The Father-Daughter Plot

Chapter 9 A Confucian Utopia: Kōda Aya and Kōda Rohan

238 Chapter 9 A Confucian Utopia Kòda Aya and Kòda Rohan Ann Sherif The Father is all too often villainized as oppressive originator of the Law, as capitalist, and as dictator; he is rapist, molester, pervert, and abuser, and readers tend to collapse all these different manifestations into a single figure. That is, we often conflate the individual father, the socioeconomic and political systems of patriarchy, the phallus, the Law in the symbolic order, men! Clearly, such oversimplification cannot lead to a sophisticated theory of gender and gender relations nor enhance feminism. I believe one of our tasks in this volume is to distinguish among the several aspects of the figure we call the Father and paternalism and so arrive at a more nuanced understanding of women writers’ relationship to this figure in both its monolithic and plural manifestations. Only in this way can we get away from the pitfalls of a gendered binarism. This chapter will focus on the particular daughter-father relationship between Kòda Aya and Kòda Rohan, a relationship that has invited precisely this sort of conflation and confusion. I will argue that the narrative realm created by Kòda Aya in her autobiographical essays presents in fact a utopian vision of the family, a unified moral and aesthetic realm that is an alternative to the despair at the failed patriarchy and matriarchy expressed in the texts of many of Kòda’s contemporaries . Kòda’s world view finds inspiration in Confucian ideals of moral and bodily discipline within the domestic setting. And the fatherdaughter relationship evoked in her writings is never an exclusive one, for mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and other women also function as essential players in her accounts of the family. A Confucian Utopia: Kòda Aya and Kòda Rohan 239 Writing the Lettered Father Kòda Rohan (1867–1947) was arguably one of modern Japan’s preeminent men of letters. He launched his career as a critically acclaimed writer with novels such as The Five-Story Pagoda (Gojû no tò, 1891) and later established himself as a critic and public intellectual as well. Unlike many of his peers, Rohan trained his gaze not primarily on the Anglo-European world, emphasizing instead Japan’s Asian literary and philosophical heritage. Exhibiting tremendous versatility in style and topic, he produced everything from dense and stylistically challenging historical novels about ancient China to books written in a highly colloquial style about urban planning or premodern literature , and essays on fishing and cinema. In contrast, Rohan’s daughter Kòda Aya (1906–1990) began her writing career as her father’s biographer, with numerous essays about her home life with the eccentric, famous Rohan. At the start of her career, Kòda Aya had the advantages of a famous name and a tolerant age. The postwar era encouraged an outpouring of literary creativity and fostered a diversity of voices and interests. In this exhilarating atmosphere, Kòda grappled with the assignment given her of presenting her late father’s home life to an admiring readership. She also faced the tasks of supporting herself and finding a place in the world when she no longer had the responsibility of caring for her father. During the 1940s and 1950s, Kòda’s numerous autobiographical essays drew the attention of many Japanese readers because they succeeded brilliantly in providing an intimate view of the personal life of the idiosyncratic Rohan, a celebrated writer who did not run with members of the literary establishment (bundan) and whose revered works held an ambiguous position in the modern canon and the debate on tradition and modernity. Kòda herself acknowledged her father’s ambivalent status as cultural figure, and also as a family man: Some people praise my father as a formidable scholar; others call him an eccentric (fûgawari no henjin), but Father had a different interpretation: “It’s not that I’m a great scholar; anyone who thinks so must be greatly ignorant,” he’d say, or “People who think I’m strange just don’t realize how many people don’t fit into the same mold as they do.” At times, I agreed with him. In any case, I learned about housekeeping from my father not because he was a scholar who felt compelled to teach me. Nor were my lessons the warped 240 Ann Sherif inheritance of an eccentric. Rather, it just happened...