Don Juan East/West: On the Problematics of Comparative Literature (review)

Don Juan East/West: On the Problematics of Comparative Literature. By Takayuki Yokota-Murakami. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. xiv + 226 pp. $60.00.

In the provocative study under review, Takayuki Yokota-Murakami interrogates, with passionate moral energy and clarity, an idea that is of extreme importance to the field of Comparative Literature: the assumption that there are universal and essentially human behavior patterns, concepts, and institutions, on the basis of which literary comparisons can be made across widely divergent cultures. The author questions this assumption--he argues, following recent philosophical and linguistic theories, that there is no "irreducible, general core of meanings that all languages and cultural paradigms share, constituting universal human essentials" (28). Thus there is no "Ur-concept so original as to be universally applicable" (172); rather, concepts such as "love," "lust," and "sexuality"--the ones the author takes on in his study--are historically and culturally defined and, ultimately, not transferable to other cultures. Yokota-Murakami uses this standard anti-universalist argument to problematize the assumption of analogous concepts between Western and Japanese culture. He criticizes the way comparatists attempt to "pinpoint a certain phenomenon in a different culture, and then to find a corresponding term [in another culture] if there is one." Focusing on the concept of "love," he goes on to argue: "It does not matter if they cannot find one. They would point to the 'phenomenon,' and then call it 'love'" (31).

It is the confidence, based on universalist thinking, that an analogy can always be found in another literary tradition for a given literary genre, theme, or figure in Western literature, which entices comparatists to seek out figures analogous to, for example, the Western "Don Juan figure," in non-Western cultures. In the one hundred years or so since intensive contact between Japan and Western nations resulted in their gaining of some knowledge of each others' literary traditions, both Japanese and Western critics have noticed similarities between Western Don Juan figures and several Japanese premodern male literary figures. These are the poet Ariwara no Narihira, the focal figure of the mid-tenth-century work in the uta-monogatari (poem-tale) form, Ise monogatari (The Tales of Ise); the hero of the early eleventh-century monogatari (tale) Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji), Hikaru Genji; and Yonosuke, the hero of the late seventeenth-century fiction Ko-shoku ichidai otoko (The Life of an Amorous Man). (Mindful of Yokota-Murakami's caveat against attempting to transfer terms across cultures, I use the word "hero" very loosely here, as "the figure around which the work mainly revolves.") The basis on which comparatists in Japan and the West have considered these figures as possible analogies to the Western Don Juan figure is their proclivity to love or sex.

Giving an example of what label a literary critic from within the Japanese tradition might give the supposed "Don Juan figures," Yokota-Murakami refers to them as iro-otoko, a term that one might attempt to translate as "great lovers." The related term ko-shoku that appears in the title mentioned above, Ko-shoku ichidai otoko (The Life of an Amorous Man), he glosses as "abundance, a bliss, a play" (153). Thus, an iro-otoko is a man capable of abundant love; a man for whom love is bliss and play. Though Yokota-Murakami utilizes terms associated with the Edo or Tokugawa period (1603-1868) retroactively in the case of the two earlier figures, the hero of the tenth-century Ise monogatari and the hero of the early eleventh-century Genji monogatari, he is at least viewing these figures from within the Japanese tradition. The iro-otoko, then, is a male lover constructed in Japanese terms, and with an awareness of the historical evolution of the figure within Japanese literature and culture.

What is immediately apparent from Yokota-Murakami's definition of the iro-otoko, the...