The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction (review)

When I attempt to focus my thoughts about the body in postwar Japanese fiction, my mind begins to reel. My own recent research reminds me of how buraku and Zainichi Korean authors question the meanings of "blood" and the invisibility of their difference; of individual physical violence as metaphor for national violence; and of the intense physicality of all aspects of life in the work of Yang Sogil. Yang, whose fiction is both critically acclaimed and stunningly popular, is obsessed with the notion of the "Asian body." This body—unlike that of the contemporary resident of Japan—emerges from and on occasion even revels in its experience of corporeal brutality, animalistic urges (whether for food or sex), and manual labor. The last of these terms is crucial, for Yang's intent is to criticize the way that Japan's economic success has numbed its populace to the very sensations of being alive. At the same time, like many other students of Japanese literature, I think of how the big names of the postwar period, from Hayashi Fumiko to Mishima Yukio, Ōe Kenzaburō, Murakami Ryō, and Yamada Eimi, reflect upon sexuality and gender identity, and frequently their intersection with race (usually Japanese versus white or black).

I do not expect Douglas Slaymaker or any other scholar to be able to present a coherent synthesis of all of these issues in a single volume, even if it has a title as grand as this one. I am not even certain such a task would be possible or useful. Rather, I begin my consideration of this book, the primary focus of which is the so-called "flesh writing" (nikutai bungaku) of the early postwar era, by seconding the author's contention that a careful examination of these sometimes-overlooked works will deepen our understanding of Japanese literature in the decades succeeding them. The above thoughts, however random, bring home one of Slaymaker's most important observations: the texts he examines are "foundational to a palette of images that continues to energize imaginaries of the body, and the ramifications of this conceptualization extend to the fiction being produced at the end of the twentieth century" (p. 162).

One might imagine, from the above, that the book excavates a range of postwar texts in an effort to reveal the influence of these flesh writers. Rather, The Body of Postwar Fiction joins recent analyses of post-1945 Japanese culture such as John Dower's Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (Norton, 1999), Michael Molasky's The Postwar Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory (Routledge, 1999), and Yoshikuni Igarashi's Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton University Press, 2000) by taking as its major focus the early postwar period. This volume is by no means redundant with these other works, for Slaymaker's scope is not as broad as Dower's or Igarashi's and he treats a different set of texts and takes a different approach from Molasky.

For the most part, Slaymaker's set of texts consists of the fiction and essays of Tamura Taijirō, Noma Hiroshi, and Sakaguchi Ango, discussed in chapters three, four, and five, respectively. Consideration of these writers is bracketed by contextualizing chapters. In chapter one, he provides a history of the usage and changing connotations of terms of the body before these authors were active. He takes great pains to trace the use of nikutai, but he also examines the words shintai, seishin, and kokutai and, in chapter two, the role of "the woman's body" in the works of the flesh writers. In chapter six, he turns to the work of five women writers in the 1950s. Although there are references to historical circumstances and the historical references in the texts, historical events per se do not figure large. Nor does some grand theory such as psychoanalysis or poststructuralism. Instead, Slaymaker carefully reports what these writers said, what...