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

it enabled and encouraged a subjective evaluation and experience of the demimonde's pleasures and pains. The demimonde's figurative space could serve whatever purpose these writers wished—aesthetic, psychological, political—and therein rests one of the greatest ironies of this type of literature. Instinct indicates that demimonde fiction would likely chronicle a private desire, as a ledger of attraction, longing, seduction, frustration, loss, anguish, and (sometimes) fulfillment. Yet, I argue that the textual landscapes of such demimonde texts were, because of their very interiority, potentially subversive to state authority and forced ideologies of national unity, particularly in the violent (intellectually as well as physically) interwar and postwar periods. The demimonde figures as a realm in which outsiders with specialized knowledge can become highly influential figures in a society/national culture and in which, ultimately, the wounds left by a dramatic—and traumatic—century in Japanese history may possibly be healed.

By locating the possibility for healing and agency in the pleasure quarters, Japanese writers, I argue, discovered a paradoxical truth: namely, that the demimonde, often seen as a place of pathology, may become a textual place in which to work through trauma. Even though the topos of the karyûkai was still, at times, written as an elegy—it was portrayed as a place of tragedy and loss in works, for example, such as the stories of Higuchi Ichiyô, Ôka Shohei's Kaei, Tamura Taijiro's Story of a Prostitute (about the Korean comfort women), and the films of Mizoguchi Kenji which deal with demimondaines and the karyûkai, including Sisters of the Gion and The Life of Oharu—it also figures as a redemptive space in twentieth-century demimonde literature. The freedom to unmoor oneself from linear time was one way in which the demimonde spurred on such a regenerative process. In turn, such processes were represented in modern demimonde literature by performative techniques, such as the dancelike montage sequences found in several key demimonde texts, such as Kawabata's Yukiguni. I argue that modes of performance became integral to processing in these narratives the negative experience of modernity as well as the loss induced by the collapse of the historical karyûkai. Demimonde literature further points to the