Femininity, Self-harm and Eating Disorders in Japan

Navigating contradiction in narrative and visual culture

Gitte Marianne Hansen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317444381
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From the 1980s onwards, the incidence of eating disorders and self-harm has increased among Japanese women, who report receiving mixed messages about how to be women. Mirroring this, women's self-directed violence has increasingly been thematised in diverse Japanese narrative and visual culture.

This book examines the relationship between normative femininity and women's self-directed violence in contemporary Japanese culture. To theoretically define the complexities that constitute normativity, the book develops the concept of 'contradictive femininity' and shows how in Japanese culture, women's paradoxical roles are thematised through three character construction techniques, broadly derived from the doppelgänger motif. It then demonstrates how eating disorders and self-harm are included in normative femininity and suggests that such self-directed violence can be interpreted as coping strategies to overcome feelings of fragmentation related to contradictive femininity. Looking at novels, artwork, manga, anime, TV dramas and news stories, the book analyses both globally well known Japanese culture such as Murakami Haruki's literary works and Miyazaki Hayao's animation, as well as culture unavailable to non-Japanese readers. The aim of juxtaposing such diverse narrative and visual culture is to map common storylines and thematisation techniques about normative femininity, self-harm and eating disorders. Furthermore, it shows how women's private struggles with their own bodies have become public discourse available for consumption as entertainment and lifestyle products.

Highly interdisciplinary, it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese studies, Japanese culture and society and gender and women's studies, as well as to academics and consumers of Japanese literature, manga and animation.

1
Introduction

Women and mixed messages

The October 2009 cover of lifestyle magazine Papyrus features a portrait of Makishi Satoko, the famous Japanese pop singer, actor and author, known as Cocco. Although the magazine’s graphical layout and the cute lilac ballerina dress that she wears remind us of fashion-magazine covers, the constructed character (Cocco) is not normative – with her too thin body and the obvious cuts across her arms and chest, she embodies a sickly and abused character.¹ But Cocco is not just a victim. She is also a victimiser. As one fan tells me, Makishi’s struggles with anorexia and cutting are no secret; such self-directed violence has become part of her public persona, and these issues are in fact frequently central themes in Cocco’s lyrics, interviews and films, most recently in Tsukamoto Shinya’s film KOTOKO [translated as Kotoko] (2012), where she plays a mentally ill, self-harming mother. But while the image of a self-abused female character may be controversial on the cover of a lifestyle magazine, Makishi is just one among many women who paradoxically are both victims and victimisers in Japan, where the incidence of eating disorders and self-harm behaviour has been rising significantly since the 1980s (Katō 2004: viii; Pike and Borovoy 2004: 497; Matsumoto et al. 2004a).

By publishing Cocco on its front cover, Papyrus participates not only in the specific discourse surrounding the singer’s personal experiences with eating disorders and self-harm, but also in the broader discourse concerning the growing number of people who practise acts of self-induced starvation, regurgitation and cutting. Although in Japan the group of people who undertake acts of such self-directed violence is made up of individuals of all ages and social backgrounds, studies have shown that the vast majority are women (Pike and Mizushima 2005: 26; Matsumoto et al. 2004b). Regardless of whether these are school girls, workers or housewives, Japanese women engaged in such acts tend to collectively express that they get mixed and contradictory messages about norms related to femininity and about how to be women (Pike and Borovoy 2004: 498; Katō 2004: 132–6). Put differently, while anorexia, bulimia and wrist cutting are considered pathological and consequently diagnosed as clinical disorders, for the women who starve, cut or otherwise violate their own bodies, their acts are somehow tied to, and explained by, what it means to be ‘normal’.

Motivated by these women’s feelings, the overall purpose of this book is to examine the relationship between normative femininity and women’s self-directed violence in contemporary Japan. At first I found it curious that while Japanese women who harm their own bodies constitute a diverse group of individuals, they seem to share a collective experience of receiving contradictory messages. Then, as I began to examine normative femininity and its thematisation in contemporary Japanese culture, I came to realise that what these women were saying made much sense. As this book will show, although normativity today is highly complex and therefore cannot easily be defined, ‘navigating contradiction’ seems to be one of the core competences women are required to master.

Messages and cultural meanings about norms are produced and exchanged in every personal and social interaction in which individuals take part, increasingly through media (Hall 1997: 3). Leading researchers on eating disorders and self-harm in Japan have indeed recognised that, among other factors, discourses in the Japanese media play an important role in the problems women face with their own bodies (Yamaguchi and Matsumoto 2005: 659; Miller 2006: 161; Pike and Borovoy 2004: 503; Spielvogel 2003: 189; Asano 1996: 3). Although several studies focus on discourses ‘promoting’ eating disorders through the repetitive endorsement of the thin female ideal in, for example, Japanese women’s magazines and commercials (Miller 2006; Spielvogel 2003; Clammer 1995), it falls outside their aim to take into account thematisations of femininity and the female body in other genres such as literature, manga and anime, just as it is beyond their scope to consider the increasing thematisation of eating disorders and self-harm that is evident across contemporary Japanese narrative and visual culture. In this book, I am by contrast not only interested in examining what constitutes normative femininity, but also in examining how normative femininity has been thematised in Japanese culture (both narrative and visual culture) since the 1980s.² As I show, across genre and cultural hierarchies, stories and messages about diverse female characters who successfully navigate contradictions in both fictional worlds and representations of the real world are frequently available to recipients of Japanese culture through very specific thematisation techniques.

While my motivation for this book initially stemmed from concern over the continuous rise in eating disorders and self-harm, as well as women’s motivations for undertaking such self-directed violence, it is also driven by the increasing usage of these clinical disorders to promote the consumption of entertainment and lifestyle products. Although Makishi’s personal intention for displaying a self-abused Cocco may be to create awareness about this growing problem, for the editorial team of a commercial magazine such as Papyrus, an important reason for using a cover photo that explicitly depicts eating disorders and self-harm is surely to promote sales. But although the exposure of women’s self-abuse in this manner may seem controversial to most readers, Papyrus is not the only player in this market; in tandem with the rise of eating disorders and self-harm since the 1980s, women’s self-directed violence has increasingly been thematised in diverse Japanese narrative and visual culture. This includes not only explicit thematisations through real women’s experiences with anorexia, bulimia and cutting, as constructed in socio-clinical profiles, letter collections and internet blog discussions, but also through fictional female characters’ acts of self-induced starvation, regurgitation and cutting as depicted in literature, film, anime and manga, among others. Therefore, in addition to exploring how women’s self-harm and eating disorders relate to normative femininity, I examine the relationship between thematisations of normative femininity and women’s self-directed violence. Overall, three central questions guide this book: what constitutes contemporary normative Japanese femininity, how is normative femininity thematised in Japanese culture and how does self-directed violence and its thematisation relate to this norm? To explore these questions, this book is divided into two parts: ‘Normativity’ and ‘Self-directed violence’.

Part I examines contemporary normative femininity and its thematisation in diverse Japanese narrative and visual cultures. In Chapter 2, based on a social-constructivist approach to sex and gender, I begin by developing the most central concept of the book: ‘contradictive femininity’. While Japanese women today can pursue life in many different ways and normativity, as such, is difficult to define, contradictive femininity is useful to define theoretically the complexity of the ‘long gender leash’ that constitutes normative femininity in contemporary Japan. The chapter ends by proposing how this norm is thematised in practice via ‘double and multiple characters’, ‘extended characters’ and ‘transforming characters’ – three character-construction techniques that broadly derive from the doppelgänger motif due to their ability to construct several selves. The next three chapters develop the specifics of each of these techniques.

First, Chapter 3 demonstrates how contradictive femininity is thematised via the most typical type of the doppelgänger motif: ‘double and multiple characters’. The works and characters analysed in this chapter include the two Nanas in Yazawa Ai’s manga NANA (2000–9), the alter-ego construction in Kon Satoshi’s anime Papurika (2006) and the three friends in the TV drama Araundo 40 – chūmon no ōi onna-tachi (Yoshida 2008). By ‘teaming up’, these various characters form character units that reflect the complexities and paradoxes of the contemporary norm. Chapter 4 then exemplifies how contradictive femininity is thematised via ‘extended characters’, a technique paralleling the classic doppelgänger motif by linking a character from one distinct work as an extension of characters in earlier works. The works I analyse in this chapter are Kawakami Mieko’s short novel Chichi to ran (2010 [2007]) and its link to Higuchi Ichiyo’s short novel Takekurabe (1895–6), Otsuichi’s short story ‘Mukashi yūhi no kōen de’ (2006 [2001]) and its link to Abe Kōbo’s novel Suna no onna (1962), and links between several TV spots for the shinkansen rail service from the 1980s and 2000s. Despite the diverse plots and characters found in these works, as this chapter shows, the contemporary characters are de-subjectified and tied down by tradition through their links to earlier characters. Part I concludes with Chapter 5, which introduces the third character-construction technique: ‘transforming characters’. Through individual transformativity, this type of character thematises contradictive femininity by shifting between distinct multiple roles and mastering paradoxical competences. The works analysed in this chapter include Bandō Mariko’s how-to book Josei no hinkaku (2008 [2006]), Anno Moyoco’s manga series Hataraki-man (2004–7), the TV drama Bara-iro no seisen (Īda and Kikuchi 2011), Murakami Haruki’s short story ‘Nemuri’ (1990 [1989]) and news stories surrounding the Japanese women’s football team, Nadeshiko-Japan, after it won the World Cup in 2011. As the chapter shows, through acts of transformation, each of these diverse characters are hybrids who manage to do it all by themselves.

In Part II, I turn to women’s self-directed violence. Chapter 6 begins with an introduction to eating disorders and self-harm in the Japanese context. I then demonstrate how two key competences – appetite control and pain tolerance – are included in normative femininity, implying that the borderline between the normal and the sick is blurred. As I point out, unlike characters in narrative and visual culture, real women cannot physically multiply, extend or transform. However, by being both victim and victimiser, women who direct violence towards their own bodies can navigate contradiction and imitate the doppelgänger motif. The chapter therefore ends by suggesting how eating disorders and self-harm are a contemporary lifestyle, an alternative strategy to cope with contradictive femininity and overcome feelings of fragmentation.

The first half of Chapter 7 continues by exemplifying the extensive and varied explicit thematisations of eating disorders and self-harm in contemporary Japanese narrative and visual culture. Among other works, I consider various documentaries, Suenobu Keiko and Anno Moyoco’s manga, Kanehara Hitomi and Ogawa Yōko’s literary works and Aida Makoto’s artwork. This diversity across genre and cultural hierarchies demonstrates how women’s private struggles with their own bodies have become public discourse and entertainment. The second half of Chapter 7 develops a set of analytical markers that can be used as guides to expose storylines about female characters’ self-violent behaviour in contemporary Japanese culture, revealing how techniques used to thematise normative femininity – the three variations of the doppelgänger motif – also function to construct storylines about eating disorders and self-harm.

In Chapter 8, the markers are then used to expose embedded storylines about self-directed violence in works where these issues are not explicitly thematised: Miyazaki Hayao’s anime Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001) and Murakami Haruki’s short story ‘Midori-iro no kemono’ (1991). While Miyazaki’s young girl is linked to eating disorders through two competences – refusing to consume and expelling the consumed – Murakami’s housewife narrator’s acts of cutting and stabbing a green monster, which represents her own other self, mirror self-harm. Since the potential identifications in the two works are different, the chapter questions common understandings of Miyazaki’s female characters as good role models and Murakami’s as the opposite.

Chapter 9 concludes the main findings of the book and shows that when Japanese women with eating disorders and self-harm behaviour say they get mixed messages about femininity, two factors may explain the connection between their feelings and their self-harming acts. First, elements of eating disorders and self-harm are included in the contemporary norm: contradictive femininity. Second, techniques used to thematise contradictive femininity are similar to those used to thematise women’s self-directed violence: variations of the doppelgänger motif. By being both victims and victimisers, women who direct violence towards their own bodies come to imitate a contradictive-femininity-as-doppelgänger motif. Finally, to help navigate the many works spanning different genres and cultural hierarchies that are introduced throughout this book, an appendix is included that alphabetically lists brief notes regarding the authors and producers as well as publication data.

Whether falling within the category of normative femininity or of self-harm and eating disorders, I selected the works analysed in this book because their female characters are in one way or another navigating the complexities of contradictive femininity. However, as I will show, while some characters appear to be struggling, others are quite content and happy. The purpose of analysing works where female characters are constructed with mixed or contradictive ideas about femininity is to exemplify how contradictive femininity is thematically repeated in contemporary Japanese culture, transcending established boundaries of academic enquiry such as genre, cultural hierarchy and authorship. Although several other stories and messages about normative femininity and women’s self-directed violence may exist throughout Japanese culture, it is not the aim of this book to discuss or analyse any of these.

Furthermore, contemporary Japanese narrative and visual culture is not an easily defined field; it is in a state of constant change and ever increasing scope. This implies that a substantial number of potential works for analysis exists, and I acknowledge the impossibility inherent in accessing all relevant sources of post-1980s Japanese narrative and visual culture that thematises normative femininity and women’s self-directed violence. Although this necessarily precludes me from presenting a mutually exclusive, comprehensively exhaustive list of materials for analysis, the specific works analysed in this book have been selected to show diversity. Th...