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

common rhetoric, created by (almost exclusively male) theorists, which casts traditional Japanese culture as female. As Alan Tansman explained, “The discourse of modernity in Japanese intellectual life employs the language of gender: that which resists the modern—the anti-rational, non-Western, native core of Japanese culture—has figured in the culture as feminine.”²⁰ Writers such as Kuki, in the 1930 essay “‘Iki’ no kôzô,” wed these two genderings—the de facto femininity of the karyûkai and the projected femininity of the traditional in Japanese culture—in order to laud the authenticity of the pleasure quarters.

However, the flip side to this argument was also prevalent by the interwar period: namely, that women—and in particular, women of the demimonde—were harbingers of the modern, in part because women were suddenly more visible in the social and working structures of society after the First World War. As Miriam Silverberg observed, “Japanese commentators on Japanese modernity were very much aware of the presence of women in the modern picture. The images of the café waitress, along with the vibrating presence of the modern girl, were placed front and center.”²¹ Naomi, the main character of Tanizaki Junichirô's 1924 novel, Chijin no ai, wickedly synthesizes these two fantasies of the café waitress and the modern girl, but in many of the works I discuss—notably Nagareru, “ ‘Iki’ no kôzô,” and the texts of Nagai Kafû—femininity is mobilized to either promote modernity or to preserve tradition.

But whether demonized or apotheosized, bemoaned as modernized vamps or heralded as guardians of tradition, the female demimonde characters of twentieth-century texts and films frequently become the repository of a wide variety of male longings, ideals, convictions, and fears. In the postwar nikutai bungaku, or “literature of the flesh,” movement, for example, women generally and prostitutes specifically were appointed as agents of freedom, supposedly transcending ideology. However, this characterization by a male writer such as Tamura only raises further questions about subjectivity, projection, and fantasy in male texts about women.

As much as any ideal, literary demimondaines often embody loss.²² In part because this trope of loss and mourning frequently accompanies