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

texture of artistic thought with the literal world of pleasure, of which the mistress is synecdochic—a world that is peripheral, decadent, sexual, seductive, defiant of state institutions (particularly marriage), and perhaps even defiling and/or transformative.

The prevalence of demimonde representations in literary texts of both the Japanese and Western canon is an example, to quote Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, of how “what is socially peripheral may be symbolically central.”⁴ For, although the demimonde may truly exist only in a dialectical relationship with mainstream society, as its dark and forbidden underside, its aesthetic, sociological, psychological, and of course, sexual ramifications have always adumbrated, complemented, and generally impacted the “respectable” world.⁵

In a nation such as Japan, which historically had designated specific sections of its major cities as pleasure quarters, the translation of these spaces into the literary and artistic imagination demonstrates the degree to which a realm that was supposed to be contained, controlled, and “outside” the mainstream could nevertheless hold great significance in the dominant culture as a place of aesthetic experimentation as well as of performed and internalized ideals, trauma, mourning, testimony, racism, violence, redemption, and transcendence. This book considers how the physical space of the demimonde was interpreted in literary space in various twentieth-century Japanese texts, films, and artworks, especially as the space of the actual pleasure quarters was undergoing striking changes.⁶

From rapid modernization during the interwar period (1918–1939) to postwar devastation and economic recovery (1945–present), Japan experienced a radical transformation in social and cultural values during the twentieth century. This sociocultural shift led writers and other artists to return repeatedly to the demimonde to represent, in sometimes highly inventive ways, its many potent facets: its intimacies, fantasies, addictive and contagious power, complex temporality, memories, lost illusions, pleasure, and pain. In the process, writers inevitably detailed the cities that those demimondes inhabited, harassed, and inspired, underlining the connection between demimonde texts and those about the city