The Demimonde in Japanese Literature: Sexuality and the Literary ...

demimonde fiction, I have chosen to break somewhat with a strict chronological format, for the work of mourning, like the demimonde itself, finds an alternate temporality to the linear. Thus, presenting these texts in a nonchronological format creates a metaphor for the subject matter. That is why in the first chapter I analyze the work of contemporary American writer William Vollmann alongside that of 1930s Japanese authors Kuki Shûzô and Nagai Kafû.

However, though this book, unlike many studies of movements in twentieth-century Japanese fiction and ideology, does not present World War II as precipitating the most decisive divide in twentieth-century literature, its argument does follow a trajectory that begins with interwar texts and ends with postwar texts. Although both the interwar and the postwar periods were represented in writing and art as moments in which boundaries were disrupted—historically and textually—the particular issues these two disparate periods concerned themselves with were unique. What is more, there was, I would argue, a definite shift in demimonde literature as the demimonde itself gradually transformed from the bustling subculture it was in 1930s Japan to the ghost town it became after 1956 and the outlawing of prostitution. During this period, the karyûkai transitioned not only in reality but on the page as well, becoming more concerned with mental/psychic boundaries after World War II. Before, when the pleasure quarters existed in reality, demimonde literature had largely been concerned with physical boundaries in three-dimensional space.

Themes of internalization, spectralization, the collapse of boundaries, trauma, and healing recur throughout this book, but its five chapters are grouped around concentrations of specific motifs and spatial paradigms. However, they also progress temporally, with the first two chapters discussing prewar works and the last three presenting postwar ones. Chapter 1 discusses, through close readings of Kuki's “‘Iki’ no kôzô” and Kafû's Bokutô kidan, how authors in the 1930s used themes of distance and connoisseurship to model the demimonde as an inviolable space on the page, and how such fiction challenged state authority, structuring a place of resistance in which society's outsiders could become insiders.