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

particularly in the form of iki, which might be loosely translated as “chic,” and which was an aesthetic born in the Edo pleasure quarters. In this way, the demimonde—typically a peripheral space of otherness and outsiders—was repositioned as the paragon of a supposedly national consciousness. Within the context of a modernizing culture, however, even this casting of the demimonde as a space of tradition and a throwback to a gloried past could in fact be read as counterculture and radical. In this way, the very traditionalism of the karyûkai may be another key to its continued power as an image of resistance.

Shut down for about a year during WWII, the historical karyûkai never really recovered its place of significance in Japanese culture after the war, and this was reflected in Japanese demimonde literature and art during the second half of the twentieth century. Backed by a literary tradition, established during the Edo period, of ribald karyûkai stories which in breadth and accomplishment could easily rival that of France's demimonde literature, modern Japan begot often heartbreaking and sometimes highly experimental demimonde fiction by canonical writers such as Aya, Kawabata, and Kafû. After the war, demimonde literature and arts in Japan began to mirror not so much the karyûkai, but instead a more diffuse, less defined space of the underworld, such as the postwar prostitutes, or pan-pan, in Tamura Taijiro's “Nikutai no mon” or the specialized call girls in Murakami Ryû's film Topâzu. As shown in chapter 3, postwar demimonde literature also could not seem to avoid making frequent references to the transnational economy of sex work that pervaded Japan's colonial period, particularly in the infamous form of the “comfort women,” women who were forced into prostitution during World War II by the Japanese military.

Of course, even the traditional karyûkai comprised various strata of prostitutes, from the most common (and most easily seduced) to the resplendent tayû and oiran, who demanded a more delicate, time-consuming, and costly approach. Even within these various categories, slippage and camouflage occurred (that is, there were women who pretended to be less amenable to advances than they in fact were, as with the initially demure geisha Komako in Kawabata's Yukiguni), so that