Double Fictions and Double Visions of Japanese Modernity by Baryon Tensor Posadas A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto © Copyright by Baryon Tensor Posadas, 2010 Double Fictions and Double Visions of Japanese Modernity Baryon Tensor Posadas Doctor of Philosophy Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto 2010 Abstract At roughly the same historical conjuncture when it began to be articulated as a concept marking a return of the repressed within the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank, the doppelganger motif became the subject of a veritable explosion of literary attention in 1920s Japan. Several authors – including Akutagawa Ryûnosuke, Edogawa Rampo, Tanizaki Jun’ichirô, and others – repeatedly deployed the doppelganger motif in their fictions against the backdrop of rapid urbanization, imperial expansion, and the restructuring of all aspects of everyday life by a burgeoning commodity culture. Interestingly, as if enacting the very compulsion to repeat embodied by the doppelganger on a historical register as well, a repetition of this proliferation of doppelganger images is apparent in the contemporary conjuncture, in the works of authors like Abe Kôbô, Murakami Haruki, or Shimada Masahiko, as well as in the films of Tsukamoto Shinya or Kurosawa Kiyoshi. To date, much of the previous scholarship on the figure of the doppelganger tends to be preoccupied with the attempt to locate its origins, whether in mythic or psychical terms. In contrast to this concern with fixing the figure to an imagined essence, in my dissertation, I instead place emphasis on the doppelganger’s enactment of repetition itself through an examination at the figure through the prism of the problem of genre, in terms of how it has come to be discursively constituted as a genre itself, as well as its embodiment of the very logic of genre in its play on the positions of identity and difference. By historicizing its formation as a genre, it becomes possible to productively situate not only the ii proliferation of images of the doppelganger in 1920s Japan but also its repetitions, resignifications, and critical articulations in the present within the the shifting constellation of relations among various discourses and practices that organize colonial and global modernity – language and visuality, the space of empire and the construction of ethno-racial identities, libidinal and material economies – that structure (yet are nevertheless exceeded by) its constitution as a concept. iii Acknowledgements The completion of this work could not have been possible without the support and encouragement of many individuals and institutions. First and foremost, I am indebted to my supervisor Atsuko Sakaki, whose tireless efforts in guiding me through the process of conceiving, preparing, and completing this dissertation has been invaluable and inspirational. Her always insightful feedback and suggestions, not to mention her patience and generosity with her time and unfailing support for my endeavors, went far beyond what any student could ask for. She has truly been a mentor throughout these past years, and my gratitude for all her efforts exceeds the limits of what I am able to articulate in language. Many thanks also to the other members of my supervisory committee. It is difficult to overstate the profound impact of Eric Cazdyn’s keen and incisive intellect on my own thinking and writing. The critical insights he was always generous to offer have opened up the horizons of my thought, and for this, I am immensely grateful. Ken Kawashima has also taught me much through the years. He was always pointing me in interesting directions and encouraging me to think things through, and I am undoubtedly a better student and scholar for it. During a period of stay in Japan funded through a Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Research Scholarship, Professor Oshino Takeshi was a generous host and advisor. I thank him especially for his invitation to participate in his graduate seminars and pushing me to participate in the intellectual community at Hokkaido University, all of which made my stay in Japan as productive as possible. Also invaluable were the rewarding exchanges, meanderings, and conversations with various friends and colleagues through the years: Sean Callaghan, Joe Culpepper, Indira Endaya, Darcy Gauthier, Nicole Go, Monica Guu, Christina Han, Itsuki Hayashi, Merose Hwang, Mark McConaghy, Chikako Nagayama, Yuri Naito, Sara Osenton, Erik Spigel, Asami Tsuda, Wang Jing, and Martin Zeilinger at the University iv of Toronto; and at Hokkaido University, Han Yeonsun, Hanawa Hiroshi, Inoue Kishô, Kawasaki Kôhei, and Ôkawa Takeshi all warmly offered friendship and hospitality for which I am grateful. Finally, my mother Linda Santiago, has been ceaseless in her support of my work and the trajectory my life has taken. Without her continuing trust that has taken so many different forms, I would not be where I am today. And my deepest appreciation and gratitude to Denise Liu. Her constant warmth and patience with me made it possible for me to see this project through to its end. v Author’s Note Throughout this dissertation, all Japanese names are given with the surname preceding their first name, unless the author in question resides and publishes primarily outside of Japan in a language other than Japanese, in line with the established convention in the field. Also, following Japanese convention, authors are referred to either by surname (e.g., Abe) or given pen name (e.g., Rampo), depending on the name for which they are most recognized. Where translations of the literary materials are available, I have cited those; all other translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. Transliteration follows the revised Hepburn Romanization system. vi Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Author’s Note vi Introduction 1 Part I: The Emergence of the Doppelganger 1 - Detection and the Doppelganger: Formations of a Genre in Interwar Japan 30 2 - Doubled Assimilations and Exclusions: The Doppelganger in the Contact Zone 68 3 - Scopic Regimes of Japanese Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Visuality, and the Doppelganger 110 4 - Rampo’s Repetitions: Adaptation as Doppelganger 151 Part II: Repetition Compulsions 5 - History in a Hall of Mirrors: Detective Fiction and the Doppelganger Revisited 185 6 – Intertextual Doppelganger: Double Visions of “Japan” 221 7 - The Doppelganger at the End of the World 260 Bibliography 295 vii INTRODUCTION Defining the Doppelganger As a figure that occupies the lacuna between self and other, the doppelganger marks a sense of crisis, an anxiety mired in tensions and contradictions that manifest when the discursive boundaries of the structures of modernity are no longer tenable. Indeed, what is most noteworthy about the doppelganger (in its myriad manifestations) is the fundamental ambiguity and destabilizing properties of its characteristics. It is simultaneously subject and object; it is an enactment of the mirror stage of subject formation on one hand, and at the same time it is the return of the repressed, the materialization of the excess that the limits of the modern subject cannot contain. It is around this figure of the doppelganger and the critical questions and problems it foregrounds for those films and fictions of Japanese modernity informed by it that this dissertation is organized. Its task is to take the doppelganger’s appearances in Japanese films and fictions as a point of departure, or to borrow the words of Gilles Deleuze, a “practice of concepts” that enables the possibility of rendering visible its relations with a range of different problems and issues in the history of Japanese modernity, and through this, open a space with the possibility of thinking, of telling different narratives about them.1 What exactly is the doppelganger? The study of the doppelganger as a literary motif is itself of course not unprecedented.2 Yet despite these precedents, defining the doppelganger beyond a rough 1 Deleuze uses the phrase at the end of Cinema 2: The Time-Image, in reference to the role of philosophical inquiry in the study of cinema. He writes, “philosophical theory is itself a practice, just as much as its object. It is no more abstract than its object. It is a practice of concepts and must be judged in the light of other practices with which it interferes. A theory of cinema is not ‘about’ cinema, but about the concepts that cinema gives rise to and which are themselves related to other concepts corresponding to other practices, the practice of concepts in general having no privilege over others, any more than one object has over others” (Deleuze 1989: 268). Needless to say, in this dissertation, rather than cinema, it is the concepts and practices that the doppelganger gives rise that will be the object of investigation. 2 For a thorough review of the most often cited textual appearances of the doppelganger in both literature and film, along with the critical studies and the various definitions and approaches beyond the examples I note, see Fonseca (2006). Also, in Japanese, two recent works have also attempted a meta-analysis of existing studies on the motif in Japanese literature to produce a cataloguing of the Japanese literary texts commonly referenced in connection with the doppelganger, namely Mizuno (2002) and Nishii (2006). 1 Posadas / Introduction / 2 description of its characteristics has been a notoriously difficult, if not ultimately unproductive, endeavor. Christopher Hallam, for one, has lamented the embarrassing vagueness of the concept, writing that “in the broadest sense of the idea, ‘double’ can mean almost any dual, and in some cases even multiple, structure in a text” (Hallam 1981: 5). The earliest known use of the word “Doppelgänger” (literally, double-goer) is typically credited to Jean-Paul Richter (1763-1825) with his novel Siebenkäs (1796-1797).