Cats, Dogs, and Cyborgs: Transcending the Human-Animal Divide in Contemporary Japanese Literature
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CATS, DOGS, AND CYBORGS: TRANSCENDING THE HUMAN-ANIMAL DIVIDE IN CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE LITERATURE A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Asian Studies by Tyran Clement Grillo August 2017 © 2017 Tyran Clement Grillo CATS, DOGS, AND CYBORGS: TRANSCENDING THE HUMAN-ANIMAL DIVIDE IN CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE LITERATURE Tyran Clement Grillo, Ph.D. Cornell University 2017 Cats, Dogs, and Cyborgs: Transcending the Human-Animal Divide in Contemporary Japanese Literature blurs the binary between humans and non-humans, as represented in the torrent of relevant literature that has saturated Japan’s popular markets since the archipelago underwent a so-called “pet boom” in the mid-1990s. Through carefully selected texts that look beyond mere representational approaches to the literary animal, each chapter treats specific works of literature as case studies of human-animal relationships gone somehow awry. Examining symbiotic concepts of “humanity” and “animality,” and how each enhances—and undermines—the other across national literary spaces, Cats, Dogs, and Cyborgs makes an unprecedented case for Japan’s pet boom, and how its sudden interest in companion animals points to watershed examples of what I call “productive error,” by which anthropocentrism is redefined as a necessary rupture in, not a bandage on, the thick skin of human primacy. Covering such diverse topics as euthanasia, guide dogs, the supernatural, and posthumanism, this book concludes by introducing the paradigm shift of “postanimalism” as a detour from the current traffic jam of animal-centered philosophies, and in anticipation of a larger project that requires Japan as catalyst, and postanimalism as its theoretical innovation. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Tyran Grillo has been engaging Japanese culture ever since his best friend in high school, a boarding student from Tokyo, introduced him to Japanese rock music. An interest in the lyrics of that music turned into an obsession with the language, and further a passion for literature and translation. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he earned his B.A. and M.A. in Japanese Language & Literature, along with a second full B.A. in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies. Synthesizing these disparate fields, his work plots the theoretical and the experiential along untraditional axes of inquiry through Japanese literary lenses, and their relationship to representations of animality. Having published on a variety of topics, in addition to his scholarly work, he has produced over one million words of reviews and essays to an ever-increasing platform of readers on his website, Between Sound and Space , and has, to date, translated 12 books from Japanese to English, of which eight have been published. One of these, Mr. Turtle , is the subject of this dissertation’s fourth chapter. iv I dedicate this dissertation to my family, without whose love and support this document might never have existed—nor I, still, to produce it. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Like any intellectual product, this dissertation did not emerge from the vacuum of its writer’s head. Rather, it is the culmination of many years of study, conversation, and interaction. At the University of Massachusetts, where I completed my B.A. and M.A., the initial stirrings of this project took root in the mentorship I received from Professors Amanda Seaman, Stephen Miller, and Doris Bargen. Without their patience and encouragement, I might never have gained the confidence to pursue a Ph.D. At Cornell University, where my thinking grew in leaps in bounds, not least of all through the tireless guidance of Professors Brett de Bary and Jane Marie Law, whose unwavering belief in me ensured that the nascent stages of my scholarly development would be fortified enough to bear the fruit presented in the following pages. Along with them, Professor Victor Koschmann served on my dissertation committee, working on a tight schedule to provide comments and criticisms in a pinch. For that, I am in a lifetime of debt. Others at Cornell—including Laura Brown, Sherry Colb, Antoine Traisnel, Peter Gilgen, Elisha Cohn, Samantha Zacher, and Dominic LaCapra—revealed avenues into Animal Studies I never imagined. Beyond Cornell, still others have given me a bounty of theories to work with toward planting my own. Dominic Pettman, Jasbir Puar, Lori Gruen, Colin Dayan, Kari Weil, Jonathan Skinner, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Pawel Frelik, Aaron Skabelund, Brett L. Walker, Gavin Walker, and Akira Mizuta Lippit are but a few in the latter category. Above all, I acknowledge the animals whose lives and deaths fill these pages with their vibrancy. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH..........................................................................................iv DEDICATION................................................................................................................v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...........................................................................................vi TABLE OF CONTENTS..............................................................................................vii PREFACE..............................................................................................viii FROM POSTHUMANISM… (AN INTRODUCTION) ..............................................11 CHAPTER 1: SARABANDŌ.......................................................................................42 CHAPTER 2: DISABLING THE ANIMAL, ANIMALIZING THE DISABLED.......78 CHAPTER 3: SKIN AND SOIL.................................................................................110 CHAPTER 4: SHELL IS OTHER PEOPLE................................................................146 …TOWARD POSTANIMALISM (A CONCLUSION) ............................................189 BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................198 vii PREFACE The initial motivations behind this dissertation were moral, as my encounters with contemporary Japanese literature had revealed what I believed to be a gross contradiction. This contradiction mattered to me as a self-professed lover of animals— whose actual needs, I would have asserted, were being suppressed in favor of symbolic representations. My belief was that, living in a moral world, I needed to address the problems of animal literature at the source of authorship. As a writer myself, I felt it imperative to interrogate other writers’ involvement in the linguistic abuse and de- individualization of animal subjects, while reconciling an intellectual life in which animals had for so long been exploited that challenging my own thinking on the topic meant challenging centuries of habit by extension. Behind this pretention, I was missing out on the importance of readership and context, leading me to define the larger purpose of my project through strategic ordering of texts. Despite a certain attraction, any purely literary approach proved disappointing— not because it was unworthy but because it offered so few implications for the future. The text had become a finite entity. Had I restricted myself to discourses of animal- and Asia-related studies, I might have felt adequate in outing blatant contradictions in the literatures of my concern. My disinterest in solving grand narratives led me to posthumanism, through which I came to try on a less wrinkled discursive suit. Whereas the language of other disciplines was mired in deconstruction, I found that posthumanism thrived on non -construction. It felt appropriate to put Japanese literature and posthumanist thought in conversation with one another, a decision which put me in mind of Joseph Joubert’s dictum, “It is better to debate a question without settling it viii than to settle a question without debating it.” Through posthumanism, I had narrowly escaped the infinite regression of standing my arguments like facing mirrors, having learned instead the value of placing them back to back. Delving into my original thesis, I became more aware of what I was not trying to do than what I was. I knew this project to be more than exclusively comparative, sociological, or even aligned with animal studies, though it is all those things. It was using Japanese literature as a platform to embrace, and stimulate debate around, frameworks of relational life. Nevertheless, I found myself being challenged by others in my field. Some would say, “But animals have been used as symbols for millennia. Why start criticizing them now?” Such questions fueled my calling to unpack them in a non-speciesest manner. My eureka moment came when I shifted the blame from ignorant others to myself for not being more explicit about what was at stake: intellectual culpability. For while it may be common to define, address, and restitute physical violations of animal bodies, how much less so to do the same for abstractions of emotion and thought. With few exceptions, even the finest writings on moral lives of animals end up being more about the moral lives of those reading and writing them, while nominally curating a fictional preference for the animal(s) in question. I was determined not to be yet another scholar who senses animals without making sense of them. Another tendency I noticed among critics was in thinking that animals, whether literary or actual, were selectively thought of in human terms. It was easy for critics to project fear, joy, and even grief onto the larger mammals yet impossible for