Before Identity

The Question of Method in Japan Studies

Richard F. Calichman

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781438482149, 9781438482132
• eBook ISBN: 9781438482156
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: Literature

Aims to introduce a greater degree of theoretical rigor to the discipline of Japan studies as a whole.

Before Identity represents the first attempt to provide a comprehensive examination of the methodological ground of Japan studies. At its most basic level, the field presupposes the immediate empirical existence of an entity known as the "Japanese people" or "Japanese culture," from which it then carves out its various objects of inquiry. Richard F. Calichman attempts to show that this presupposition is itself ineluctably bound up with modern forms of knowledge formation, thereby enlarging the scope of what is meant by modernity. In this way, he aims to bring about a heightened level of theoretical-critical vigilance in the field.

Calichman explores the methodological commitments implied or expressed in the work of a range of writers and scholars-Murakami Haruki, Komori Y?ichi, Harry Harootunian, Tomi Suzuki, Alan Tansman, and Dennis Washburn-and how such commitments have shaped and limited the field. If theoretical issues in Japan studies are not subjected to this sort of in-depth scrutiny, Calichman argues, then the field will continue to remain ghettoized relative to other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, which have typically been more receptive to conceptual discourse. By showing that scholarly inquiry must begin not at the level of the object but rather at the more fundamental level of methodology, Calichman aims to introduce a greater degree of theoretical rigor to the discipline of Japan studies as a whole.

Chapter 1

Remembering Kafka

Between Murakami Haruki and Komori Yōichi

My job is to arrange things in the right order. I make sure that results come after their causes. I make sure that meanings don’t get conflated with each other. I make sure that the past comes before the present. I make sure that the future comes after the present. Well, I suppose it’s alright if things get a little out of order.

—Murakami Haruki1

Introduction

The astonishing domestic and international success of Murakami Haruki’s 2002 novel, Umibe no Kafuka [Kafka on the shore], would be critically appraised several years later by literary critic Komori Yōichi in his 2006 book-length study, Murakami Haruki ron: ‘Umibe no Kafuka’ wo seidoku suru [On Murakami Haruki: A close reading of ‘Kafka on the shore’]. Komori, who first rose to prominence in the field of modern Japanese literature in 1988 with the publication of two widely influential works, Buntai to shite no monogatari [Narrative as literary style] and Kōzō to shite no katari [Narration as structure], declares that Murakami’s novel must be understood contextually on the basis of the historical aftermath of 9/11. Noting that the novel was published exactly one day prior to the first anniversary of the series of terrorist attacks that occurred in the United States on September 11, 2001, Komori writes, “The very act of the book’s publication played a performance that momentarily recalled to readers the memory of 9/11, which took place in the real world, only to then draw their consciousness into the fictional world of [Murakami’s] own novel, making them forget that memory.”2

Echoing the criticism of Murakami’s oeuvre by a number of other left-wing critics, Komori specifically faults Umibe no Kafuka for its effacement of historical memory. Certain writers, as for example Natsume Sōseki, help us apprehend the past with greater depth and urgency by virtue of the sophistication of their fictional techniques as well as their general awareness of the politicality inherent in the act of literature. Murakami, by contrast, diverts the reader’s attention away from the demands of the past by creating what Komori regards as a politically vacuous fictional world. While the external fact of the novel’s publication date may have been strategically intended to evoke some type of historical linkage with the events of 9/11, the internal dynamics of the work appear, from Komori’s perspective, to erase that link by preying upon the reader’s consciousness, displacing his or her focus on historical memory, and encouraging a lack of vigilance in the form of historical forgetting.

In his denunciation of Murakami, Komori finds support in the words of the novelist Kakuta Mitsuyo. Writing in the literary journal Gunzō in 2002, Kakuta describes reading Umibe no Kafuka while watching television coverage of the previous year’s 9/11 terrorist attacks. As she reports, the anxiety produced by these two activities was of such intensity that she considered canceling a trip abroad for fear that her plane might be targeted; similarly, she recalls a friend’s inability to open the seal of a parcel of books sent from the United States out of concern that the box may contain traces of anthrax bacteria. Kakuta concludes that her sense of fear stems from what she refers to, in a striking phrase, as Murakami’s “intention of unintentional violence” (bōryokuteki na ishinaki ishi).3 Komori emphasizes this fear by contrasting it with the overwhelmingly positive reception of the book in Japan, where readers have consistently described it as providing a sense of “solace” (iyashi) and “relief” (sukui). How is it possible that Murakami’s novel can yield such contradictory readings? For Komori, Kakuta’s response to Umibe no Kafuka represents a minority voice that must not be drowned out by the vast number of readers who, in the wake of 9/11, turn to the novel for a sense of reassurance and emotional comfort in the face of an otherwise frightening historical reality. The widespread acclaim for the novel instills in Komori a “strong apprehension” and “powerful sense of crisis,” as he writes, for he views this response as symptomatic of an increasing political apathy found throughout present-day Japan.

Komori notes that the publication of Umibe no Kafuka was accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign that deployed various resources from the internet. Moreover, the commercial pressures brought to bear on readers received tacit support from the Japanese government. Here, Komori refers to remarks made shortly after the book’s appearance by the psychologist Kawai Hayao, who as director of the Agency for Cultural Affairs (Bunkachō) played a leading role in Japanese national education. Praising Umibe no Kafuka as “great narrative fiction,” Kawai goes on to quote a passage that appears at the end of the novel about “looking at the painting and listening to the wind” as image-based activities that are somehow capable of endowing life with a greater sense of purpose and meaning.4 Komori critically summarizes Kawai’s words as follows: “Emphasize images rather than language, and particularly such corporeal or pre-reflective (shintaika sareta) images as ‘listening to the wind.’ ” In his response to Kawai, Komori once again appeals to the notion of consciousness: “If language is consciousness, then images encompass the realm of the unconscious, and corporeal or pre-reflective images are linked even more deeply to this unconscious realm.”5

In his reflections on historical memory as well as in his engagement with the views of Kakuta Mitsuyo and Kawai Hayao, Komori is keen to stress the importance of critical vigilance in our approach to Umibe no Kafuka. With the support of a variety of commercial and state forces, Murakami’s novel has achieved unprecedented recognition at a historical juncture in which the events of 9/11 and the subsequent “War on Terror” have produced a sense of increasing global instability. A rigorous understanding of Umibe no Kafuka must begin by situating the work against the background of this larger violence: “In those countries where Umibe no Kafuka has become popular, a common social and spiritual pathology has been spreading since ‘9/11’ in 2001, and the novel has been consumed as a commodity that brings about ‘relief,’ ‘succor,’ and ‘solace’ for that pathology. It is the standpoint of the present book that we must not accept this situation as ‘something positive.’ ”6 This large-scale “pathology,” Komori argues, reveals certain problems endemic to contemporary society, problems that require rational analysis so that we may better grasp its causes and possible forms of treatment. The false promise of emotional consolation held out by Murakami’s novel must be resisted, for it encourages a form of complacency and even infantilization that leaves intact our existing sociopolitical structures. In this regard, Kawai’s focus on sensory images is dismissed as a mere withdrawal from conscious political engagement in favor of an unconscious acceptance of institutional reality. Komori regards the unconscious as a site of prereflective corporeality in which consciousness remains stunted, prevented from developing beyond the limits of the body such as to expand its critical faculties and achieve greater awareness of the surrounding world. Consciousness is associated with historical memory, and this is contrasted with the forgetting of the past and dulling of critical vigilance that appear initially in Umibe no Kafuka, but is then repeated in Kawai’s celebration of the novel as well as, more generally, the work’s global commercial success. Komori’s project in Murakami Haruki ron: ‘Umibe no Kafuka’ wo seidoku suru consists in awakening the reader from the slumber of this unconscious forgetting so that we may confront literature and the historical reality that encompasses it with a greater responsibility to the past.

Reflections on Method

In order to better grasp the stakes of Komori’s approach to Murakami’s novel, we must first consider the broader issue of Komori’s methodological commitments in his understanding of literature. Some of the clearest examples of the theoretical foundations that undergird his interpretative practice are found in two early works, Kōzō to shite no katari and Dekigoto to shite no yomu koto [Reading as event]. In the former text, Komori undertakes an analysis of literature on the basis of the interrelated notions of writing and reading. He examines these notions in the course of explicating the literary formalism of the modernist writer Yokomitsu Riichi, as can be seen in the following extended passage:

It is no exaggeration to claim that the logical cornerstone of Yokomitsu’s ‘formalism’ is to be found in the single word ‘writing’ (moji). For example, such contemporary French thinkers as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Derrida have made a radically conceptual expansion of the word écriture, with its everyday meanings of written language, written letters, writings, the act of writing, and handwriting. Just as they have sought to enact a structural shift in the world’s knowledge of this term, so too did Yokomitsu try to construct a theoretical strategy for his notion of ‘formalism’ by expanding the concept of ‘writing.’ … He poses the question of readership in the process of receiving ‘writing’ in the form of linguistic ‘traces’ or residual ‘material forms’ that are severed from the ‘author’ as parent in the sense of the source of expression. … As Yokomitsu states, ‘We look at a newspaper. Yet even without looking at it, the newspaper contains merely forms in the sense of engraved writing, which appear simply like meaningless stones. Now when we look at that newspaper, we for the first time perceive the content determined by this writing, which originating in the forms of engraved writing as arranged in the newspaper is completely different from stones’. … In this sense, the ‘writing’ that is ‘simply like meaningless stones’ appears as spatialized ‘material forms’ that are completely different from ‘language’ that appears in the process of expression whereby the expresser tries at each instant to grasp the temporal succession of consciousness. … In order to once again recover this ‘object’s’ function as language, that is, in order to restore to life dead language or the linguistic corpse, ‘we’ readers must ‘look’ at that ‘writing.’ Only when the reader ‘looks’ at ‘writing,’ perceives it in its status as ‘writing,’ sets in motion its interpretive codes and contexts as linguistic signs, incorporating it into his own continuous flow of consciousness in the Bergsonian sense of durée, can we ‘for the first time’ ‘perceive the content determined by this writing, which is completely different from stones’ that exist, and which emerges from ‘the forms of writing.’ This is Yokomitsu’s claim.7

At first glance, these lines may appear to have little in common with Komori’s critical reading of Murakami. While the contexts are indeed quite different, there can nevertheless be discerned an underlying attention to what might be called ideological concealment that is pivotal to Komori’s project. Just as the widespread reception of Umibe no Kafuka in terms of “solace” and “relief” masks a dynamics of violence, as Komori indicates in referring to Kakuta Mitsuyo’s response to the novel, so too does the traditional understanding of writing and reading depend upon a concept of expressionism. This is a concept centered on the ideal of communicative transparency that dismisses the possibility of misreading and misunderstanding as mere empirical accidents that do not impinge upon the essential transmission of meaning in intersubjectivity. As Komori recalls, such expressionism posits “the ‘author’ as parent in the sense of the source of expression.” Whatever temporal or spatial gap may come to intervene in the relation between the parent-author and child-text must be regarded as strictly provisional, for the latter in its status as emissary or representative of the former can in principle only give itself through the larger identity shared between these two. Because the text contains within it the core of meaning as intended by the author, it presents itself as intelligible to the reader. As a vehicle of expression that is initially animated by the author, writing awaits the reanimation of the reader, whose understanding of the author’s original meaning is enabled by the fact that the act of reanimation in reading is ultimately nothing more than a repetition or doubling of—that is to say, a return to—the source. For Komori, the animation of meaning that unites the otherwise distinct acts of writing and reading conceals the complex manner in which writing presents itself to be read.

According to Komori, this classical notion of expression comes to be disturbed by Yokomitsu Riichi’s strategic expansion of the concept of writing—an expansion that Komori compares to the theoretical development of the otherwise everyday term écriture in contemporary French thought. The rethinking of writing takes as its point of departure the interstitial space that exists between the writer as source of meaning and the reader as its intended recipient or destination. In this account, what is given to the reader are merely the “traces” (konseki) or “material forms” (busshitsuteki keishiki) that remain after being “severed” from the author. What has come to be naturalized as a simple transmission of meaning from writer to reader is now discovered to contain an element of materiality that risks being overlooked in this model of intersubjective communication. In his example of the newspaper, Yokomitsu stresses that the page of print “contains merely forms in the sense of engraved writing (chōkokuteki na moji), which appear simply like meaningless stones.” Komori conceives of this material remainder of writing in the specific terms of death and spatiality: the traces left by the original writer are nothing more than “dead language,” a “linguistic corpse” that in and of itself signifies nothing. From the time they appear in the world, detached from the animating temporality of the writer, such lifeless marks give themselves strictly as instances of bare spatiality: “The ‘writing’ that is ‘simply like meaningless stones’ appears as spatialized ‘material forms’ that are completely different from ‘language’ that appears in the process of expression whereby the expresser tries at each instant to grasp the temporal succession of consciousness.” Just as writing signals a passage from temporal life to spatial death through the expressive act in which language leaves the writer and falls into the material world, so too can writing once again rise to the level of meaningful language (as opposed to “meaningless stones”) through the animating act of reading. As Komori concludes, “Only through the reader’s durée … that is, the setting into motion of consciousness in the form of time, can ‘writing’ in the sense of the non-linguistic spatial object for the first time be restored to life in the form of language.”8

Komori’s elucidation of Yokomitsu’s formalism through focus on the concept of writing represents a vital theoretical intervention that raises the level of discourse on Japanese literature considerably beyond the limits of traditional empirical scholarship. Nevertheless, we would be remiss not to point out that certain problems do appear in his reading of Yokomitsu, problems that are not merely restricted to this or that particular object of inquiry but indeed form part of Komori’s general method of literary interpretation. Despite his attempt to liberate the question of writing from a narrow expressionist conception in which the parent-author is posed against the child-text over which he retains full control, Komori replicates this same binary framework in both his sympathetic or productive approach to Yokomitsu and his far more critical commentary on Murakami. Komori is by no means unaware of the trap of binarity, as can be confirmed, for example, in his early study Buntai to shite no monogatari, where he criticizes Freud for “attempting to describe the binary opposition between man and woman as the binary between the penis and vagina, presence (genzen) and absence.”9 As we witnessed in his attack on Murakami, however, Komori follows a broadly Manichean approach in his reading of Umibe no Kafuka. The novel is grasped either as a source of comfort and emotional relief, as can be seen in the work’s general reception as well as in the remarks of the psychologist and government bureaucrat Kawai Hayao regarding the book’s putatively therapeutic value, or as a site of violence that provokes fear, as attested to by the novelist Kakuta Mitsuyo and confirmed by Komori’s own impressions. No doubt Murakami’s work has given rise to a wide array of responses, but Komori seems intent on narrowing the range of possible readings to the unilaterally adulatory or the no less unilaterally negative or disparaging. Given that a literary text is at issue here, however, the oppositional structure of Komori’s reading (either/or, for or against, good or bad) immediately raises the question of whether Umibe no Kafuka or indeed any work of fiction can justly be seen through such a reductive lens.

This presentation of Murakami’s novel in such starkly contrastive terms lays the groundwork for more specific instances of binarity. From Komori’s perspective, Umibe no Kafuka is to be denounced for its violent erasure of historical memory. This work, as he remarks in lines previously quoted, “momentarily recalled to readers the memory of 9/11, which took place in the real world, only to then draw their consciousness into the fictional world of [Murakami’s] own novel, making them forget that memory.” Here memory is conceived in an exclusively dualistic sense, such that it can only be “recalled” (sōki saseta) or forgotten (“making them forget”: wasuresasete iku). Memory is not regarded as taking place along a spectrum in which the act of recall always remains vulnerable to forgetting, just as forgetting might at any time suddenly yield to recall. The possibility of relationality between memory and forgetting, whereby each remains essentially exposed to the other in a kind of mutual contaminatability, appears to be foreclosed in advance. Indeed, Komori’s unduly rigid conception of memory eventually leads him at one point in his reading of Murakami to propose a literary typology between “Novels that Recall Memory and Novels that Omit Memory,”10 as he entitles a chapter section in his book. In this view, the interrelated questions of time and subjectivity in their indispensable role in memory come to be dismissed in favor of a purely objectivist account according to which certain things in the world in and of themselves give rise to memory while other things are innately or naturally disposed to erase it.

In the foregoing passage, the opposition between memory and forgetting is reinforced by the division between the exteriority of what Komori calls the “real world” and the interiority of Murakami’s “fictional world.” Consciousness, which Komori insists should be authentically directe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Remembering Kafka: Between Murakami Haruki and Komori Yōichi
• Chapter 2 The Double Pull of History and Philosophy: Reading Harootunian
• Chapter 3 The Question of Subjectivity in North American Japanese Literary Studies
• Coda Some Brief Remarks on Responsibility
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover