David Pinder observes, “[t]he urban landscape itself, which once might have seemed a charged and poetic realm, had become a closed field, drained of mystery and passion” (ibid.). The novels and short stories discussed in this chapter stand out in their quest to reverse that banality by revealing in their narrative lines the mysteries and passions that are a defining element of urban space. Works foregrounding mystery and crime embrace the full extent of Tokyo’s geographical reach and thereby offer readers understandings of the city itself that might otherwise be inaccessible. They are in their own right, to refer back to Philip Howell’s observation quoted at the beginning of this chapter, significant “epistemologies of the city” (1998, 358). 194 B. E. THORNBURY

Notes 1. See, for example, the material on compensated dating in Kinsella (2014). 2. In his study of Isle of Dreams, Mark Pendleton points out that Tokyo Bay originally had few natural islands. Six defense emplacements were built in the nineteenth century in response to the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry, leading in the twentieth century to the rapid construction of islands and the extension of the Tokyo shoreline into the Bay (Pendleton 2018b, 50–51). Battery #6 is likely where Shōzō loses his life, as Pendleton notes (ibid., 61), writing that the core setting for Hino’s novel can be found in a specific waterfront location, the island of Yumenoshima, one of several artificial islands constructed from waste materials at the northern end of Tokyo Bay. As with Odaiba, continuing processes of land reclamation have resulted in Yumenoshima becoming contiguous with the rest of the metropolis; a series of bridges and train lines connects Yumenoshima to various other artificial islands and areas of reclaimed land, including nearby Tatsumi, Shiomi, and Kasai—and through these to central Tokyo. (Ibid., 51) 3. Thornbury (2017) uses The Gun as a case study on cultural references in translated fiction, with a focus on the sociocultural context of guns and orphanages in Japan. 4. Japan stands apart from a number of countries, including the United States, for its continued reliance on institutions (orphanages) rather than foster homes for the care of children who are without family caregivers and do not have anyone else to raise them. See Thornbury (2017). 5. A person whose powers of observation are often a key factor in helping the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department solve crimes, the fictional Yukawa exemplifies the detective (albeit one who has amateur status) as an “urban observer” (Lehan 1998, 4). 6. In Tetsuya Honda’s novel Soul Cage (2017, Sorū keiji 2007), the banks of the Tama River, like those of the Sumida in The Devotion of Suspect X, are a no-man’s-land, where homeless people erect shelters with the expectation that they will be left alone by the public at large and by the authorities. In Soul Cage, a person who appears to be one of those anonymous homeless residents is in fact the individual Tokyo homicide detective Lieutenant Reiko Himekawa and her colleagues are seeking. Clueless when she first encounters him in a tent near the river, Reiko nevertheless notices that the man occupying the tent is in a bad way: “As a human being and a government employee, Reiko felt that she should go over, rub his back, ask him how he felt, maybe even arrange for him to go to a hospital” (Honda 2017 [2007], 63). But, it is not her job, she reasons: 6 TOKYO CARTOGRAPHIES OF MYSTERY AND CRIME 195

The guy was sick, so, yes, she felt sorry for him. At the same time, she wanted to ask him how he could seriously expect to stay healthy when he lived like this. Some people ended up homeless despite doing everything they could to fight against it. But if the guy’s only problem was a lack of grit, then he needed to pull his socks up and make an effort to return to normal life. Living this way was dangerous: he was putting both his health and his safety at risk. (Ibid., 64) Reiko articulates society’s naiveté by expressing her assumption that the man is there because he just does not have the willpower to improve his life—and get off of the riverbank. In Soul Cage, Honda critiques society’s willingness not to see the trouble within its midst, as Higashino does in depicting the victimization of a homeless man by Ishigami in The Devotion of Suspect X and Kore-eda does in portraying the children’s dire situation in Nobody Knows. 7. “Once leaving regular employment, and with age, it becomes increasingly difficult to enter regular positions, which forces women to take up poorly paid part-time casual work” (2009, 5), as Kaori Okano has written. “Even if they find regular employment, married women with children find it impossible to perform the tasks that many regular positions require (e.g.[,] long working hours, lack of flexibility)” (ibid.). Higashino provides little information about Yasuko’s background. If she has only an average education and lacks career skills, she would have had little choice in employment once her first marriage ended. Low-wage work—for example, as a supermarket cashier—would likely have been her only option had her appearance and social skills not permitted her entry into the world of hostess clubs. 8. Worm’s given name, Ryo,̄ is mentioned one time (Kirino 2008 [2003], 66). 9. As Worm says, “Before we came to Suginami-ku, until I was a freshman in high school, we lived in a suburban town with a population of about 150,000. In this huge housing project with about two hundred other families. The kind of huge apartment building you see everywhere, with long open hallways and tricycles and co-op boxes outside every door” (Kirino 2008 [2003], 80). 10. Even Worm has contempt for his father. Entering his father’s study to use the computer to “play around on porn sites,” Worm says to himself: “Why can’t you see that I think you’re a total loser? You always brag about being a doctor, but you just work in a nothing little clinic. No better than some office worker. If you don’t like it, why don’t you become the head of a huge hospital and use your money to get me into Harvard? ‘Cause you can’t, that’s why” (Kirino 2008 [2003], 66). 11. Inaba’s “Morning Comes Twice a Day” skillfully describes the cartographic centrality of the Imperial Palace. When the narrator of the story 196 B. E. THORNBURY

looks at a booklet of Tokyo maps, she (of course) finds that the very first page shows Chiyoda Ward—which encompasses the Imperial Palace grounds. “[S]urrounded by pale turquoise and green ink, [the Imperial Palace] was like a womb smack in the center of the body of Tokyo. It sat there in cheerful isolation, surrounded by the water in the Imperial Moat” (2002 [1996], 244). 12. Pinder quotes here Gilles Ivain’s 1953 essay “Formulaire pour un Urbanisme Nouveau” (“Formulary for a New Urbanism”). CHAPTER 7

Conclusion: Flux and Fluidity and World Literature and Film

“The city, the contemporary metropolis, is for many the chosen metaphor for the experience of the modern world” (1994, 92), Iain Chambers has written. “In its everyday details, its mixed histories, languages and cultures, its elaborate evidence of global tendencies and local distinctions, the figure of the city, as both a real and an imaginary place, apparently provides a ready map for reading, interpretation and comprehension” (ibid.). And yet, “the idea of a map,” as Chambers goes on to observe, “with its implicit dependence upon the survey of a stable terrain, fixed referents and measurement, seems to contradict the palpable flux and fluidity of metropolitan life and cosmopolitan movement” (ibid.). To view mapping as both a function of Tokyo fiction and film (in which maps of the city are read and movement within the city is mapped point to point) and as a multifaceted mode of literary and cinematic analysis helps counter any such contradiction. Simply put, mapping offers necessary and productive ways of grasping “the palpable flux and fluidity of metropolitan life and cosmopolitan movement” to which Chambers refers. By engaging with works of fiction and film through mapping,

we find ourselves in the gendered city, the city of ethnicities, the territories of different social groups, shifting centers and peripheries—the city that is a fixed object of design (architecture, commerce, urban planning, state

administration) and yet simultaneously plastic and mutable: the site of transitory events, movements, memories … a significant space for analysis, critical thought and understanding. (Ibid., 93)

The works discussed in the preceding chapters map Tokyo urban space, one both rooted in and set free from the actual geography of the city. In literature and film, a Tokyo that may be unrepresented and unrepresentable on public maps, to borrow Jordan Sand’s phrasing (2013, 48), is given expression (in other words, mapped) through words and cinematic imagery—especially in the depictions of encounters between characters that shape understandings of Tokyo. There is, for example, Ryō’s initial, unplanned encounter with Maiko at Tokyo Station Gallery in Tsujihara’s “My Slightly Crooked Brooch.” It is an episode that helps establish the Tokyo-area transportation network and all of its component parts—from the tiny Shōnan Monorail line on which Ryō begins his daily commute to major pass-through points like Tokyo Station, where he revels in the enormous array of stores, restaurants, and even the prominent art gallery that are at his disposal—as a system that reinforces in self-assured men like him the mobility, power, and authority they take for granted. Moving from point to point, the system is theirs, they feel, and they can use it as they will. A transportation system used by men as they will is underscored in a far more disturbing way by scenes of assault-as-encounter on crowded Tokyo trains by male gropers on female victims—ranging from a girl still in elementary school commuting to classes from Tokyo’s suburban Fuchū City to Shibuya in Kirino’s Real World and a junior-high student riding a train headed in the direction of Haneda Airport in Nakamura’s The Thief to an older woman (Ryō’s wife) heading home on the Yokosuka line in “My Slightly Crooked Brooch.” Terauchi, the train-riding schoolgirl in Real World, experienced over the course of time a pattern of behavior that led her to conclude that adults either will harm her or, at the very least, will not help her when she needs assistance. The scene in The Thief portrays the pickpocket protagonist of the novel—a man otherwise scorned by society—as a righteous individual who comes to the aid of those who cannot defend themselves. For Ryō’s wife, the assault fuels her rage at men— her husband, the real estate agent who allows her to sign a lease in exchange for the promise of sex, and the groper himself—all of whom claim privilege at her expense. Assault-as-encounter is also found in Shōsuke Murakami’s Train Man when Hermès, quietly reading a book on a moving train, is the victim of harassment by a drunken male passenger. Train 7 CONCLUSION: FLUX AND FLUIDITY AND WORLD LITERATURE AND FILM 199

Man’s aid in pulling the man away from her possibly ignites the beginning of a relationship with a romantically happy ending. In Horie’s “The Owl’s Estate,” the encounter in the streets of Ikebukuro between the narrator and the Frenchwoman Isabelle depicts a Tokyo where remnants of the city’s past stand in juxtaposition to the inexorable forces reshaping the city. The old, low-rise houses (like the one where Isabelle and the other girls from abroad who are passing through Japan are staying) are part of a Tokyo that is being erased—and being replaced by the new, more “internationalist” high-rise city seen in neighborhoods such as Akasaka, where Tokyo’s male elite flock to the hostess clubs that employ a cadre of young and attractive foreign women (like Isabelle) ready to serve them. But, as the narrator keenly realizes, the new, self-styled sophisticated Tokyo is in some respects a sham—one where a hardwork- ing, intellectually curious guy like him must struggle just to come up with enough money to buy the books that he needs to help him understand the world and where a person like the superficial and uninformed Isabelle is showered with money just for looking pretty in a city that for her is nothing but a temporarily amusing playground. Yamada’s Strangers offers in Asakusa, the epicenter of Tokyo’s nostalgia- laden shitamachi, the possibility of yet an entirely different kind of encounter—one between those living in the present and those in times past. The Ikebukuro of “The Owl’s Nest” may contain remnants of the city’s past, but, more than any other neighborhood, Asakusa is where Tokyo of bygone eras resides in the urban collective memory and imagination. Even so, as Yamada’s novel is at pains to show, time does not stand still and the clock cannot be turned back. Every minute that Harada spends with the ghosts of his parents is sapping him of his own life—and he must break away from them to survive. In contrast, Kitano’s Kikujiro, which begins and ends in Asakusa, employs the boy Masao—buoyed by an all’s-well- that-ends-well summer-vacation journey with the neighborhood denizen Kikujirō—as the face of a bright future emerging out of Tokyo’s past. Tokyo flux and fluidity are repeatedly mapped through characters’ encounters with mystifying and enigmatic figures. Murakami’sThe Wind-up Bird Chronicle is rife with such moments of contact. Time spent in Shinjuku leads to Tōru’s acquaintance with the woman dubbed Nutmeg and to his confrontation with the man with the guitar case somewhere near Yoyogi. Murakami’s “Super-frog Saves Tokyo” is set in motion when Katagiri comes home to his Tokyo apartment one day to find the giant Frog waiting for him. The encounter at Harumi Wharf with the 200 B. E. THORNBURY

motorcycle-riding woman leads to Shōzō’s eventual death in Hino’s Isle of Dreams. The Kobayashi family’s encounter with Kagawa in Fukada’s Hospitalité opens up their house—and their eyes—to the world outside of their Kinshichō neighborhood. By extension, encounters that result in violence and even murder are integral to the cityscape of Tokyo fiction and film. The salaryman Shirakawa leaves young Dongli stripped and beaten in a love hotel (likely in Shibuya) in Murakami’s After Dark. In Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X, the abusive Togashi is strangled by his ex-wife, Yasuko, and her daughter, Misato, in their shitamachi apartment, and a homeless man taking shelter on the banks of the Sumida River becomes the unwitting victim of mathematician Ishigami’s plot to save the two women. Suzuki’s “Beyond the Darkness” depicts the psychological violence that the bully Hikuma inflicts on the young mother Eriko when she answers the telephone in her family’s new, hard-won suburban Tokyo condo. Yoshida’s Parade confronts the reader with the hidden side of the seemingly upstanding Naoki, who uses the dark of night as cover for his murderous attacks on women walking alone in the streets of the Chitose Karasuyama neighborhood. The scene in which young men verbally accost Train Man’s Hermès in the Ebisu Garden Place shopping and dining complex is a potent indicator of the discomfort and outright danger women may face in cities even in broad daylight and even in the “best” neighborhoods. At the other end of the spectrum, encounters that result in at least temporary happiness and fulfillment are also elements of the fictional and cinematic portrayal of Tokyo’s flux and fluidity. A puppy makes a joy- ful camping companion for Fujii on a Ginza office building rooftop in Shiina’s “The Yellow Tent on the Roof.” Sugiyama’s attraction to Mai in Suo’s Shall We Dance? turns into a genuine passion for dance that keeps him coming back to her Tokyo dance studio. In Kawakami’s “The Hut on the Roof,” Taeko finds a sense of belongingness and community, thanks to the aging Tokyo shopkeepers whose businesses she patronizes. Yoshimoto’s Moshi Moshi sings the praises of the Shimokitazawa neighborhood through Yotchan, who attains psychological healing there following her father’s death. And, finally, characters’ direct encounters with the city itself are among the most expressive ways Tokyo’s flux and fluidity are mapped. Two examples will suffice. The first is encapsulated in Tsukuru’s description of Shinjuku Station in the last chapter of Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage: 7 CONCLUSION: FLUX AND FLUIDITY AND WORLD LITERATURE AND FILM 201

Shinjuku Station is enormous. Every day nearly 3.5 million people pass through it, so many that the Guinness Book of World Records officially lists JR Shinjuku Station as the station with the “Most Passengers in the World.” A number of railroad lines cross there. … The rails intersect and combine in complex and convoluted ways. … It is a total maze. During rush hour, that maze transforms into a sea of humanity, a sea that foams up, rages, and roars as it surges toward the entrances and exits. Streams of people changing trains become entangled, giving rise to dangerous, swirling whirlpools. No prophet, no matter how righteous, could part that fierce, turbulent sea. (Murakami 2014 [2013], 360)

The second example centers on Tokyo’s never-ending cycle of construction and demolition that is the refrain of Shibasaki’s Spring Garden. Tarō, a man who just wants to get through life with the least amount of bother, becomes a keen observer of that cycle. Setting out each day from his soon-to-be-demolished apartment in Setagaya Ward, he perceives that “[t]he number of construction sites around [the neighborhood] seemed only to increase. He … came across places where they were tearing down buildings. He caught sight of what was left of a wooden house, loaded onto the back of a truck” (2017 [2014], 108). Tokyo, where “so much [is] going on” (ibid., 105), appeals to Tarō, who is originally from Osaka. It is the hidden city that particularly draws him in—one where waterways have been rerouted so they now move along invisibly underground and even where weapons left behind from the war still occasionally turn up:

Every day, he walked over culverts with rivers running inside them. There were water pipes and gas pipes underground too, and maybe unexploded bombs, for all he knew. … If there were unexploded bombs still underground, then there must also be bits of the houses that were burnt down then, items of their furniture. Before that, this area had been fields and woods, and leaves and fruits and berries that fell every year, as well as all the little animals, would also have formed layers over time, sinking down ever deeper under the ground. And now Taro was walking on top of it all. (Ibid., 109)

Like Tsukuru Tazaki, Tarō is also an observer of Shinjuku Station, where he transfers train lines on the way to and from his office: “Just when he’d been thinking that the engineering works that had been going on there forever had finally been completed, he noticed that new engineering works had now begun on a different set of tracks. … Now the realization struck Taro: the works would never come to an end. They would finish only 202 B. E. THORNBURY when the station had ceased to be used” (ibid., 84). Tokyo, as he has come to understand, is forever defined by change. These encounters—along with all of the others that make up Tokyo fiction and film—map the flux and fluidity of the city. That very act of mapping (and, indeed, Tokyo’s culture of mapping in its entirety), as I suggested in the introductory chapter, offers a counter-response to the sense of insecurity and disconnection that pervades life in the real, imagined, and real-and-imagined city. For anglophone consumers of translated fiction and subtitled film, the flow of newly available texts produced by a growing cohort of skilled translators continually enriches the mapping process. “[O]ne of the great pleasures of being in Tokyo,” Michael Emmerich has written, is “a sense of disorientation that blends seamlessly into a seemingly opposite sense of rootedness, of being at home” (Emmerich 2015, xi). The feeling “of rootedness, of being at home” derives in part from the accumulated experience of engaging with Tokyo fiction and film—which gives readers and viewers of these texts a sense of place-ness, of knowing where they are. Moreover, by making the city an increasingly familiar place, works of Tokyo fiction and film that cross borders in translated and subtitled form help validate their inclusion in lists of world literature and world film. World literature, to quote David Damrosch’s often-cited definition, comprises “all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language” (2003, 4). Accepting Claudio Guillén’s “cautionary focus on actual readers,” Damrosch adds that “a work only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture” (ibid.). An analogous definition can be applied to works of world film, for which “circulat[ion] beyond their culture of origin” and being “actively present” (by attracting the notice of reviewers and com- mentators in key media outlets, for example) are also prime requirements. A persuasive claim for inclusion in lists of world literature and film can be made for a number of the works discussed in Mapping Tokyo. However, percentage-wise, when it comes to world literature especially, fiction from Japan continues to occupy a more or less peripheral place in those lists—if only because relatively few works have been translated from Japanese into other languages. It is difficult to suppress a sense of dismay when reading Pascale Casanova’s comments regarding Japan in her influential bookThe World Republic of Letters (2004 [1999])—which is widely regarded as having made the concept of world literature a topic of lively debate in academic 7 CONCLUSION: FLUX AND FLUIDITY AND WORLD LITERATURE AND FILM 203 and critical circles (see, for example, “World Lite: What Is Global Literature?” 2013). Casanova’s central hypothesis is that “there exists a ‘literature-world,’ a literary universe relatively independent of the everyday world and its political divisions, whose boundaries and operational laws are not reducible to those of ordinary political space” (2004 [1999], xii). The salient feature of this “international literary space” is “relations of force and a violence peculiar to them—in short, a literary domination” (ibid.). For Casanova, Japan is a special case:

The literary nations that are most closed in upon themselves, most concerned to equip themselves with an identity, endlessly reproduce their own norms in a sort of closed circuit, declaring them national and therefore necessary and sufficient within their own autarkic market. Thus Japan, which was long absent from international literary space, drew upon a very powerful internal tradition, handed down from one generation to another, that was based on a set of models held not merely to be a necessary part of any writer’s training, but actually objects of national piety. This cultural context, inaccessible to most foreign readers and extremely difficult to communicate abroad, inevitably favored a national conception of literature. (Ibid., 106–7)

Casanova goes on to say that “the most closed literary spaces are charac- terized by an absence of translation” (ibid., 107). The inference here is that Japan has only itself to blame for coming up short in the arena of translation and, thus, occupying a marginal position in international literary space. Such a claim would seem to have the effect of fostering—rather than objectively describing—a system in which certain literatures dominate while the rest remain on the periphery. Since Japan’s opening to international trade and the advent of modern- ization in the latter part of the nineteenth century, translation has occupied an important place in Japan’s literary world—with writing in all genres translated into Japanese for readers eager to immerse themselves in and keep abreast of global intellectual currents. The world outside, however, has taken less interest in Japan’s rich literary output—often dismiss- ing Japanese culture as an exotic curiosity. To reduce the wide range of Japanese literature to an exercise in “national piety” is off the mark. It is instructive to refer back to the preface of The World Republic of Letters, where Casanova writes without irony: “Translation, despite the inevitable misunderstandings to which it gives rise, is one of the principal means by which texts circulate in the literary world. And so I am pleased that this book, aimed at inaugurating an international literary criticism, should 204 B. E. THORNBURY itself be internationalized through translation into English” (Casanova 2004 [1999], xiii). She understandably expresses pleasure that her book, originally written in French, is accorded inclusion in global critical discourse through its translation into English—although it is a text that in effect rationalizes why work in Japanese, for example, is not given the same degree of transnational access through translation. Lawrence Venuti takes a different approach in The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. Basing his observations on Edward Fowler’s essay “Rendering Words, Traversing Cultures: On the Art and Politics of Translating Modern Japanese Fiction” (1992), he writes:

The English-language canon of Japanese fiction … was maintained for some three decades [after the end of the war in 1945] by a network of translators and institutions. Although it did indeed represent the Japanese texts as foreign and create a wide English-language audience for them, the privileged concept of foreignness was distinctively American and academic, reflecting a domestic nostalgia for an exotic prewar Japan and marginalizing texts that couldn’t be assimilated to the stereotype. (Venuti 1998, 82)

The postwar situation was, however, more complex than Venuti suggests: it was U.S. government policy to convince the American public that Japan- the-wartime-enemy had become Japan-the-peacetime-ally-and-friend—an ally and friend standing on the side of the U.S. against Soviet and Chinese communism. Great efforts were made on the U.S. side to project to the postwar American public images of Japan as a country with a beautiful, peace-loving, classical culture (see Thornbury 2013). Jumping forward several decades, Venuti regards translations of the “Americanized” novels of Banana Yoshimoto as part of a “restoration” that “seeks to compensate for a previous exclusion” of works reflecting “the diversity of the Japanese narrative tradition” (1998, 82). He notes that Megan Backus’s translation of Yoshimoto’s Kitchen “was successful in reaching a diverse readership and altering the English-language canon of modern Japanese fiction” (ibid., 84). Venuti implicitly accepts Masao Miyoshi’s characterization of Yoshimoto’s work as being “celebrations of an Americanized Japan” without necessarily agreeing with Miyoshi’s dis- paraging assessment that it is “naively written” (ibid.). In reference to the use of colloquial American English mixed in with italicized Japanese words (such as “ramen,” “wasabi,” and “tatami mat”) in the translation of Kitchen, Venuti writes: 7 CONCLUSION: FLUX AND FLUIDITY AND WORLD LITERATURE AND FILM 205

The heterogeneity of Backus’s translation discourse undoubtedly indicates that Yoshimoto’s characters are Americanized Japanese. The very language of the translation thus makes the same point that is made in the Japanese text by the many allusions to American popular culture, to comic strips (Linus from Peanuts), television programs (Bewitched), amusement parks (Disneyland), and restaurant chains (Denny’s). (Ibid., 85)

He argues that the translation is “foreignizing”—not, as might be expected, because of the presence of Japanese terms, but because of the use of colloquial English. “[I]n its deviation from dominant [English- language] linguistic norms … [the Backus text] brings the awareness that the translation is only a translation, imprinted with domestic intelligibili- ties and interests, and therefore not to be confused with the foreign text” (ibid., 86). Venuti echoes the commonly held notion of a coexisting “Americanized” Japanese culture and an “authentic” (which is to say, non-Americanized) Japanese culture. What Yoshimoto does in Kitchen, however, is demonstrate the cosmopolitan nature of Japanese culture. Japanese readers (who were the initial target audience of the novel) are comfortable with references to the television shows and other pop culture products from the United States and other parts of the world that they themselves consume. And, on her side, Backus shows respect for readers of her translation. Although Venuti points to the word “futon” in the translated text as a “retention of the Japanese word” (1998, 86), Backus treats the word as already part of an ever-expanding vocabulary of familiar Japanese cultural references—and assumes that her readers already know what a futon is. Venuti concludes that, yes, it was a good idea to make Yoshimoto’s work available in English translation even though “Miyoshi was certainly right to question the Americanized themes in Yoshimoto’s fiction, to view them as evidence of the cultural imperialism that the United States has conducted since World War II” (ibid., 87). Miyoshi, as Venuti says, would presumably have preferred more translations of Tanizaki (ibid., 84). If that is the case, Miyoshi was advocating an outmoded agenda—one inseparable from the fact that Yoshimoto burst onto the late twentieth-century literary scene as a young woman in a culture where serious literature has long been dominated by an older, male establishment. In the end, as Venuti would likely agree, world- literature status now belongs to Yoshimoto as much as it ever did to Tanizaki.

* * * 206 B. E. THORNBURY

“The urban terrain in Tokyo is constantly being rewritten,” Paul Waley has noted (2007, 1473). Although referring to the built environment of the city, Waley’s observation well applies in a figurative sense to the ongoing rewriting of the urban terrain as new works of Tokyo fiction are published and new works of Tokyo film are released. Even when new works come along, those that came before and have already made their mark continue to have meaning and to shape understandings of the city. “In order to imagine the unrepresentable space, life, and languages of the city, to make them liveable, we translate them into narratives” (1997, 186), James Donald has written. “We remember or misremember events and imagine them taking place against a symbolic topography. This is true not just of individual memory. It is evident in the intimate connection between the modern metropolis and the development of aesthetic genres and technologies of communication. Most notable of these are the cinema and, before that, the novel” (ibid.)—to which short stories should be added as well. Cycles of construction and demolition require that official, public maps that graphically represent the physical cityscape have to add in the new points that have materialized and eliminate what no longer exists. Conversely, the points on the map of the city produced through literature and film just keep growing more and more numerous and never disappear. Appendix: Annotated List of the Translated and Subtitled Works Discussed in Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film

Entries are arranged alphabetically according to the name of the author or the director (and according to the translated title of the work). Information is given on the Japanese-language editions of the novels and short stories and on the Japanese release of the films. See the references section for information on the English-language translated/subtitled versions of these works.

Ekuni Kaori, “Picnic.” Japanese edition: “Pikunikku” is one of the stories in Ekuni Kaori, Inu to hamonika (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2012), 89–109. The story was first published in the journalBungei in the Spring 2007 issue. Fukada Kōji, Hospitalité. Japanese release: Kantai (Tokyo: WA Entertainment and Seinendan, 2010). Furukawa Hideo, “Model T Frankenstein.” Japanese edition: “T-gata furankenshutain” is one of the stories in Furukawa Hideo, TYO goshikku (Tokyo: Village Books, 2011), 187–208. The story was first published in the journal Monkey Business in the Summer 2010 issue. Hashimoto Osamu, “Vortex.” Japanese edition: “Uzumaki” is one of the stories in Hashimoto Osamu, Hatsunatsu no iro (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2013), 41–74. The story was first published in the journalSubaru in June 2012.

© The Author(s) 2020 207 B. E. Thornbury, Mapping Tokyo in Fiction and Film, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34276-0 208 APPENDIX: ANNOTATED LIST OF THE TRANSLATED AND SUBTITLED WORKS…

Higashino Keigo, The Devotion of Suspect X. Japanese edition: Higashino Keigo, Yogishā X no kenshin (Tokyo: Bungeishunjū, 2005). The novel was first serialized in the journal Ōru yomimono from June 2003 until June 2004 and from August 2004 until January 2005. Hikari Agata, “A Family Party.” Japanese edition: “Hōmu-pātı”̄ is one of the stories in Hikari Agata, Hikari Agata no sekai 5 (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1999), 125–172. The story was first published in the journal Shinchō in September 1986. Hino Keizō, Isle of Dreams. Japanese edition: Hino Keizō, Yume no shima (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1985). Honda Tetsuya, The Silent Dead. Japanese edition: Honda Tetsuya, Sutoroberı ̄ naito (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 2006). ———, Soul Cage. Japanese edition: Honda Tetsuya, Sōru keiji (Tokyo: Kōbunsha, 2007). Horie Toshiyuki, “The Owl’s Estate.” Japanese edition: “Fukurō no yakata” is one of the stories in Horie Toshiyuki, Zeraniumu (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 2002), 149–180. The story was first published in the journal Shosetsū torippā in the Spring 2001 issue. Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Café Lumière. Japanese release: Kōhı ̄ jikō (Tokyo: Shōchiku Co., Ltd., 2003). Inaba Mayumi, “Morning Comes Twice a Day.” Japanese edition: “Asa ga nido kuru” is one of the stories in Inaba Mayumi, Neko ni michiru hi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1998), 105–131. The story was first published in the journal Kaien in September 1996. Ishikawa Tomotake, Gray Men. Japanese edition: Ishikawa Tomotake, Gurei men (Tokyo: Ei Shuppansha, 2012). Kakuta Mitsuyo, “A House for Two.” Japanese edition: “Futari-gurashi” is one of the stories in Kakuta Mitsuyo, Mazakon (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 2007), 135–165. The story was first published in the journalSubaru in July 2006. Kawakami Hiromi, “The Hut on the Roof.” Japanese edition: “Koya no aru okujō” is one of the stories in Kawakami Hiromi, Doko kara itte mo toī machi (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2008), 7–29. The story was first published in the journal Shōsetsu shinchō in November 2005. Kirino Natsuo, Out. Japanese edition: Kirino Natsuo, OUT [AUTO] (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1997). ———, Real World. Japanese edition: Kirino Natsuo, Riaru wārudo (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 2003). APPENDIX: ANNOTATED LIST OF THE TRANSLATED AND SUBTITLED WORKS… 209

Kitano Takeshi, Kikujiro. Japanese release: Kikujiro ̄ no natsu (Tokyo: Bandai Visual/Tokyo FM, 1999). Kon Satoshi, Tokyo Godfathers. Japanese release: Tokyō ̄ goddofāzāzu (Tokyo: Madhouse, 2003). Kore-eda Hirokazu, Nobody Knows. Japanese release: Dare mo shiranai (Tokyo: Cinequanon/Bandai Visual, 2004). ———, Shoplifters. Japanese release: Manbiki kazoku (Tokyo: AOI Promotion/Fuji Television Network/GAGA, 2018). Kurosawa Kiyoshi, Tokyo Sonata. Japanese release: Tokyō ̄ sonata (Tokyo: Entertainment Farm, et al., 2008). Murakami Haruki, After Dark. Japanese edition: Murakami Haruki, Afutādāku (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2004). ———, “All God’s Children Can Dance.” Japanese edition: “Kami no kodomotachi wa mina odoru” is one of the stories in Murakami Haruki, Kami no kodomotachi wa mina odoru (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2000), 67–95. The story was first published in the journalShincho ̄ in October 1999. ———, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. Japanese edition: Murakami Haruki, Shikisai o motanai Tazaki Tsukuru to, kare no junrei no toshi (Tokyo: Bungeishunjū, 2013). ———, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Japanese edition: Murakami Haruki, Sekai no owari to hādo-boirudo wandārando (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1985). ———, 1Q84. Japanese edition: Murakami Haruki, 1Q84 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2009–2010). ———, “The Second Bakery Attack.” Japanese edition: “Panya saishūgeki” is one of the stories in Murakami Haruki, Zo ̄ no shometsu:̄ Murakami Haruki tanpen senshū 1980–1991 (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2005), 65–83. The story was first published in the journal Mari Kureeru in August 1985. ———, South of the Border, West of the Sun. Japanese edition: Murakami Haruki, Kokkyo ̄ no minami, taiyo ̄ no nishi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1992). ———, “Super-frog Saves Tokyo.” Japanese edition: “Kaeru-kun, Tōkyō o sukū” is one of the stories in Murakami Haruki, Kami no kodomotachi wa mina odoru (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2000), 127–158. The story was first published in the journalShincho ̄ in December 1999. ———, “Where I’m Likely to Find It.” Japanese edition: “Doko de are sore ga mitsukarisō na basho de” is one of the stories in Murakami Haruki, Tokyō ̄ kitanshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2005), 81–119. The story was first published in the journal Shincho ̄ in May 2005. 210 APPENDIX: ANNOTATED LIST OF THE TRANSLATED AND SUBTITLED WORKS…

———, A Wild Sheep Chase. Japanese edition: Murakami Haruki, Hitsuji o meguru boken̄ (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1982). ———, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Japanese edition: Murakami Haruki, Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru (Tokyo: Shinchōsa, 1994–1995). ———, “Yesterday.” Japanese edition: “Iesutadei” is one of the stories in Murakami Haruki, Onna no inai otokotachi (Tokyo: Bungeishunjū, 2014), 65–116. The story was first published in the journalBungeishunju ̄ in January 2014. Murakami Shōsuke, Train Man. Japanese release: Densha otoko (Tokyo: Tōhō Co., Ltd., 2005). Nakamura Fuminori, The Gun. Japanese edition: Nakamura Fuminori, Jū (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2003). ———, The Thief. Japanese edition: Nakamura Fuminori, Suri (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 2009). Shibasaki Tomoka, Spring Garden. Japanese edition: Shibasaki Tomoka, Haru no niwa (Tokyo: Bungeishunjū, 2014). Shiina Makoto, “The Yellow Tent on the Roof.” Japanese edition: “Okujō no kiiroi tento” is one of the stories in Corinne Quentin, ed., Tokyō ̄ shosetsū (Tokyo: Kinokuniya Shoten, 2000), 5–45. Suo Masayuki, Shall We Dance? Japanese release: Shall We Dansu? (Tokyo: Nippon TV et al., 1996). Suzuki Kōji, “Beyond the Darkness.” Japanese edition: “Yami no mukō” is one of the stories in Suzuki Kōji, Sei to shi no genso ̄ (Tokyo: Gentōsha, 1998 [1995]), 103–189. Tsujihara Noboru, “My Slightly Crooked Brooch.” Japanese edition: “Chotto yuganda watashi no burōchi” is one of the stories in Tsujihara Noboru, Kareha no naka no aoi hono ̄ (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2005), 7–55. The story was first published in the journalShincho ̄ in February 2004. Yamada Taichi, Strangers. Japanese edition: Yamada Taichi, Ijintachi to no natsu (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1987). Yamazaki Nao-cola [Naokōra], “Dad, I Love You.” Japanese edition: “Otōsan daisuki” is one of the stories in Yamazaki Naokōra, Te (Tokyo: Bungeishunjū, 2009), 125–159. Yoshida Shūichi, “An Elevator on Sunday.” Japanese edition: “Nichiyōbi no erebētā” is one of the stories in Yoshida Shūichi, Nichiyobitachī (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2003), 5–34. ———, Parade. Japanese edition: Yoshida Shūichi, Paredō (Tokyo: Gentōsha, 2002). APPENDIX: ANNOTATED LIST OF THE TRANSLATED AND SUBTITLED WORKS… 211

Yoshimoto Banana, Kitchen. Japanese edition: Yoshimoto Banana, Kitchin (Tokyo: Benesse Kōporēshon [Fukutake Shoten], 1988). ———, Moshi Moshi. Japanese edition: Yoshimoto Banana, Moshimoshi Shimokitazawa (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 2010). ———, “Newlywed.” Japanese edition: “Shinkonsan” is one of the stories in Yoshimoto Banana, Tokage (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1993), 7–22. The translator notes that the story was first serialized (no dates given) on printed posters displayed inside Japan Railway trains in the Tokyo area. References

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A Barber, Stephen, 4, 5 Afutādāku, see Murakami, Haruki Barry Award, 25 Agency for Cultural Affairs Bernofsky, Susan, 50, 64 (Bunkachō), 23 Birnbaum, Alfred, 49, 63, 66n5, 68n15 Akaishi, Chieko, 126n9 Blencowe, Claire, 90n3 Alexander, Elye J., 65n4 BookTrust, 43n33 Alfred A. Knopf, 25, 27 Brazil, 130–134, 139, 163n4 Allen, Esther, 50, 64 Bridge, Gary, 36, 167, 186, 187 Allison, Anne, 6, 93 British Centre for Literary Almony, Kalau, 27 Translation, 24 Andrew, Lucy, 35, 129 Bubble, economic, 32, 142 Apter, Emily, 37n2 Bullying, 36, 101, 168, 170, 173 Arts Council England, 43n30, 43n33, 44n42 “Asa ga nido kuru,” see Inaba, Mayumi C Cannes Film Festival, 28, 105 Caquard, Sébastien, 2 B Carpenter, Juliet Winters, 27 Backus, Megan, 66n6, 204, 205 Casanova, Pascale, 202–204 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 65n2 Castro, Teresa, 38n7 Balshaw, Maria, 1 Chambers, Iain, 36, 197

1 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

China, 32, 134–137, 140 F “Chotto yuganda watashi no burōchi,” Film Movement, 28, 59, 67n12 see Tsujihara, Noboru Flowers, Petrice R., 162n3, 163n7 Chronotope, 65n2, 95 Foreignization (in translation), 53, Cinematic subtitling, issues of, 48–54 54, 63 Coates, Jamie, 33, 164n11 Foucault, Michel, 38n4 Coates, Jennifer, 67n11 Freedman, Alisa, 33, 70, 74, 79, Coates, Stephen, 26, 43n31 89–90n2 Comma Press, 24, 43n30, 50 Fujii, James, 13, 39n9, 73, 74, 90n2, Cooper, David, 3 91n13, 96–100, 123, 124, Cresswell, Tim, 137 125n7, 200 Cultural references (in translation), Fukada, Kōji, 29, 138 54–61, 63, 64, 66n7, 66n8, 194n3 Hospitalité, 28, 32, 53, 58–59, 61–63, 130, 137, 138, 140, 151, 152, 162, 200 D “Fukurō no yakata,” see Horie, Dalkey Archive Press, 23, 26, 42n25 Toshiyuki Damrosch, David, 38n3, 202 Furukawa, Hideo, 22, 41n23, 45n44, Daniels, Stephen, 38n7 55, 66n8, 146, 147, 183 Dare mo shiranai, see Kore-eda, “Model T Frankenstein”, 22, 55, Hirokazu 58, 130, 146, 162, 183 Darke, Jane, 132 “Futari-gurashi,” see Kakuta, Mitsuyo de Certeau, Michael, 41n18 DeLyser, Dydia, 38n7 Densha otoko, see Murakami, Shōsuke G de Wolf, Charles, 42n25, 42n27 Gabriel, Philip, 25–27, 29, 60, 63, “Doko de are sore ga mitsukarisō na 66n5, 67n9 basho de,” see Murakami, Haruki Gender identity and sexual orientation, Domestication (in translation), 53, 54, 35, 130, 147, 149, 152–160, 162 63, 66n6 Giles, Morgan, 45n42 Donald, James, 2, 37, 38n5, 206 Golden Elephant Award, 24, 43n32 Goldstein-Gidoni, Ofra, 74, 90n7 Goossen, Ted, 24, 48, 65, 65n3 E Grand Prix for Crime Fiction, 25, 44n37 Eckersall, Peter, 74 Granta: The Magazine of New Writing, Edgar Award, 25 26, 50 Éditions Autrement, 26 Greenblatt, Stephen, 164n9 Effron, Malcah, 37 Grescoe, Taras, 70, 89n1, 90n2 Ekuni, Kaori, 65 Grossman, Edith, 49, 51 “Picnic,” 65 Grove Press, 25 Emmerich, Michael, 24, 33, 202 Guillén, Claudio, 202 Engberg-Pedersen, Anders, 22 Gunzō New Writers’ Prize, 44n38 Entrikin, J. Nicholas, 38n7 Gurei men, see Ishikawa, Tomotake INDEX 229

H I Hankins, Joseph, 40n15 IBC Publishing, 26 Harley, J.B., 6 Ichikawa, Hiroo, 67n10 Haru no niwa, see Shibasaki, Tomoka 1Q84 [Ichi kyū hachi yon], see Hashimoto, Osamu, 93, 117, 118 Murakami, Haruki “Vortex,” 93, 117, 124 “Iesutadei,” see Murakami, Haruki Havens, Thomas R.H., 165n16 IFC Films, 28 Higashino, Keigo, 10, 16, 25, 27, 29, Ijintachi to no natsu, see Yamada, Taichi 39n9, 40n16, 49, 63, 65n4, Immigration policy, Japan, 32 179–182, 195n6, 195n7 Inaba, Mayumi, 1, 9, 32, 41n23, 57, 93, The Devotion of Suspect X, 10, 16, 100, 105–107, 126n10, 195n11 25, 29, 39n9, 49, 63, 65n4, “Morning Comes Twice a Day,” 1, 130, 141, 152, 162, 167, 179, 9, 32, 41n23, 57, 93, 100, 180, 182, 194–195n6, 200 105, 107, 117, 124, 195n11 Hikari, Agata, 12, 121–123, 128n21 International Booker Prize, The, 25, “A Family Party,” 12, 31, 94, 120, 43n33 121, 124, 128n22 Ishikawa, Tomotake, 18, 29, 31, Hillenbrand, Margaret, 35 43n32, 44n41, 64, 167, 171–175 Hinks, Jim, 24 Gray Men, 18, 29, 31, 43n32, Hino, Keizō, 14, 31, 39n9, 175–177, 44n41, 64, 167, 171, 173, 174 194n2 Ivain, Gilles (Ivan Chtcheglov), 193, Isle of Dreams, 13, 31, 39n9, 42n25, 196n12 42n27, 167, 175, 194n2, 200 Izumo, Satoko, 26, 43n31 Hirayama, Yōsuke, 119 Hitsuji o meguru bōken, see Murakami, Haruki J “Hōmu-pātı,”̄ see Hikari, Agata Japan Cuts (Japan Society Honda, Tetsuya, 21, 189, 194–195n6 New York), 28 The Silent Dead, 21, 167, 188 Japanese Literature Publishing Project Soul Cage, 188, 194n6 (JLPP), 23, 24, 42n27 Horie, Toshiyuki, 45n44, 130, Japan Film Festival of San Francisco, 28 140–143 Jerusalem Prize, 25 “The Owl’s Estate,” 130, 140, Jū, see Nakamura, Fuminori 142, 161, 181, 199 Hostess clubs, 134, 141, 181, 195n7, 199 K Hou, Hsiao-Hsien, 18, 30, 86–89 “Kaeru-kun, Tōkyō o sukū,” see Café Lumière, 10, 18, 28, 30, 58, Murakami, Haruki 70, 86, 88 Kakuta, Mitsuyo, 93, 114–117 Howell, Philip, 36, 168, 193 “A House for Two”, 93, 114, Hutchinson, Rachael, 33, 190 117, 124 230 INDEX

“Kami no kodomotachi wa mina L odoru,” see Murakami, Haruki Lammers, Wayne, 27 Kantai, see Fukada, Kōji Lefebvre, Henri, 37 Kawakami, Hiromi, 25, 45n44, 93, Literary translation, issues of, 48–54 111–114, 200 Liu-Farrer, Gracia, 32, 45n48 “The Hut on the Roof,” 93, 111, Lo, Kwai-Cheung, 134 124, 200 Kennedy, Liam, 1 Kidd, Chip, 15, 41n20 M Kikujirō no natsu, see Kitano, Takeshi Mackie, Vera, 33 Kirino, Natsuo, 12, 13, 25, 27, 29, Manbiki kazoku, see Kore-eda, 32, 44n37, 57, 66n9, 69, 80, 88, Hirokazu 91n9, 130–136, 153, 157–160, Mapping, culture of, 3–8, 202 162n2, 163n4, 165n18, 167, Marling, William, 23, 44n34 183, 184, 195n8, 195n9, Massey, Doreen, 54, 71 195n10, 198 Matsubara, Hiroshi, 128n22 OUT, 12, 25, 27, 29, 32, 57, 130, Matsuie, Masashi, 24 132, 134, 137, 141, 142, 162 Maynard, Kieran Robert, 68n15 Real World, 27, 29, 57, 66n9, 69, Miki, Satoshi, 29 70, 74, 80, 88, 91n9, 130, Minority groups, 129 153, 157, 158, 160, 162, Minotaur Books, 25, 44n40, 65n4 165n18, 167, 183, 184, 198 Mitchell, Peta, 9 Kitano, Takeshi, 16, 28, 164n12, 199 Mitsios, Helen, 26 Kikujiro, 16, 17, 28, 199 Moëd, Lydia, 65 Kitchin, see Yoshimoto, Banana Monkey Business: New Writing from Kōdansha, 24, 26 Japan, 24, 50 Kodansha International, 27 Moore, Henrietta L., 90n3 Kōhı ̄ jikō, see Hou, Hsiao-Hsien Morton, Leith, 33, 190 Kokkyō no minami, taiyō no nishi, see Moshimoshi Shimokitazawa, see Murakami, Haruki Yoshimoto, Banana Kon, Satoshi, 28, 32, 130, 139, Murakami, Haruki, 7, 10, 11, 14, 15, 150, 158 19–21, 25, 27, 29, 30, 33, 39n8, Tokyo Godfathers, 28, 29, 32, 130, 39n11, 41n18, 42n24, 44n38, 139, 150–152, 158, 162 48, 49, 56–58, 63, 65n3, 66n5, Korean ethnicity, 144, 145, 164n14 82, 93, 98, 99, 130, 136, 137, Kore-eda, Hirokazu, 17, 28, 29, 32, 147–149, 160–162, 164n8, 167, 93, 99, 102, 104, 126n8, 195n6 186, 187, 190–193, 199–201 Nobody Knows, 17, 28, 29, 93, 99, After Dark, 14, 29, 48, 49, 130, 136, 100, 102, 104, 105, 124, 161, 163n8, 167, 186, 200 126n8, 126n13, 195n6 “All God’s Children Can Dance,” Shoplifters, 28, 32, 126n8 19, 20 “Koya no aru okujō,” see Kawakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Hiromi Years of Pilgrimage, 7, 15, 25, Kurosawa, Kiyoshi, 32 27, 39n8, 58, 93, 98, 99, Tokyo Sonata, 32 123, 200 INDEX 231

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the O End of the World, 39n11 Ō e Prize, 24 1Q84 (One Q Eight Four), 19, 21, Ogg, Kerin, 150 27, 29, 33, 48, 130, 147, 162, Okano, Kaori, 195n7 167, 192, 193 “Okujō no kiiroi tento,” see Shiina, “The Second Bakery Attack,” 19 Makoto South of the Border, West of the Sun, Olk, Harald, 54 27, 30 Ō tomo, Rio, 136, 137, “Super-frog Saves Tokyo,” 57, 167, 163–164n8 190, 191, 199 “Otōsan daisuki,” see Yamazaki, “Where I’m Likely to Find It,” 57 Nao-cola [Naokōra] A Wild Sheep Chase, 10, 11, 49 OUT [AUTO], see Kirino, Natsuo The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, 19, 20, 48, 56, 68n15, 199 “Yesterday,” 130, 160, 162 P Murakami, Shōsuke, 28, 29, 70, 81, “Panya saishūgeki,” see Murakami, 83, 88, 89, 198 Haruki Train Man, 28, 29, 70, 81, 83, 88, Parēdo, see Yoshida, Shūichi 91n14, 198, 200 Pendleton, Mark, 33, Murata, Sayaka, 25, 44n39 67n11, 194n2 Convenience Store Woman, 44n39 Phelps, Catherine, 35, 129 Murray, Giles, 26, 49 “Pikunikku,” see Ekuni, Kaori Pinder, David, 193, 196n12 Plourde, Lorraine, 31, 126n10 N Powell, Allison Markin, 25–27 Nakamura, Fuminori, 26, 27, 29, 31, Powers, Richard, 191 43n31, 45n43, 45n46, 57, 64, 70, Priestnall, Gary, 3 80, 81, 88, 167, 177, 178, 198 Pushkin Press, 26, 45n44 The Gun, 27, 29, 45n46, 167, 177, 194n3 The Thief, 26, 29, 31, 43n31, 57, Q 58, 64, 70, 80, 81, 88, 198 Quentin, Corinne, 26, 33 Naoki Prize, 25 Napier, Susan, 81, 151 National Diet, 18, 37n1, 41n21 R Natsume, Sōseki, 93 Read Japan Program, 24 Nejimaki-dori kuronikuru, see Riaru wārudo, see Kirino, Natsuo Murakami, Haruki Richardson, Douglas, 38n7 “Nichiyōbi no erebētā,” see Yoshida, Roberson, James E., 90n4 Shūichi Rogers, Lawrence, 26, 33, 66n7 Nippon Foundation, The, 24, 42n28 Rubin, Jay, 27, 29, 48, 49, 63, 66n5, Nornes, Abé Mark, 23, 28, 52 66n7, 68n15 Nye, Joseph, 42n26 Ryang, Sonia, 164n13 232 INDEX

S Stringer, Julian, 28 Sakai, Hiroki, 44n41 Sugimoto, Yoshio, 55, 129 Sand, Jordan, 33, 36, 40n12, 40n17, Sugiura, Ikuko, 165n18 90n5, 126n12, 127n19, 127n20, Suo, Masayuki, 29 128n22, 154, 164n10, 198 Shall We Dance?, 14, 28, 29, 45n47, Sasakawa, Ryōichi, 42n28 84, 94, 119, 120, 122, 124, Seaman, Amanda, 68n15, 131 168, 200 Seidensticker, Edward, 33 Suri, see Nakamura, Fuminori Sekai no owari to hādo-boirudo Sutoroberı ̄ naito, see Honda, Tetsuya wandārando, see Murakami, Suzuki, Kōji, 44n41, 58, 167–171, 200 Haruki “Beyond the Darkness,” 58, 167, Shall We Dansu?, see Suo, Masayuki 168, 171, 200 Shibasaki, Tomoka, 39n10, 45n44, 201 Suzuki, Nobue, 90n4 Spring Garden, 39n10, 201 Shibata, Motoyuki, 24 Shiina, Makoto, 13, 39n9, 49, 93, T 96–98, 200 Tally, Robert T. Jr., 2, 9 The Yellow Tent on the Roof, 39n9, Tange, Kenzō, 32, 150 49, 93, 96, 99, 100, 123, 200 “T-gata furankenshutain,” see Shikisai o motanai Tazaki Tsukuru to, Furukawa, Hideo kare no junrei no toshi, see Tilted Axis Press, 26, 50 Murakami, Haruki Tokyo Shimoda, Hiraku, 88 homelessness, 91n12, 130, 150–152 “Shinkonsan,” see Yoshimoto, Banana Metropolis, 3, 55, 56, 105, 183 Shitamachi, 11, 16, 40n17, 49, 53, Metropolitan Government, 165n16 61–63, 65n1, 95, 96, 137–139, Metropolitan Government building, 179–182, 199, 200 32, 150 Siegel, Allan, 38n5 Metropolitan Police Department, Simon, Sherry, 47 188, 194n5 Skytree, 32, 61, 126n8 primary, secondary, and tertiary, Smith, Alexander O., 27, 49, 65n4 22, 55, 66n8 Snyder, Stephen, 25, 27 scholarship on, 33–34 Soft power, 23, 42n26 twenty-three wards (ku), 11, 22, Soho Crime, 27, 45n43 55, 183 Soho Press, 26, 43n31, 45n43, university courses on, 34 45n46, 50 Tōkyō goddofāzāzu, see Kon, Satoshi Soja, Edward, vii, 2 Tōkyō sonata, see Kurosawa, Kiyoshi Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 28 Tsuda, Takeyuki, 163n5 Sōru keiji, see Honda, Tetsuya Tsujihara, Noboru, 12, 18, 19, 70–79, Spatial literary and film studies, 2 82, 88, 89, 170, 198 Speech patterns, 130, 160–162 “My Slightly Crooked Brooch,” 12, Strecher, Matthew, 42n24, 44n38, 63, 18, 58, 70–80, 82, 86, 88, 65n3, 65n5, 190 170, 198 INDEX 233

U Yamanaka, Keiko, 163n4, 163n5, “Uzumaki,” see Hashimoto, Osamu 164n14 Yamazaki, Nao-cola [Naokōra], 12 “Dad, I Love You,” 12 V “Yami no mukō,” see Suzuki, Kōji Venice Film Festival, 28 Yiu, Angela, 33, 34, 91n11, 91n14, Venuti, Lawrence, 50–53, 66n7, 126n13 204, 205 Yōgisha X no kenshin, see Higashino, Vertical, 26, 27, 44n41, Keigo 128n22, 175 Yoneda, Asa, 29, 67n13 Vintage, 25, 59 Yoshida, Shūichi, 11, 25, 26, 29, 59, VIZ Pictures, 28 60, 64, 130, 144–146, 154–157, 185–187 “An Elevator on Sunday,” 130, 144, W 161, 164n14 Waley, Paul, 3, 30, 31, 34, 45n49, 61, Parade, 11, 26, 29, 33, 58–64, 62, 165n17, 206 130, 153, 160, 162, 167, Walkowitz, Rebecca, 23, 65 184, 185, 200 Watson, Sophie, 36, 167, 186, 187 Yoshimoto, Banana, 29, 66n6, 67n13, Wellspring Media, 28 84, 85, 89, 107–111, 126n13, Westphal, Bertrand, 89 127n15, 127n16, 127n17, 152, White, Merry, 104 153, 204, 205 Words Without Borders, 42n29 Kitchen, 66n6, 93, 107–109, 124, World film, 2, 36, 38n3, 202 130, 152, 158, 162, 204, 205 World literature, 2, 36, 38n3, 51, Moshi Moshi, 29, 67n13, 93, 109, 197–206 124, 140, 200 “Newlywed,” 70, 84, 85, 88 Yū, Miri, 45n42 Y Tokyo Ueno Station, 45n42 Yamada, Taichi, 27, 30, 44n41, Yume no shima, see Hino, Keizō 94–96, 125n3, 125n4, 125n5, 125n6, 199 Strangers, 27, 30, 44n41, 57, Z 93–95, 99, 123, 140, 199 Zainichi, 164n13