View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Washington University St. Louis: Open Scholarship Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) Spring 4-22-2014 Look at Me: Japanese Women Writers at the Millennial Turn David Holloway Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation Holloway, David, "Look at Me: Japanese Women Writers at the Millennial Turn" (2014). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 1236. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/1236 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN SAINT LOUIS Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures Dissertation Examination Committee: Rebecca Copeland, Chair Nancy Berg Marvin Marcus Laura Miller Jamie Newhard Look at Me: Japanese Women Writers at the Millennial Turn by David Holloway A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2014 Saint Louis, MO TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. iii INTRODUCTION: Ways of Looking. 1 CHAPTER ONE: Apocalypse and Anxiety in Contemporary Japan. 12 CHAPTER TWO: Repurposing Panic. 49 CHAPTER THREE: Writing Size Zero. 125 CHAPTER FOUR: The Dark Trauma. 184 CONCLUSION: Discourses of Disappointment, Heuristics of Happiness. 236 WORKS CITED. 246 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS If any credit is deserved for the completion of this dissertation, it is not I who deserve it. At least not entirely. My professors and dissertation committee members worked tirelessly and patiently with me, read countless drafts and redrafts, contained the messiness that happens during a project such as this, and offered thoughtful advice throughout the entire process. This dissertation would not have been possible without their collective guidance and encouragement. My sincere thanks to my academic advisor and mentor Rebecca Copeland, whom I have known since first taking her class on Japanese women writers as a sophomore in college. Professor Copeland has been vigilant over my academic development ever since and has seen my potential even during those moments in which I did not see it myself. I am likewise indebted to Marvin Marcus whose vast knowledge of all things Japan has continued to challenge me to think beyond my comfort zone. Professor Marcus’ pencil (never a pen!)—with which he meticulously annotated my various dissertation drafts and offered well-directed criticism—has a special place in my heart. Jamie Newhard’s calm helped me weather the seas when they turned rough. And the diligence with which she offered invaluable support was a crucial ingredient in the completion of this dissertation. Laura Miller’s expertise in Japanese body culture shaped my own interest in scholarship on the body, and her various and intellectually rigorous monographs and edited anthologies were a cornerstone of my dissertation as well as a launching point for my own intellectual intrigue in aesthetics of the body. A warm expression of gratitude to Nancy Berg, as well, the only member of my committee whose area of expertise is not Japan. Professor Berg has been there all the way, sometimes in plain sight, sometimes behind the scenes; thank you for your wisdom, insight, humor, and three-year-old chocolate covered blueberries. This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous financial assistance of the Japan Foundation, which funded a year of field research at Rissho University. There, I was iii able to work closely with Professor Tomoko Ubukata. I would like to thank her immensely for pushing me in the right direction and for pointing me toward the right bookstores. I would also like to thank her for allowing me to observe her graduate student seminar, where I met any number of talented young scholars with whom I enjoyed countless discussions about Japanese literature, psychoanalysis, and the intellectual merits of The L Word . I am also appreciative of the generous financial assistance of the Washington University in St. Louis Center for the Humanities, where I edited and finalized this dissertation. The conversations with other faculty in residence, the quiet workspace, the chocolate—all were wonderfully helpful in this most crucial of stages of the dissertation. No less importantly, I am grateful for the support of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Washington University in St. Louis. Thanks to Virginia Marcus and Shino Hayashi for prodding me to maintain my language skills; and to my colleagues, to visiting scholars who came and went during my time here for our Mellon Seminars, and to my students who taught me as much as I taught them. Thanks to Krystél Mowery for keeping my head on straight and making sure I never missed a deadline and to Debra Jones who kept the payments coming. Finally, though perhaps firstly, the most sincere of thanks to those closest to me: to my mother for doing all the things that my mother has done for me—perhaps this dissertation will look good on your bookshelf next to the Twilight books you “found in the attic;” to Jann, for all of your support; and to Christina, who gets the very last line of the acknowledgements, which, they say, is quite a treat. iv INTRODUCTION: Ways of Seeing Her subjects see, of course, but they are much more seen, captured by the gaze. Often, in the film stills and the centerfolds, this gaze seems to come from another subject, with whom the viewer may be implicated; sometimes…it seems to come from the spectacle of the world; yet sometimes, too, it seems to come from within. --Hal Foster, “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic” Oh traveler, go to Lacedaemon and say that in the mirror, Graveyard of smiles, there is a single gravestone Painted white, thick with makeup Where the wind blows alone. --Tada Chimako, “Mirrors” This is a study of ways of seeing in contemporary Japanese women’s fiction: it is a study of how literary characters are seen, how they see themselves, and how they see the world. Feminism’s concern with “the gaze” has demonstrated that the ways in which men look at women influences the ways in which women look at themselves—as though a phantasmic male figure is always watching and scrutinizing, whose point of view seemingly represents that of the world at large. The political edge of the gaze has invited academic and intellectual recapitulations of its power over women. Hal Foster’s work on the obscene, the abject, and the traumatic, for example, is a theoretical exploration of how contemporary female artists wrestle with the notion of women’s status as sex(ual) objects. Some feminists have followed suit, arguing for a new politics of liberalized sexuality that rearticulates being looked at as an empowering rather than anxiety- inducing experience. This study contributes to ongoing academic and intellectual intrigue into women’s place in the visual economy of sexual politics and the current state of feminism. We could argue that as feminism makes headway into dismantling and revisioning ways of seeing and being seen, women remain at the epicenter of a vigorous and unrelenting visual culture and meat market. This can be partially explained by the emergence of pro-sex feminism which, as 1 explained in Chapter Two, has wanted to neutralize the political and systemic threat of female objectification by saying that sexual objectification can work to women’s advantage and advancement; it can also be attributed to the circulation of women’s bodies as commodities and cash, as things to be bought and sold as well as things that are used to procure other things: sex continues to sell and be sold. The Japanese fiction analyzed in this dissertation emerges from an awareness of and disappointment with the state of the female body as an object of visual pleasure and cultural fascination. This dissertation is especially interested in how female characters deal with the visual terrain of contemporary Japan and their place within it; how they deal with being looked at all the time and how their experiences as objects of sexual consumption inform largely pessimistic worldviews. It is not only sex that shapes the ways in which these characters see the world. As explained in Chapter One, Japanese fiction of the past several decades is foregrounded by a constellation of financial, natural, and sociocultural disasters that occurred in the early 1990s, what scholars called “the lost decade.” Young people growing up in the years that followed have been labeled Japan’s “lost generation” and are seemingly representative of a post-Japan Japan, one that is lacking the qualities of “Japan Inc.”—not only the prominence of industry, but also and more importantly the personal sacrifice and commitment of the populace to a version of economic nationalism. During the period of high economic growth of the 1980 and early 90s, “the Japan Problem” was an external problem, particularly for the US government which saw its status as the world’s number one economy threatened by Japan’s thriving postwar economy; one could argue that after economic collapse and the resulting social anxiety, the Japan Problem became Japan’s problem—which remains unsolved today amidst residual economic stagnation and an uncommitted and uncaring youth culture. The fiction presented in this dissertation is 2 occupied by protagonists whose lives have been shaped by the economic and social unrest of “the lost decade.” They seem lazy, self-indulgent, aimless.