The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan

Chapter 6 Kafu: Censored, Dead or Alive (1948–1950, 1973–1980)

ChAPtEr 6 Kafū Censored, Dead or Alive (1948–1950, 1973–1980) As she writhed her body in pleasure, her hair having become disheveled , I too was overcome, and once she started grinding on top of me, she collapsed forward, crying out in quick succession, ‘Oh, oooh. I’m coming again, I’m coming again,’ and for the second time in a row, I am drenched in her juices. —“Yojōhan fusuma no shitabari” (1924)1 It is altogether fitting that the author Nagai Kafū marks both the beginning and the end of Japan’s landmark literary obscenity trials. He is an author known equally well for his immaculate high style as for the rather “maculate contents” of his fiction, for dabbling with the debauched dancing girls of Asakusa, for antagonizing the authorities in the prewar and postwar periods alike, for introducing Western literary translations to Japan and for reintroducing early modern Japanese literary traditions in the fashion of an Edo-period “scribbler” (gesakusha), and for his avowedly apolitical sexual politics. Kafū remains one of the more confounding literary figures in modern Japan.2 His uncanny ability to occupy simultaneously the highest and lowest of poles is perhaps best symbolized by his receipt of the prestigious Order of Cultural Merit in 1952 and by his posthumous appearance twenty years later as a fictional character in one of the indicted Nikkatsu Roman Porn films in 1972. The struggle to reconcile all the apparent contradictions of a writer with such a long and varied career as Kafū’s—many of which were embodied by 168 the Canon under Fire the story “Yojōhan” itself—understandably confounded the judges and led to verdicts that seemed somewhat contradictory. In both trials, the story was deemed obscene but Kafū himself was exculpated. In the first trial, although the publisher was convicted, Kafū was pardoned because the authorities seemingly believed his strategic denials of authorship. In the later, posthumous trial, while the judges acknowledged Kafū to be the author and deemed the story obscene, they also championed Kafū as a literary genius in the tradition of the Edo-period artist, confirming the honor bestowed on him by the cultural merit award. These verdicts again suggest the inevitable vagaries that result when cultural production meets the force and logic of law. But they are also ones that haunt the critical reception of an author like Kafū, as evident in the divergent interpretations of him offered by literary scholars, ranging from incisive cultural critic (bunmei hihyōka) to a somewhat perverted, if talented, dilettante. His postwar publications, in particular, both his new fiction as well as republications of his salacious prewar works, engendered some of the fiercest attacks. One critic damningly concluded that when considering “Kafū as a novelist, it might not matter if the entire thirty-odd volumes of short works he wrote in the postwar period were entirely ignored.”3 At stake in both trials and in literary criticism is the sanctity of canonized authors like Kafū. The fact that the lawyers and judges engaged in such literary judgments suggests how the trials were as much exercises in literary criticism and canonization as they were attempts to regulate social morality. In fact, the “Yojōhan” Supreme Court verdict of 1980 marked the introduction of a significantly expanded legal definition of obscenity that revised the long-standing three-prong definition established in the Chatterley trial to one that required consideration of not just a work’s sexual content but also its proportions, prose style, and narrative structure. That the story’s very same narrative devices would fuel the competing claims of the defense and prosecution alike suggests both the ironies that arise when literary interpretation is undertaken in the legal arena and the plasticity of literary criticism in general. It is not difficult to imagine the perverse delight that Kafū would have taken in all the fuss over half a century later, especially since he was safely removed from any practical consequences of the verdict. A contrarian like Kafū could only have delighted in the fact that his slight, ten-page story would, on the one hand, garner a literary endorsement from the nation’s highest court and prompt it to nuance the legal definition of obscenity into Kafū: Censored, Dead or Alive 169 one that rivals the interpretive methods of literary critics and, on the other, provide the makings of a 1973 Nikkatsu Roman Porn...