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Four Island Dreams: Yaponesia and the Cultural Unconscious
- University of Hawai'i Press
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Island Dreams: Yaponesia and the Cultural Unconscious Every time I see a papaya tree, whether its leaves are full or fallen, I feel my wife’s limbs; whether its fruit is ripe or unripe, there I see my wife’s form; when I eat the fruit, thinking it’s delicious, somehow I get the feeling I’m eating a part of my wife’s body. What could this mean, I wonder. Shimao Toshio, “Niwa ue no papaya,” 1963 From the late 1950s through the 1970s Shimao was absorbed in two projects: the fictionalized account of his wife’s mental illness that became Shi no toge (see chapter 3), and the depiction of his relationship with his island home, which is the topic of this chapter. To divide these two projects, however, is to risk missing how they are in many ways one. As noted at the end of chapter 3, Shimao ’s byōsaimono—his twenty-year literary study of his wife and her madness—is in large part a study of a native of Amami, of a woman who could not adjust to life away from her island home, whose profound sense of incongruity drove her back to the southern island. As I examine in this chapter, Shimao’s myriad essays on the islands (numbering some 170 from 1954–1978) and his “Yaponesia ron” (Theory of Yaponesia ) are both an attempt to trace the origins of this complex of southern islanders vis-à-vis the mainland, and a move to dispel it by helping instill 160 a sense of cultural identity, even pride, in a people historically deprived of such. Through these writings Shimao became known to southern readers perhaps less for his fiction than for the issues he raised in his essays : the historical and present-day relationship between the center and the peripheral regions of Japan (one in which the latter have been victimized ), the possibilities of a multicultural Japan, and prospects for maintaining diversity within one nation. As I will argue, Shimao’s fiction and essays are mutually reinforcing, and a full understanding of either depends on knowledge of both projects. One particularly intriguing way that fiction and essays overlap is found in connections between Yaponesia and Shimao’s fictional preoccupation with the unconscious. In rediscovering and bringing to the forefront marginalized geographic and cultural zones, Shimao uncovers what he views as Japan’s cultural unconscious. His fictional depiction of encounters with these zones, in turn, is shown as a journey toward the edges of consciousness, indeed to the unconscious realm itself. And this fictional meeting of conscious and unconscious is conveyed in the distinctive style he develops from the mid-1950s onward, one that subtly brings the two worlds together. After examining Shimao’s Yaponesia essays, I will discuss Shi no toge and several stories—which I call Shimao’s “island stories”—written at the same time the first half of Shi no toge was composed (1959–1965), and, in the conclusion, the two books Hi no utsuroi and Zoku Hi no utsuroi . All set on an island (except Shi no toge)—usually but not always identifiable as Amami—these stories are connected by two common elements. The first is their depiction of the familiar Shimao male protagonist (and in three stories the wife), now after the wife’s madness has subsided, back in the island. The second is the husband’s search for knowledge of the island, which to a large degree comes to him filtered through the medium of the wife, who as an island native is privy to an insider’s viewpoint he is never allowed to share fully. The wife represents the closest the narrator can get to the island—she is, arguably, a symbolic substitute for the island—yet, despite the narrator’s attempts to get “inside,” both the island and the wife remain Others who are more often than not unknowable and ungraspable. Traces of madness remain in the wife, but she has shifted from madwoman to guide, even healer, of the husband who, because he is “out of place,” is the one who is ill. The male protagonist is forever the perpetual outsider, but one who, despite his sense of incongruity toward the island, is profoundly Island Dreams: Yaponesia and the Cultural Unconscious 161 [3.236.64.8] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:00 GMT) drawn to it and its people. To understand fully these island stories and Shi no toge and its sequels—indeed all of...