In Transit: The Formation of a Colonial East Asian Cultural Sphere

5. Colonial Women and the Primitive: Masugi Shizue and Sakaguchi Reiko

Part III The Cartography of Desire and Self-Realization 157 5 Colonial Women and the Primitive Masugi Shizue and Sakaguchi Reiko “I have never thought about whether it is an advantage or a disadvantage being a woman writer. On occasion it is an advantage, but I have also felt that it was a great disadvantage. Anyhow, it is a minor matter, and basically I do not think about gender. The only thing I thought about was wanting to be a writer.” —Masugi Shizue* In 2008, Tsushima Yūko published the novel Too Barbaric (Amari ni yaban na), a massive tome about two Japanese women, one living in the 1930s, the other living in 2005, whose lives crossed paths on the island of Taiwan, a former colony of Japan. The protagonist Miyo (Miicha1 as she is known in the narrative) was a moga, a modern girl, who married a young university professor and moved to the colonial capital of Taipei in the early 1930s. The excitement of being with the man she loved in a new and exotic place was the adventure of a lifetime for her. Yet, as the narrative progresses, we see a vibrant modern girl, openminded and full of curiosity, gradually deteriorating into a miserable and unstable figure, subject to paranoia and impulsive shoplifting. Miicha is subjected to psychological abuse by her mother-in-law, who never liked her and refuses to acknowledge her. The emotionally detached husband Akihiko, who devotes himself solely to his own career, neglects her. The husband also discourages Miicha’s attempts to learn the native language and befriend locals. Isolated from the rigid community of the local expats and forbidden to have any connections with the native population, she feels trapped on the island. After having a miscarriage and suffering the death of another child, she comes undone and is sent back to her mother’s home by her husband, who effectively divorces her. The novel then jumps to the twentieth-first century, where Miicha’s niece Lily visits Taiwan, trying to piece together her aunt’s ill-fated life. Through Lily’s memories, we learn eventually that Miicha died young * Masugi Shizue, “A Woman Writer” (“Onna no sakka” ዥࡡషᐓ), in Kainaki Habataki ࠖ⏝ᩣ࡝ࡀ⩒ᦹࡀࠗ (1940). 158 | In Transit (younger than Lily, who is now in her early fifties) and alone, a broken woman. The narrative, both epic and intimate, employs a parallel structure similar to those used by Murakami Haruki in The End of the World/HardBoiled Wonderland and Kafka by the Sea, or his recent 1Q84, which construct multiple narrative personas and storylines in independent narratives that eventually merge. The work also extends the epistolary narrative form Tsushima employed in her earlier work Fire Mountain (Hinoyama, 1998), in which an uncle who lives in the United States corresponds with his nephew through letters over an extended period of time. She also published a dialogue with the Korean writer Shin Kyonsuk (1963–) in epistolary format documenting a yearlong exchange of thoughts in a collection titled A House with a Mountain, a House with a Well (2007). In Too Barbaric, again, Tsushima makes use of the same narrative form, allowing her characters to speak through letters, diaries, and personal memoirs, complementing an omnipresent narrator with the liveliness of Miicha’s own naïve, hopeful, but at times frustrated voice. Tsushima’s expansive narrative begins with an epilogue steeped in mythical images that invokes not only the primordial but also multiple layers of folkloric and literary narrative past. The novel opens with the repeated onomatopoetic refrain of “donburakko, donburakokko, donburako , donburakokko . . .” that mimics the sound of an object floating on the water. The narrative subject is enclosed in a pod-like space: “In the darkness, time does not exist. Only senses of hunger, things thrown up from the mouth, the smell of urine and excrement.”2 Tsushima invokes many layers of metaphor, myth, and folktales to depict this southward journey. The most obvious one certainly is the primordial womblike state. But the author also refers to the legend of Momotarō (Peach Boy), in which the famous refrain of the onomatopoetic “donburakko, donburakokko” depicts the peach floating down the river, containing a future hero at its core. The traditional folktale version familiar to Japanese children relates the story of the brave Peach Boy who was able to enlist an odd brigade of a dog, monkey, and pheasant (all native Japanese animals) to conquer the demons on...