Stephen Dodd

Structures of colonialism in Itō Sei's “Yūki no machi”

In Itō Seis (1905–69) “Yūki no machi” (Streets of ghosts, 1937), a narrator returns to his native town of Otaru, Hokkaido, where he experiences a hellish and hallucinatory encounter with people from his past. He is forced to confront shameful aspects of his youthful life that he had tried to repress. In this paper, I propose that a close examination of the story sheds useful light on the real fears, tensions and expectations surrounding colonialism that had become an integral part of Japanese culture and society during the late 1930s. Structures of colonialism, which speak of uneven power relationships between a dominant centre and a distant weaker locality, are spelt out, for example, through the railway network and racist ideology that appear in the story. I also explore the storys depiction of a colonial relationship between mainland Japanese culture centred round Tokyo and the peripheral outpost of Hokkaido. More generally, I suggest that the story illuminates a global power configuration between Japan and its colonies that was entering an increasingly aggressive and bellicose phase during the late 1930s.

An Age of Melodrama: Family, Gender, and Social Hierarchy in the Turn-of-the-Century Japanese Novel (review)

Yasuko Claremont has written a good book about a bad novelist. The emperor-hating Ōe is revealed to be an emperor without clothes. I am glad she has written this book and brought a discussion of Ōe’s merits as a novelist into the open. For years I have heard intellectuals of Ōe’s generation complain about him in private: not only about his fi ctional drivel, but his hypocrisy (his hero, Sartre, turned down the Nobel Prize) and, worse, his exploitation of his handicapped son, Hikari. (This deserves to be a public issue, since it is after all Ōe who made a public fi gure of Hikari in the fi rst place.) To my Japan studies colleagues in other disciplines who are dismissive of our single-author studies, I answer: Claremont’s The Novels of Ōe Kenzaburō marks something new, an unprecedented voice of dissent amid the common chorus of praise for Japan’s most famous dissident voice.

Japan's private parts: Place as a metaphor in Nakagami Kenji's works

Abstract This paper examines the way Nakagami Kenjis texts highlight what are generally repressed elements of mainstream Japanese culture, or what he calls its ‘private parts’. Main texts cited are the collection of essays, Kishū: ki no kuni, ne no kuni monogatari, and the short stories, ‘Shugen’, ‘Fushi’ and ‘Kataku’. Making use of his own peripheral status in relation to Japanese society as a native of the Kumano region, the elements he uncovers include social discrimination against the buraku (outcaste) community and a high degree of misogyny expressed through sexual violence. A particular feature of Nakagamis work is that, although he appears to be working within the traditional Japanese narrative tradition, that very tradition is subverted and challenged by narrative elements related specifically to the writers experience of having grown up in Kumano. Nakagamis narrative strength emerges from the fact that he has access to an ‘outsiders’ perspective while being fully informed of the expectation ...