Discourses of Seduction: History, Evil, Desire, and Modern Japanese Literature (review)

Hosea Hirata's collection of essays, Discourse of Seduction, is driven by desire, and it is written in a voice delirious with the attractions of text and words; the essays are also driven by concerns for memory and history and the scandals of desire and pleasure. In the first paragraphs of the book, Hirata makes clear that these forces are united by a burning question, itself infused by matters of seduction: "Why do I still read literature?" His question is given further precision as an inquiry into "Why am I still so madly in love with literature?" The answers are far-ranging as he circles around a number of figures canonical in the Japanese literary landscape: Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Murakami Haruki, Ōe Kenzaburō, Natsume Sō-seki, and Furui Yoshikichi (who seems something of an odd man out in this list), as well as critics Kobayashi Hideo and Karatani Kōjin. Western social theorists also orbit these readings: Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Žižek, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault (but not much Jacques Derrida, except as a ghostly presence, with the shades of his critical legacy in the background). As the list of critics suggests, these essays have roots in the theory ferment of the 1980s; Hirata references his indebtedness to theoretical analyses, portraying himself as a member of a generation that was "equipped with 'theory'" and ready to attack the ideological monoliths that were inherited—namely "Japanese literature" and, therefore, "Japan" (p. 3).

The introduction cogently maps the critical landscape underlying Hirata's desire for text and the desires in the texts. In that landscape, we encounter History, evil, and desire (as enumerated in the subtitle) and also ethics and the Lacanian "Real." Desire energizes the aesthetic object and is arti-culated as the scandalous. Literature, which figures as the eroticized other, is by extension configured as "evil." Crucial at this point is a Lacanian understanding of the Real (and therefore of the Symbolic and the Imaginary); in this, Hirata contends that literature provides a peephole to catch a glimpse of the Real, which is the terrain of psychic drives. The chapter does more than summarize, however; it pithily develops the important critical ideas that are brought to bear on Hirata's readings of twentieth-century texts. One result is a collection of essays united by a multifaceted scaffolding rather than an argument that unites the various interventions.

At the same time, the landscape contains crosscurrents from other directions: psychoanalysis is one, as is an interest for what marks History and historicity. Concerns for History tether the readings to the often-noted propensity to "interiority" found in Japanese fiction and also to the disconnect, thereby, away from historical events located in an external "out there," particularly in times of imperial and military expansion, colonialism, and societal power grids. This relates to questions of ethics, such as how literature interacts with events in the world, and also how readers, writers, and others in the society in which this literature is embedded make use of literature. The forces of time and memory, of the past and of reality, thereby figure large throughout. In result, Hirata builds on these theoretical apparatuses to provide powerful and compelling readings of central texts and authors of twentieth-century Japanese literary, intellectual, and cultural worlds.

One strength of the essays is in the energy and the commitment propelling them. Not only to answer the "why" of our continued readings (for those of us who continue to read print) but to think in terms of how we live in the context of ethics and history, memory and action. The close readings given to Ōe, Mishima, Kawabata, and Murakami excavate the layers that structure these works; the critical scaffolding surrounds a complex architecture of allusive criticism.

There is a significant omission in this landscape, however, and Hirata points it out immediately in his acknowledgments...