New Halves, Old Selves: Reincarnation and Transgender Identification in Ōshima Yumiko’s Tsurubara-tsurubara

The cover illustration to Ōshima Yumiko’s Tsurubara-tsurubara (1999, Rambling rose, rambling rose) depicts an androgynous child, in a nightgown, preparing for sleep.¹ Illustratively reminiscent of English literature’s most famous gender-variant child, L. Frank Baum’s Princess Ozma, Ōshima’s drawing emphasizes the character’s youthful naturalness in regard to gender ambiguity.² About to enter into a dream, the toddler’s naïveté of conventional norms permits a freer expression of transgender tendency. This child is the boy Tsugio who will later, with the onset of pubescence, experience great distress as the socializing demand for culturally sanctioned forms of bodily performance casts shame and uncertainty on what had once seemed an instinctive tendency toward gender versatility.

Ōshima’s Tsurubara-tsurubara (hereafter, TS) examines with an intimate lens the internal and external conflicts and tensions that a gender-variant child undergoes through the self-affirmation that occurs in the process of transition. Tsugio, who self-consciously identifies himself as female through the name of Tayoko, resists the external pressures of masculine conventionalization within Japanese society. While transgender phenomena have recently been the subject of several novels and television dramas in Japan, TS uniquely emphasizes the intensely private world of identity formation in the constitution of trans-embodiment. Avoiding the more typical fixation on psychotherapeutic discourse common to most depictions of transgender phenomena, TS uses manga’s imaginative mandate, as a genre that lends itself to visualization of paraphysical possibility, to elide medical presentations of sex reassignment. Instead of evolving as a pathological discourse of gender identity disorder—of hormones and orchiectomies—TS explores Tsugio’s intuitive insistence on his/her multisubjectivity as both male and female at the level of consciousness. To emphasize the metaphysical nature of gender diversity, Ōshima situates Tsugio’s gender variation within a vocabulary based on reincarnation: his transgender inclinations, as portrayed in TS, are not the result of a disordered psychological makeup, although the narrative raises this possibility. Instead, the text favors Tsugio’s emphatic need to become Tayoko as directly connected to a sequence of past-life memories. Tsugio claims, from a young age, that he had previously existed as a woman, an existence that, because of karmic incompletion, requires him to be(come) Tayoko in the present lifetime. The persistence of Tayoko’s memories enables the formation of a new subjectivity as a woman in his current life. Thus, TS, through a metaphysic in which past-life regressions intervene within the normative trajectory of gender acquisition, investigates how multiple subjectivities enable cross-gender identification. The process of transition, as Ōshima presents it, begins first as intensely cognitive, and only through this acceptance of internal diversity can the later external (bodily) adjustments be made in order to ease gender dysphoria. Enhanced by manga’s capacity to present internal states of consciousness through illustration, TS takes a sympathetic interior view of Tsugio’s developmental uncertainty as he experiments at transgender crossings until, ultimately, s/he undergoes a complete gender transformation in which the old self becomes his new half.

What makes TS so potent are its sets of related forces that inform the background to Tsugio’s transition into Tayoko, in which both eventually coalesce as a spectrum of multiple-subject formation. Ōshima suggests, but does not insist on, the possibility for reincarnation as a catalyst for cross-gender identification, and that karma might act as a specific link in the chain of reincarnation. Yet, ultimately, she prefers to leave unresolved the meaning of telos through transition and transformation. Her depictions instead focus on tensions that resist easy categorization or explanation. Ōshima’s illustrations explore consciousness as fluid and adaptive, rather than a basic metaphysical grounding of subjectivity. And, while she is not hostile to psychotherapy or in opposition to medical explanations for transgender identity, she evokes a series of questions about gender and identity that undermine assumptions about the body as simply a physical grounding for the self-aware subject.

Ōshima’s portrayals of transgender themes, published in the late 1980s in the shōjo magazine ASUKA...