The Youth of Things: Life and Death in the Age of Kajii Motojiro

1. Illness as Empowerment

7 1 Illness as Empowerment Ill on a journey dreams wander the withered moor ~ Bashō As in Europe, TB had existed in Japan for centuries ,butitwasonlywiththeriseofindustrialsociety,particularlyinitsearly stages, characterized by cramped and impoverished working conditions, that it reached epidemic proportions; Japanese rates of mortality peaked in 1918.1 Though Kajii grew up in a relatively prosperous household—his father worked for a shipping company—he did spend much of his earlier life in the industrial city of Osaka, then known as the Manchester of the East2 and afflicted with a particularly high rate of TB infection.3 The disease had a deadly effect on several members of his family. Two younger brothers and a sister died from it, while his elder brother underwent operations on his lungs. It is believed that his grandmother, who died of TB-­ related symptoms in 1913, infected all the children.4 Kajii first showed signs of infection at the age of seventeen but appeared to recover. In 1919, he entered the prestigious Third Higher School (Dai San Kōtō Gakkō, usually known as Sankō) in Kyoto, but in 1920 a lung inflammation forced him to withdraw temporarily. Despite this, he managed to pass the entrance exam for the University of Tokyo, which he attended beginning in the spring of 1924. But as his medical condition deteriorated further, he was forced to cut short his studies. On New Year’s Eve 1926, he went for what he expected to be a brief period of recuperation to the Yugashima hot springs resort on the 7 8 Chapter One Izu Peninsula; in fact, he ended up staying for a total of sixteen months and never completed his university course. Enforced isolation proved an ideal environment in which to concentrate on several of his most important stories, but it was loneliness and a desire to reenter the thick of literary activities that pulled him back to Tokyo in April 1928. By September of that year, worsening health left him no choice but to return to the Osaka family home, where his mother nursed him until the end. He continued to write until his death in March 1932. Quarantine While every writer speaks with a voice shaped by individual experience, that voice also echoes wider influences even when related to issues of personal health. A useful way of placing Kajii’s literary representation of illness into a larger context is to begin from Michael Bourdaghs’s discussion of how hygiene emerged as a matter of national concern in Japan in the Meiji period. A remarkable reduction in battlefield deaths from disease during the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War was attributable to the state’s growing attention to hygiene and physical education—promoted through modern institutions such as prisons and factories and especially the army and schools—which resulted in a set of norms that came to affect all areas of people’s lives: These norms led to the incorporation of national policy directly into individual human bodies. Furthermore, as hygiene shifted the focus of medicine from curing disease in individual patients to preventing disease in society as a whole, it expanded the role of medicine beyond the treatment of disease to include the monitoring and regulation of healthy persons as well.5 One important tool for effective population surveillance was the discourse of quarantine, a hygienic technique that required “a separation of the morbid from the healthy: infected bodies had to be isolated away from healthy bodies.”6 Translated into literary terms, Shimazaki Tōson’s (1872–1943) attentioninhisnovelBroken Commandment (Hakai, 1906)toTB—socommon in late Meiji that it was often called a Japanese disease (kokuminbyō)—­ 9 Illness as Empowerment overlaps with a more general anxiety to exclude (or quarantine) “diseased” parts from the national body. Specifically, it is Ushimatsu’s outcast burakumin status, hidden from other members of the school community until the story’s final denouement, that constitutes such a danger to the wider population.7 Bourdaghs argues that, ironically, it is precisely the teacher’s willingness to abandon his beloved town of Iiyama and set off for Texas once his background becomes common knowledge that ultimately proves his faithfulness as a Japanese subject, notwithstanding his outsider status. Moreover, his decision to “quarantine” himself outside Japan reaffirms the healthy condition of the town and, by extension, the wider Japanese body politic.8 Though Kajii was writing twenty years later, some parallel readings suggest themselves. TB’s...