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

It also considers the particular temporality of the karyûkai, as well as what impact the publication of a specialized knowledge might have on a nation that was trying to regain its sense of identity—and perhaps a modicum of pleasure—through ideals of aesthetic and cultural unity. Chapter 2 explores, through readings of Kafû's Okamezasa and Tanizaki's Chijin no ai, how the sexualized space of the demimonde, once a cordoned-off territory, became intertwined with the domestic sphere and more diffuse public space during the interwar period, resulting in a chaos of confused boundaries, identities, fantasies, contagions, and addictions.

As for the postwar works, chapter 3 focuses on how the demimonde and its taboos are employed as a locus of and a reaction to trauma in Tamura's “Nikutai no mon,” Matsumoto's Bara no sôretsu, and Murakami's Kagirinaku tômei ni chikai burû and Topâzu. Through an extended reading of Kôda Aya's 1956 novel, Nagareru, chapter 4 questions how demimonde fiction becomes internalized in the body of the one who imagines it and in the text, through the tropes of narrowness and enclosure as well as through an emphasis on claustrophilia (the love, as opposed to the fear, of small spaces). The chapter also looks at examples from a wide variety of world literary texts to argue that narrowness and enclosure are ubiquitous motifs in demimonde literature both in and outside of Japan. Finally, chapter 5 argues, through analyses of Hosoe Eikoh's Barakei photographs of Mishima Yukio and the butoh dance of Ohno Kazuo, that demimonde narratives may create a language of healing through fragmentation, montage, performance, and interiority—and through language itself.

One of the greatest dangers for a project such as this is that it may fall victim to that which it at times seeks to highlight: namely, the exoticizing, romanticizing, or orientalizing of the Japanese demimonde. In the process of trying to demonstrate why and how the karyûkai attracted so many significant chroniclers, champions, and detractors, I have found this trap both pernicious and instructive: instructive in that this very danger testifies to how seductive the tendency to romanticize the space of sexuality—a tendency to which scholars otherwise as sophisticated and nuanced as Kuki Shûzô fell victim—truly is. Rather than avoiding or