translated by Naoko Matsushiro
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If we suppose that the act of depicting the body of the other in modern literature was the act of intruding into the other's space, to tame and gain control over the incomprehensible other, it is not deniable that modern Japanese literature contributed to formation of the Japanese nation in that way. Since the concept of Western modernization was introduced to Japan, Japanese literature has portrayed the bodies belonging to people of other races or social classes discriminatingly, in order to construct uniform Japanese national identity. There are numerous examples of how this was done. However, meanwhile, there is one body which Japanese literature has been unable to mention even to this day. It is the body of the Emperor. Japan's modernization was effected on a condition that nothing and no one should infringe upon the Emperor's sanctity. Until the Second World War, the Emperor was worshipped as God, and depicting the Emperor as someone having a body, like ordinary people, was a criminal act. But even in post-war Japan, after the Emperor's renunciation of his divinity, writing about the body of the Emperor stayed a taboo - as there were incidents of rightists threatening to attack those novelists who depicted the body of the Emperor as a human being. So, it was after the First World War that Japan sort of reached her goal and joined the family of modern nations. Japan became the permanent member of the UN Security Council and was accepted as one of the Powers. What began to take a clear form during that period, when domestic economy and politics seemed stable, was a genre of literature known as "private-life novels" - a genre peculiar to Japanese literature. It was a form of literature where the author's real life was used, almost entirely, as the setting and theme of the work. Authors did not merely draw on their experience for some subject matter. The attempt was more extreme, and it culminated in the notion that as long as the author gave a detailed account of his or her own everyday life, the work could attain universality as a novel. Perhaps, beneath such a notion was an arrogant world-view which assumed "I, a novelist = the truth". Two observations can be made of this phenomenon. First, there was no longer a need to depict the body of the unknown others, because the Japanese state had already colonized and dominated the "others" in her surroundings. Secondly, to compensate for their inability to write about the body of the "inner stranger", i.e. the Emperor, writers themselves were beginning to replace the position assumed by the Emperor. If we suppose that the Emperor functioned as an image of "the perfect Japanese" due to his abstract presence and total lack of concreteness, couldn't it be the case that the "I" in the private-life novels, who was forbidden to touch upon the mechanism of that functioning, attempted to represent the reverse side of the image, i.e. the image of the Japanese who has universality, precisely because s/he is so full of faults and defects and concrete peculiarities? In today's Japanese literature, it looks like a new form of private-life novels is beginning to prosper. To me, this seems to be a sign that people's longing for the image of "the perfect Japanese" is rapidly increasing -- somehow I cannot see it otherwise. |
The Speech in Japan-India Writers Caravan, Sep/2002