Reiko Abe Auestad

Ogino Anna and parodic language

Abstract Ogino Anna drew both critical and popular attention with a collection of parodic ‘fiction‐critiques’ entitled Watashi no aidokusho (My love‐hate affair with books) in 1991. She has added many more titles to the list of her works since then, most of which are parodic fiction‐critiques and parody‐like works of fiction. This paper examines how parodic language in some of these texts works to trace the operations that produce what qualifies as ‘men’ and ‘women’ of different classes and categories. The paper attempts at the same time to highlight the subversive function of laughter that disrupts the process by which the narrator‐protagonists of the same texts become subjected to the discursive effects of their own parodic scrutiny. I also seek to address some problems of feminist politics recently brought to attention by critics such as Judkh Butler and Teresa Ebert. Considering Oginos parody as a possible, if not entirely unproblematic, attempt at a new feminist strategy of subversion, I ask the que...

Invoking affect in Kawakami Mieko's Chihi to ran (Breasts and Eggs, 2008): Higuchi Ichiyô, playful words and ludic gestures

Abstract A slim and yet powerful novella, Chichi to ran (Breasts and Eggs, 2008) helped the author, Kawakami Mieko, launch her career in the Japanese literary establishment by winning her the Akutagawa prize. The novella revolves around a middle-aged single-mother, struggling to eke out a living for herself and her teenage daughter as a bar hostess in Osaka. The bond between them is severely tested under the pressure of the precarious living conditions in the post-bubble, neo-liberalist Japan of the 2000s. This essay explores the absorbing and affective aspect of the novella by drawing on Rita Felskis ‘positive aesthetics’ and Bruno Latours concept of ‘nonhuman actors’. With a focus on the movement of affect/feelings, the analysis traces how ‘non-human actors’ of all kinds and shapes in the novella, from the female characters, chatty style of speech in Osaka dialect, the kanji used in them, the protagonists obsession with breasts, images of Higuchi Ichiyô, to a carton of eggs, interact and connect in a way that make a difference, facilitating innovative life-adjustments as the narrative unfolds – the reading which should, in turn, enhance our understanding and appreciation of the text.

Long-Term Care Insurance, marketization and the quality of care: ‘good time living’ in a recently established nursing home in a suburb of Tokyo

Abstract Faced with the demands of the rapidly ageing population, the Japanese government introduced Long-Term Care Insurance (LTCI) in 2000, which has led to a substantial debate over the effects of marketization on the quality of care and the universal availability of care. Eight years later, even as they note that there are problems with LTCI, many agree that LTCI has produced some positive results worthy of attention; most importantly it has helped establish a ‘national consensus’ that the care of the elderly is no longer just a family obligation. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that various types of private senior housing have become much more affordable and popular and can, in the authors opinion, play an important role in the socialization of care in the Japanese cultural context. Using a concrete example of a relatively well-functioning private senior home in the outskirts of Tokyo, the present paper will examine how care can be organized in a private regime with emphasis on the possible effect of marketization. To give my analysis a comparative and feminist perspective, I will draw on the international and Norwegian feminist discourse on the ethics of care in dependency work – an ethics that attempts to relativize hitherto undisputed concepts in public management such as equality and rationality by taking into account the necessarily specific nature of care, which resists generalization and standardization. The essay will try at the same time to assess the potential of and the challenges for LTCI in the future.

Suicidal Honor: General Nogi and the Writings of Mori Ōgai and Natsume Sōseki (review)

that help us address these questions; often, such research reveals our readings to have fallen prey to the “fallacy of internalism,” in which the impact of a text is presumed to be accessible through the text itself. The danger is even more prominent in dealing with a category such as “women’s magazines,” which historically has been plagued by (and perhaps owes its existence to) what many considered “commonsensical” preconceptions about women. Paradoxically, then, it is Frederick’s “intuitive” speculations, rather than the counterintuitive ones, that leave this reviewer wishing for extratextual evidence. Having said this, it should be noted that textual reception and authorial intention are notoriously difficult things to theorize, let alone attempt to determine empirically. It is to her credit that Frederick is so candid concerning these points of speculation; she has also pointed out, throughout the text, the various pitfalls of anticipating reception. Notwithstanding this minor reservation, then, it is clear that Turning Pages is a valuable contribution to a growing body of scholarship that promises to resituate literary, philosophical, social, and political texts in the context of their material production, thereby illuminating the manifold negotiations those texts are subjected to during the tortuous path from writer to reader.

Ibsen's individualism in Japan: John Gabriel Borkman and Ôgai Mori's Seinen (Youth, 1910)

By tracing the critical reception of John Gabriel Borkman around the turn of the last century in the Japanese literary establishment with special emphasis on Ôgai Mori’s novel, Seinen (Youth, 1910), I would like to examine how Ibsen’s ‘‘individualism’’ was reinterpreted to fit the intellectual and political context of early twentiethcentury Japan. As is well known, Ibsen’s breakthrough as a dramatist did not come early or easy even in Europe, and there was a further lag of time in the appreciation of Ibsen on the Japanese literary scene. Put in the same category as Zola and Nietzsche and considered radical, Ibsen was viewed with great skepticism in Japan to begin with. Even as his reputation rose in time with the increasing popularity of Naturalism in Japan, there seemed to have been a tug of war between those who admired him as a positive representative of iconoclastic writers, and those who only saw him as a corrupter of traditional morals. In the midst of this tug of war, Mori’s Youth stood out as an innovative attempt at understanding Ibsen’s individualism in terms that were compatible with the increasingly politicized climate of the era. The first mention of Ibsen in Japan was made by Ôgai Mori (1867–1922) himself, an intellectual giant of Meiji Japan, who had played a leading role in introducing contemporary European literature to the Japanese literary establishment. As a young officer in the Japanese army Medical Corps, Mori was sent to Berlin in 1884 to study military hygiene, during which period he read extensively in European literature. Ibsen had won a high standing in Germany by the time Mori came to Berlin. In 1889, the year after his return, Mori started a literary journal Shigarami Zôshi (The Weir), to whose