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6 Epilogue An encounter with the body of texts written by Köda Aya raises many tantalizing questions about the status of reading, literary production, and criticism, few of which have clear-cut answers. In the preceding chapters I have attempted to address some of these questions. As Edward Said has written: Criticism adopts the mode of commentary on and evaluation of art; yet in reality criticism matters more as a necessarily incomplete and preparatory process toward judgement and evaluation. What the critical essay does is to begin to create the values by which art is judged. . . . Critics create not only the values by which art is judged and understood, but they embody in writing those processes and actual conditions in the present by means of which art and writing bear significance.1 For a writer who focuses on seemingly conventional or even regressive topics —kimono and geisha and life at home—Köda’s works resist neat classification in generic terms, as well as on the scale of tradition versus modernity. Partly this stems from Köda’s own consistently humble posture in her career as a writer and her professed distance from such categories as Art and Literature. Although she fashions stories out of incidents that would seem for all the world to relate to the life she lived, no one wants to read the stories simply to find out about her life. Not only does the style of the text present itself in an utterly arresting manner, not only are the conceptions of social relations, gender, and personhood surprisingly fresh and unconventional, but readers have also been attracted to the intelligence, ferocious curiosity, and wit of the teller of stories as well as the rhythm and beauty of Köda’s words. Critics are not in the least perturbed when they discover discrepancies between the stories she tells and independent reports of the same historical incidents or individuals. Katsumata Hiroshi, for example, enthusiastically endorses Köda’s insistence that she was born “in the midst of a storm” even though his research has turned up a newspaper weather report indicating that the skies over Tokyo were clear on the day she was born. The actual climato- logical conditions do not matter, Katsumata writes, because everyone in Köda’s family, even her daughter, and most of all Köda herself lent silent approval to this legend. It was only fitting that Köda should have come into the world during a storm and that a powerful star dominated the sky that night.2 Every reader and critic cooperates with the effort to allow Köda’s discursive performances to float in the ambiguous border zone between essay and fiction, between autobiography and novel. So much the better that she refuses the mantle of art—unlike those pretenders who have scant control of language and little understanding that people should aspire to optimism and maturity rather than succumb to, or even revel in, the pessimism of an exposed and lonely ego, or the allure of the strip show. In the end, it works nicely, this figure of the storm, because it leads smoothly to the metaphor of the bashö leaves, tattered and torn by the storm, yet still intact, ever flexible. The resilience, strength, and maturity of the persona differ sharply from the masochistic, self-sacrificial spirit of gaman, or endurance: gaman is an attitude prescribed for women—an attitude of persevering and not complaining about the oppression of patriarchy , the exploitation of the brutal capitalist, the barrenness of Japan’s rural landscape, the bankruptcy of unexamined habits of heterosexual marriage. As a writer Köda participates in the construction of discursive worlds, what Ken Ito calls in his discussion of Tanizaki “world building,” not for the sake of “the contemplation of ideal worlds” but rather to problematize “the desire behind such worlds.”3 If Tanizaki in his creative endeavors “explores the tense relationship between human subjectivity and the material world where it seeks satisfaction . . . the awesome energies invested by the imagination in remaking the exterior world, as well as the exterior world’s resistance to being fantasy,” Köda discovers worlds where the Confucian strategies of observation and selfcultivation lessen the distance between unfettered desire and an unruly universe by altering the conception of both.4 If anything undergoes symbolic inversion in the discursive realm created by Köda Aya, it is most certainly the family romance and the symbolic order, but always in...

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