The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature

The Subversion of Modernity

Susan Napier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134803354
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Modern Japan's repressed anxieties, fears and hopes come to the surface in the fantastic. A close analysis of fantasy fiction, film and comics reveals the ambivalence felt by many Japanese towards the success story of the nation in the twentieth century.
The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature explores the dark side to Japanese literature and Japanese society. It takes in the nightmarish future depicted in the animated film masterpiece, Akira, and the pastoral dream worlds created by Japan's Nobel Prize winning author Oe Kenzaburo. A wide range of fantasists, many discussed here in English for the first time, form the basis for a ground-breaking analysis of utopias, dystopias, the disturbing relationship between women, sexuality and modernity, and the role of the alien in the fantastic.

1
Introduction

Fantasies are never ideologically “innocent.”

(Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion)

In 1908 Natsume Sōseki,¹ perhaps the greatest of modern Japanese writers, published an eerie fantasy called Yume jūya (trans. Ten Nights of Dream (1974)) consisting of ten short visionary stories purporting to be dreams. In the haunting “Dream of the Sixth Night” the dreaming “I” watches absorbedly as Unkei, a master sculptor from the thirteenth century, carves immense “guardian gods” on the gate of a Tokyo temple. Inspired by Unkei’s brilliance, the protagonist returns home to try to carve gods out of the wooden logs in his garden. His attempt is a failure. As he relates it:

I chose the largest log and began to carve with great spirit. But unfortunately, I found no god within it…. I dug through every log in the woodpile, one after another, but nary a one contained a guardian god. And finally it dawned on me that guardian gods were not, after all, buried in trees of this present age [Meiji period in the original]; and thus I came to understand why Unkei is living to this day.

(p. 48)

I begin a discussion of the fantastic in Japanese literature with this dream because it foregrounds a number of the most important aspects of the modern Japanese fantastic, including the contradictory presence of the Japanese past. “Dream of the Sixth Night” is suffused with a nostalgia for a purer, richer past, a past which is increasingly inaccessible to the modernizing Japan of the Meiji period (1868–1912) during which Sōseki wrote.

The narrative strategies Sōseki uses to describe this inaccessibility are far from traditional, however. Indeed, Ten Nights of Dream is so different from premodern fantasy literature that one critic has stated that “modern Japanese fantasy begins with Ten Nights of Dream.”² In its effective development of a surreal atmosphere of Otherness, combined with its imaginative use of the notion of dream itself, the work creates a liminal literary world which is clearly that of the twentieth century. It is a world which Freud or Jung would certainly have recognized in terms of its suffocating representation of such peculiarly modern anxieties as crises of identity and free-floating guilt, expressed through archetypal imagery.

But Ten Nights of Dream does more than reflect a generalized modern angst. Although the ten dreams use such universal fantastic strategies as dreams, metamorphoses, magical women, and magical other worlds, the work is also highly culturally specific to modern Japan. In this ability to be universally accessible yet culturally specific it shares some of the aspects of another, more famous, non-Western version of the fantastic, the magic realism of Latin America.

Latin American magic realism produces compelling archetypal fantasy while expressing the complex and tragic history of Latin America. Similarly, Sōseki and other writers of Japanese fantasy created works that appeal to non-Japanese readers at the same time as they used specifically Japanese elements to portray concerns particular to modern Japan. In the case of Sōseki’s Ten Nights of Dream, his ten short fantasies problematize in a memorably original fashion the question of what it is to be a modern Japanese, trapped in a world where the “guardian gods” have disappeared.

Sōseki’s fantastic dreams are also peculiarly apt representations of their period, the late Meiji, a time of enormous change in Japanese society. This period is typically viewed as the first chapter in Japan’s extraordinary success story, but Sōseki’s works deal with the dark side of the Meiji success. These darker elements include the increasing oppressiveness of technology, the isolation of the individual, and the seemingly permanent identity crisis suffered by the Japanese vis-à-vis the West.

Turning to the 1990s, such concerns may initially seem outmoded. If anything, the history of Japan since the Second World War has been a success story of even more impressive proportions. Indeed, post-war Japan itself has become something of a myth if not a full-blown fantasy.

In both Japan and other countries, the nation was seen by economists and sociologists as a “phoenix from the ashes”, rising from the defeat and devastation of the 1940s and early 1950s to become the “Japan as Number One” of the 1970s. To its own people, and to many non-Japanese observers as well, Japan seemed to embody both the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century. The “dream” side of a stable, harmonious, and prosperous society was perhaps best represented when Ezra Vogel’s 1978 book Japan as Number One (subtitled Lessons for America) became a bestseller in Japan while achieving the rank of required reading on numerous American university courses.

On the nightmare side, we might consider Ridley Scott’s 1982 dystopian film Blade Runner, whose dark opening scene is dominated by clearly Japanese images. The film portrays its down-and-out protagonist, a twenty-first-century detective, eating sushi in a bleak urban cityscape that is technically Los Angeles. But this is a Los Angeles in which, as Giulana Bruno describes it, “[t]he explosive Orient dominates, the Orient of yesterday incorporating the Orient of today. Over-looking the city is the ‘Japanese simulacrum’, the huge advertisement which alternates a seductive Japanese face and a Coca-Cola sign.”³

In Blade Runner the “Orient,” especially Japan, is seen in a dual role, as both “explosive” and “seductive.” In William Gibson’s (1984) classic cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, in contrast, the seductive side is lost. The reader follows the opening adventures of its computer-hacker protagonist through the high-tech wasteland of twenty-first-century Chiba, an industrial city outside of Tokyo. In Gibson’s vision this mazelike international city becomes a metaphor for the bleak postmodern culture his protagonist inhabits.

Other media visions of Japan are less international, although indubitably fantastic. A 1992 Newsweek article on Japan’s economic threat included a quotation referring to the Japanese as a potential race of “economic terminators.”⁴ The reference was to the American movie Terminator, about a high-tech monster that continuously comes back from the dead to crush its opponents, but the tone was parochial rather than cosmopolitan.

The Japanese themselves have created memorably bleak fantasy scenarios about their future. From the turn of the century Japanese readers and writers eagerly embraced the science fiction genre, but science fiction celebrations of Japanese modernization are few. Instead, dystopian visions of technology run amok and social and psychological collapse have been a consistent thread throughout twentieth-century Japanese science fiction.⁵

This trend has been even more obvious in film. In 1989, for example, just when Japan seemed to be riding high with its unprecedented bubble economy, the brilliant dystopian animation film Akira became the highest-grossing film in Japan. A few years later, with Japan mired in an apparently endless recession, Akira became a major cult favorite both in America and in England, its success due both to its exuberant postmodern celebrations of vivid metamorphoses and its remarkably well-realized vision of a grim twenty-first-century Japan.

Both internally and externally, then, images of Japan seem destined to be flavored with fantastic associations. Furthermore, these associations are both positive and negative. They range from the image of Japan as a Utopian world, in which modernity actually works, to the forbidding image of Japan as dystopian high-tech nightmare.

Modern Japan has also had a long and important tradition of mimetic fiction which has delved into the contradictory complexities of modern Japanese society. Even many of the writers discussed in this book are best-known for their works of realism. The realistic tradition in Japanese literature has already been widely studied, however, both in Japan and in the West. Furthermore, as I hope the above examples hint, it is my contention that it is the fantastic genre in the Japanese arts, from Sōseki’s brief, disturbing Ten Nights of Dream to Akira’s apocalyptic vision, that best encapsulates the contradictory state of modern Japan, in which capitalist success on an unprecedented scale clashes with a still unburied traditional culture.

This is not to say that every Japanese fantasy tells the same story. Although many works contain important common elements, there is also an immense and fascinating variety to the modern Japanese fantastic. In its strategies, its techniques, and finally in its messages the fantastic is multivalent. It also changes dramatically depending on the period.

Thus, while Sōseki’s “Dream of the Sixth Night” is an appropriate representative for Meiji Japan, perhaps the archetypal fantasy for contemporary Japan is Murakami Haruki’s Sekai no owari to h∏doboirudo wandΏrando (1985) (trans. Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991)). Told in a style that mixes Raymond Chandler with The Forbidden Planet (and thus a splendid reflection of the assimilation of Western influences on modern Japanese culture), the book portrays a future Japan which has, again, been abandoned by any sort of guardian spirit. But, unlike the implicit decision to continue living in the abandoned modern world expressed by the “I” of Sōseki’s work, the “I” in Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World ultimately decides to leave the outer high-tech world of modern late twentieth-century Japan to retreat into a fantasy Utopia inside his own mind.

When his other self in shadow form attempts to reason with him about this decision, the “I” explains: “I have responsibilities… I cannot forsake the people and places and things I have created…. This is my world.” In this late-twentieth-century world the protagonist feels that his responsibilities are to himself, not to a wider society or history.

Between these two poles, Sōseki’s dreamer who digs ever more frantically into wooden logs to carve out an ultimately unattainable past and resignedly accepts living in his present period, and Murakami’s bifurcated “I” who consciously abandons his present age to carve his own world inside his brain, lies close to a century of modern Japanese history. This has been a history arguably more psychically tumultuous than that of any other nation. Despite the recent developments in China, it is still Japan which stands alone at the nexus of modernization and Westernization, still the only non-Western country to be counted as an equal by the Western powers.

In its own way the idea of Japan itself is at the convergence of Utopian and fantastic traditions, a country whose economic success has defamiliarized the very notion of capitalist development by allowing the West to see itself through a glass darkly. The changes in Japan over the twentieth century have both echoed and amended the developments of the West, from the militarism of Meiji Japan to the imperialism of Taishō and early Shōwa. In the postwar period Japan (and Western observers) have seen the dawning and eventual triumph of a careerist, materialist consumer culture so widespread as to seem almost a parody of capitalism’s ultimate goal. Finally, in the 1990s with the rise of marginalized and subversive elements in Japanese society, the consumer dream seems now to contain elements of the dystopian nightmare such as the recent slaying of little girls by a young man supposedly inspired by his enormous video collection.

DEFINITIONS AND FUNCTIONS OF THE FANTASTIC

Given this extraordinary history it seems appropriate that the fantastic should be the vehicle most suited for understanding modern Japan. It is important, however, to understand more specifically how the fantastic works and its differences from mimetic or realistic fiction. Perhaps the most important difference is one of degree. While all fiction inherently defamiliarizes the “real,” the very raison d’être of fantastic fiction is its existence in contrast to the “real.”

The works discussed in this book all maintain a diverse, complex, and fascinating relationship to the “real”, in this case the “real” of twentieth-century Japan, its history, its society, and its official ideology. Occasionally they confirm the official world-view, even celebrate it. More frequently, their relationship is oppositional, but in a subtle and indirect fashion. In some cases these works escape from or compensate for the real in an implicit form of subversion. In other cases, however, they resist it, transgress it, and ultimately attempt explicitly to subvert it. The works discussed here vary greatly from one to the other but they all belong to the problematic and fascinating genre of the fantastic.

What is the fantastic? In writing this book I came across innumerable definitions. Many tend to equate it with wish-fulfillment fantasy and see the genre primarily as one of escape. David Hartwell, in an essay in the New York Times Book Review, puts it bluntly:

Fantasy promises escape from reality. It is characteristic of fantasy stories that they take the readers out of the real world of hard facts, hard objects and hard decisions into a world of wonders and enchantments.⁶

Hartwell is the descendant of a long line of critics on fantasy (often fantasy writers themselves) who not only see fantasy as escape but also applaud that particular function. One of the most famous of these writers is J.R.R.Tolkien, who asserts,

Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or, if and when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become any less real because the prisoner cannot see it.⁷

Tolkien’s notion of fantasy is a traditional, indeed moralistic one, but the function of the fantastic as wish-fulfillment is an important one in many of the Japanese works discussed here. Tolkien’s implicit notion of some transcendent “home” located, one presumes, within the fantastic, versus the “prison-like world outside” that seems to embody Tolkien’s vision of reality is a concept that is echoed in the works of many Japanese writers, especially those of earlier periods such as Tanizaki and Kawabata.

For some critics, fantasy, especially popular fantasy, is a dangerous instrument of control, subtly propounding a consensual world view that allows for but ultimately contains any thoughts of escape or rebellion. In this view fantasy is akin to a drug, “an agent of stasis”, as Peter Kramer says of psychotherapy and anti-depressants.⁸ This kind of palliative function of fantasy, what Jameson describes as the “legitimation of the existing order,”⁹ is also very much part of Japanese popular culture. Notable examples include such popular science fiction as the Gundam series, which is essentially a celebration of advanced technology and hegemonic warfare, or the Warau sērusman (Laughing Salesman) comics which use fantasies to drive home conservative messages.

Other critics completely ignore the ideological and moral implications of the fantastic, preferring to concentrate on its formal aspects as a genre. Of these more formalistic interpretations, the most well known and compelling is Tzvetan Todorov’s definition in his book The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1975). In Todorov’s theory, the fantastic is a limited genre mark...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature
• The Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• A Note On the Text
• 1: Introduction
• 2: Woman Found Encounters With Supernatural Women in Prewar Japanese Fantasy
• 3: Woman Lost: The Dead, Damaged, Or Absent Female in Postwar Fantasy
• 4: Desert of Mirrors: The Construction of the Alien in Modern Japanese Fantasy
• 5: Logic of Inversion: Twentieth-Century Japanese Utopias
• 6: The Dystopian Imagination: From the Asylum Through the Labyrinth to the End of the World
• 7: Conclusion: Is There a “Japanese” Fantastic?
• Bibliography
• Biographical Reference