7 NAGAI KAFŪ'S FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE PDF

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7 NAGAI KAFŪ’S FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE Rachael Hutchinson university of delaware Modern Japanese literature is usually seen as beginning in the Meiji period (1868–1912), that great crucible in which new political ideas and literary methods built on the artistic crea- tivity of the Edo period to give a ...

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7 NAGAI KAFŪ’S FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE Rachael Hutchinson university of delaware

Modern Japanese literature is usually seen as beginning in the Meiji period (1868–1912), that great crucible in which new political ideas and literary methods built on the artistic creativity of the Edo period to give a new voice to Japanese writers. Many male writers of the Meiji period occupied a privileged position of power according to their class or education that allowed them entry into publishing circles. Female writers were hampered by an ingrained system of male dominance, and although the Meiji and Taishō periods produced many excellent writers both male and female, it tended to be the male writers who were published more widely and later canonized by (mostly male) literary critics. The representation of women in modern Japanese literature is therefore skewed, created more often than not through the vision of male eyes, embodying qualities to satisfy male desires. The feminist poet Kōra Rumiko  (b. 1932) once lamented that ‘The woman that is created in the texts of Japan’s male writers is a stranger to me. These novels make me angry’ (Buckley 1997: 105). Expressing similar dissatisfaction, three female Japanese critics, Ueno Chizuko, Tomioka Taeko and Ogura Chikako, published a blistering critique against writers such as Kawabata Yasunari (1899– 1972), Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), Mishima Yukio (1925–1970) and Murakami Haruki  (b. 1949), whose female characters are sacrificed, objectified and abjected before the needs of the male narrator.1 Certainly, very few women in Japanese novels of the twentieth century could be described as occupying the subject position in the work, as opposed to that of observed object. Ueno Chizuko described the two main aims of feminist literary analysis as unearthing the work of forgotten female authors, and critiquing the works of male authors which were too highly evaluated in the past (1992: 432). To these I would add a third aim, to re-evaluate male authors who challenge social hierarchies in their writing. In this chapter, I would like to hold up Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) as an example of a male writer from the Meiji period  who  developed  a  sense  of  female  subjectivity  in  his  works.  Kafū’s  critical  outlook,  based  on binary constructions and the flexibility to move in between those binaries, allowed him to adopt a feminist perspective on the position of women in Japanese society. Applying the term ‘feminist’ to a Meiji writer is not new – Rebecca Copeland described the narrator of ‘The Broken Ring’ (Koware yubiwa, 1891) by the female author Shimizu Shikin (1868–1933) as ‘an outspoken feminist aware of the inequities around her and determined not to play the role of silent victim’ (2000: 6). While Shikin, Kafū and others would not have used the word  95

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‘feminist’ themselves, neither would they have described literature in terms of Orientalism, Occidentalism or queer theory, all of which frameworks have usefully been applied to literature of the period in order to shed further light on underlying structures of social and political power. If the Meiji-Taishō era cemented what people thought of as ‘great literature’, and this  process took place in a gendered construction of nation and society, then it is particularly useful to examine a male author of this period who wrote against the grain.2 On  the  surface,  Kafū  seems  an  unlikely  candidate  for  a  feminist  reading.  Most  women  in his works are prostitutes, geisha and dance-hall girls – typical characters constructed as objects to male desire. Indeed, Kafū is widely seen as a womanizer, a geisha aficionado, and a  defendant in posthumous obscenity trials.3 And yet, the women in his novels and stories show astounding strength in the face of societal pressure and discrimination, reducing the male protagonist to an awe-struck observer or prompting cynical overviews of society from the omniscient narrator. In earlier work I pointed out the possibility of reading Kafū’s depiction of  women through a feminist lens, prompted by Mochida Nobuko’s view of a ‘feminine Kafū’,  whose love of nature, independent strength and hatred of war resonate well with contemporary female readers.4 Stephen Snyder’s work argues more strongly for Kafū as a critic of patriarchal  Taishō society (2007: xii). While Kafū’s personal life and notoriety suggest a man obsessed  with desire for the female form, his literature tells another tale, of a man concerned with social inequality in the real lived experience of women as human beings. This  chapter  looks  more  closely  at  four  works,  to  examine  the  idea  of  Kafū  as  a  writer  who fully recognized the subjectivity of women. Kafū’s earliest novels from 1902–3 featured  women as main characters, but followed the model of Émile Zola’s Naturalist plots, where  the ingénue is drawn into a life of degradation through a combination of poor heredity and environment. Kafū was thus interested in the socially outcast woman as main character, but in  early works she remained an object in the text. His time abroad would make him think more critically about divisions in society, focusing on differences of class, race and gender. Two stories written in America and France examine the figure of the woman as an object gazed upon by men. ‘The Inebriated Beauty’ (Suibijin, 1908) and ‘The Snake Charmer’ (Hebitsukai, 1909) are thoughtful explorations of the racial and sexualized Other, with the woman occupying a marginalized position in society. On his return to Japan, Kafū would focus on Japanese  women, marginalized not because of their race but by their very position as women. The story ‘May Darkness’ (Satsuki yami, 1912) and the novel During the Rains (Tsuyu no atosaki, 1931) show a more mature writer analysing power relations in patriarchal society and the role of women as sex workers in a capitalist economy. Taken together, these four works show the development of Kafū’s feminist perspective.

Women abroad: denying the male gaze ‘The Inebriated Beauty’ was published in June 1905, later included in the collection Tales of America (Amerika monogatari, 1908). The story has been analysed for its Orientalist gaze, and the sexual/racial objectification of the mixed-blood woman in the centre of the narrative.5 She first appears in a piece of art hanging on a wall at the exhibition at the Saint Louis World’s Fair in 1904. She is nude, reclining on a couch, her skin flushed with intoxication, eyes half closed. The narrator ‘I’ (jibun) gazes on the painting while his friend S describes his masterpiece. He says the painting is based on a real woman, with whom his acquaintance Mantel had an affair.6 The story is told through a complex set of brackets: Mantel’s story is in the centre, told by S, whose tale is related by jibun, whose journey around America is being written by Kafū. There are thus four men narrating the tale of the woman, constructing her in written text,  96

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retold memories and painted art. The woman herself remains a completely constructed object, never appearing in the main narrative. The bracketed narrative structures of Tales of America have been criticized as unwieldy, and here they act as the mechanism by which the woman is contained as an object. However, the bracketed narrative is also the key to understanding Kafū’s critique.7 Kafū’s writerly distance from the bracketed characters allows him to expose their weaknesses through their behaviour and comments. The Frenchman Mantel is revealed as racist, when S relates his use of racial epithets and derogatory terms to refer to Jewish and AfricanAmerican people (Nagai 2000: 40). S also reveals himself to be shallow and vulgar, spitting in the exhibition hall, chain-smoking, wearing flashy clothes and boasting about his mastery of art. He is just as concerned about race as his friend Mantel, boasting of his ‘pure’ French bloodline and criticizing Americans for their uncivilized ways (39). In the face of this bombast, the narrator remains silent. We are not given his view of the painting, or his reaction to the story of Mantel’s affair with the woman. He remains silent to the end.8 This prompts our curiosity. What does the narrator think about all this? His description of the woman in the painting suggests he finds her attractive, but he makes no spoken comment that we can analyse. However, Kafū himself provides commentary and judgement in the events of the central  story: Mantel, the racist, dies as a ‘sacrifice’ to the woman and her sexual power. When he tries to break off the affair by avoiding her, he is instead caught in the inexorable grip of her power, and finds himself walking to her rooms in a daze. He later dies a solitary death in Italy, drained of his life essence (44). The woman remains free to live her own life in the dance-halls of Saint Louis, ultimately uncontained by either the frame around her portrait or by the distortions of rumour. Minami Asuka (2007: 50–58) has examined ‘The Inebriated Beauty’ in terms of Orientalism and  colonialist  history,  showing  how  Kafū  threw  nationalist  power  dynamics  into  relief  against the Louisiana Purchase International Exposition of 1904. The ‘mixed blood’ woman is described in terms of a domestic animal, a Turkish or Persian fairytale, and an uncivilized sexual being, echoing Orientalist rhetoric. The figure of the woman in the story is more symbolic than real, complicated by Kafū’s analysis of Orientalist power structures in both literature and  real-world geopolitics. In other words, Kafū is talking about much more than men and women  here, caught up as he is in figuring out Japan’s place in the world in relation to the ‘Orient’ and the ‘Occident’.9 Ueno Chizuko sees feminism itself as bound up in the broader binary system of Orientalism: To sum up, we find ourselves trapped in a vicious circle that oscillates between Orientalism and reverse Orientalism. Feminism as a cultural product can not escape from this closed framework. (Buckley 1997: 300) In Ueno’s view, Orientalism is such a pervasive, all-encompassing closed structure that feminism will always be subsumed within it. Similarly, in ‘The Inebriated Beauty’, gender dynamics must share space with other concerns about racial constructs and Orientalist rhetoric. However, Orientalism in itself is not a closed structure.10 As I have argued elsewhere, Kafū’s work as a whole demonstrates the possibility of a flexible position, crossing and recrossing boundaries as he travelled from Japan to America to Europe, through the Middle East and Asia back to Japan again. His narrators occupy an uncomfortable liminal position, as highly educated Japanese men who feel more affinity to European writers than to their regular Japanese countrymen. Kafū writes about ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ alike as an external  97

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observer, trying to define his own position in relation to them.11 Kafū problematizes binary systems, playing with the various different positions a person may occupy on axes between extreme poles of identity. These axes can be described in terms of gender, race, class, sexuality, even sanity, along which we position ourselves and are simultaneously positioned by others. The complexity of such intersecting binary systems may be seen as one of the primary mechanisms driving Tales of America.12 Although this complexity obscures the gender constructions in ‘The Inebriated Beauty’, it also opens the way for a critical examination of gender in later works. The woman-as-object in the centre of ‘The Inebriated Beauty’ is not a feminist subject, but Kafū has cast a critical eye on men, and the many ways in which their  discourse encapsulates women. The role of women was hotly debated in the Meiji period, with public figures like Fukuzawa Yukichi and Nakamura Masanao promoting the ideal of the ‘good wife, wise mother’ (ryōsai kenbo), an educated woman who could contribute more fully to society and the nation (Koyama 2013). At the same time, a Tokugawa-period dichotomy of ‘mother’ versus ‘sexual being’ persisted, setting the image of the good, pure wife at home (or in a sanctioned public role) against that of the sexually available woman outside the home.13 Female and male authors alike wrote against this dualistic discourse. Iwamoto Yoshiharu (1863–1942) and Wakamatsu Shizuko (1864–1896) endorsed companionate and loving marriage, while the poetry of Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) combined images of motherhood and powerful sensuality.14 Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–1896) portrayed prostitutes in a sympathetic light, as did Nagai Kafū in Tales of America – for example, Annie from ‘Shelter in the Snow’ (Yuki no yadori) was conned into leaving her rural home to turn tricks on Broadway. Kafū also had a three-year relationship with  the prostitute Edyth from Washington D.C., who continued to write him letters after he travelled to France. The figure of the male writer dallying with prostitutes in the demimonde was a great staple of French Naturalist writing, and Kafū certainly draws on this tradition. Prostitutes  in Kafū’s works are treated as objects by men, but are also deserving of human dignity. Men  who treat women as objects come under scrutiny, revealed as shallow, foolish and even cruel. Further, Kafū engages directly with the Meiji discourse on the role of women, disrupting the  dualistic structure by showing how women can occupy more than one role at a time. ‘The Snake Charmer’, first published in November 1908 and later collected in Tales of France (Furansu monogatari,  1909),  is  one  of  six  stories  from  Kafū’s  time  in  Lyon.  One  summer evening, the narrator jibun strolls around the suburbs and enters a tavern, where he learns that the carnival has come to town. The narrator is seized by romantic visions of the Romani people: ‘Wanderer. Nomad. Drifter. Ah, how melancholy and nostalgic is the sound of these words that echo so deep in my heart!’ (KZ 3.390)15 He imagines that such wanderers are free to die without a sense of duty to any family, while their companions can abandon the body on the roadside as they travel onwards. Both men and women are depicted as ‘ignorant and cruel, deeply jealous, living their dirty, disorderly lives in their circus carts’ and easily falling into swordfights over matters of love (390). The narrator reveals his biased view of the Romani people, a persecuted Other in Europe. To the narrator (and to Kafū himself, it seems),  the Romani are merely ‘gypsies’. Unlike Mantel’s view of African-Americans and Jewish people in ‘The Inebriated Beauty’, exposed by bracketed narration to be racist and offensive, the narrator’s view of gypsies in ‘The Snake Charmer’ is never undercut by anything in the text or the structure. The snake charmer appears in the third chapter of the story. As a touter calls out some other attractions – ‘giant snakes from the South Seas, great crocodiles from Africa, Indian giant bats!’ – a woman stands dramatically and takes the stage, with a strong and mysterious presence: ‘a poisonous shade of crimson on her pursed lips, the inky colour slashed under the 98

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lower lids of her large eyes making her whole appearance even more fearsome’ (395). The woman appears at first to be naked, but is wearing a flesh-coloured leotard. ‘Just as I was thinking she must be over thirty, there was a whisper in the crowd: “A fine woman!”’ (395). It is clear from the audience’s reaction that she has a powerful erotic aura. The woman herself ignores everyone, staring out into the distance above their heads: From a wooden crate at her feet, the woman nonchalantly brought out four or five small snakes grasped in both hands, and after wrapping them about her body – that pure white neck, both arms and both thighs – she stood there unsmiling, unspeaking, fixing her dark gaze without a single blink. (395) Her performance over, the snake charmer prods the touter in the shoulder for a cigarette and returns to her chair, donning her mantle and smoking silently, denying the gaze of audience and narrator alike. The wording is interesting, as her eyes ‘do not reflect even the existence’ of an audience (kenbutsujin no sonzae sae utsujinu), as if the surface of her eye would not show any reflection at all (396). The eye is opaque – not a window into the soul but a shuttered panel protecting the self within. The narrator encounters the gypsy encampment again in the autumn. He tiptoes carefully around the camp so as not to disturb the sleeping men or frighten the women. One woman sits in the fading October sunlight, surrounded by small children, concentrating on her sewing. Her figure is soft, with no corset, bare shoulders covered by a dirty shawl. It is the snake charmer, appearing completely different in her domestic role. As she picks up her crying baby to soothe it, the narrator peeks inside her wagon, which shows no sign of a man’s presence. He is then overcome with melancholy: Somehow, I felt strangely sad. The figure of a mother holding her baby. Perhaps that was the cause. I could say that it was, or then again I could say that it wasn’t. Or perhaps deciding it was ‘sad’ was not quite right. Let’s rephrase, and just say that I felt a kind of faint gloomy emotion, that was like sadness. (400) Kafū draws attention to the narrator’s status as teller of the tale – ‘Let’s rephrase’ (to iinaoshite okō) is a surprising intrusion. The narrator seems to be struggling with how to frame his appraisal of the situation, and his emotional response to what he has seen. The narrator’s struggle may come from the incongruity of two female roles that are separate in the man’s head but come together in the one person of the snake charmer – the sexualized image of the performer and the ‘good mother’ image of the woman holding her baby. The snake charmer’s embodiment of both images at the same time challenges Meiji discourse, disrupting male understanding of how women function in society. In the last few lines of the story the narrator is rendered almost mute. He goes home and the story stops. The narrator’s reaction and silencing show Kafū’s focus shifting to the possibility of flexible positioning for the female  individual. Without being relegated to only one role, women can inhabit many different positionings at one time – just as the male narrator is seen to do throughout Tales of America and Tales of France. I believe that this is the beginning of female subjectivity in Kafū’s writing. Both these stories have an international dynamic, with a Japanese visitor observing the central female figure from an external position. Both narrators conjure an Orientalist fantasy world for the women to inhabit, in the many references to Turkey and Arabia in 99

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‘The Inebriated Beauty’ and the fierce life of the ‘Bohemian’ race in ‘The Snake Charmer’. In both stories the sexual power of the woman is mediated through a racial lens, and the women remain objects to the narrator’s gaze. While the snake charmer can deny his gaze when she is on stage, staring out into the distance, she is not aware of being seen in the encampment. She also remains silent, even as she renders the narrator mute. While he remained abroad, Kafū’s  view of women would be complicated by race and visions of the foreign Other. However, when  Kafū  returned  to  Japan  in  1909,  his  immediate  attention  turned  to  critique  of  Meiji  modernity and all its ills. One of his targets was patriarchal society, and as a vehicle for his critique, his female characters became more convincing. Being in Japan also removed the racial mediation from the construction, producing a stronger focus on gender-based power relations in the text.

Women at home: subjectivity within the patriarchy Kafū’s returnee stories, written in 1909–10, chronicle the changing face of Tokyo in the rapid  modernization of late Meiji. The characters move around town, by street or waterway, covering great distances in the expanding city. The main characters are male, whether they are characters in novels like The River Sumida (Sumidagawa, 1909) or a thinly disguised Kafū as  narrator, as in Diary of a Retur...