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

directly affected the karyûkai by eroding any legitimacy it could claim and repositioning it as a prohibited space—perhaps all the more seductive for its illicitness. But the deeper reasons for the karyûkai's receding from its quasi-respectable role as a depository of Japanese cultural and erotic quintessence into a more taboo recess were not the result of any overt legislation. Rather, its transformation related to the way in which its code of aesthetics was devalued as much of Japan was consumed, first by a new set of national obsessions—modernization and nationalism—that had been gradually swelling in importance since the Meiji era, and later, by war and recovery from the same.² In this climate, demimonde literature represented a decentered position vis-à-vis the predominant political and social concerns, even as some of it was destined to become canonical.³

The karyûkai as presented by novelists and theorists such as Nagai Kafû and Kuki Shûzô appears as an insider's world, folded deep within itself, like a keepsake at the heart of a locket, at a time when Japan's imperialist ambitions were at their height and when the insiders of politics were taking over more and more of the outside world. There is also a dimension of time involved with Kafû and Kuki's karyûkai portrayals: their demimonde is not only tucked away spatially but is also all but lost over a distance of time. However, the inaccessibility/impregnability that they enshrine is itself largely a fantasy, partly because by recording the karyûkai in writing, they remolded it into a very public form, and partly because of the interest in the Edo period and its karyûkai that already existed during the early twentieth century. However, the demimonde texts of these two writers from 1930s Japan—as well as others examined later in this book, such as Kôda Aya's 1955 novel, Nagareru (Flowing)—do ultimately reveal that the culture of karyûkai connoisseurship, which had once been a source of great pride to Japanese dandies, was highly impractical in the interwar and postwar periods, despite whatever theoretical and literary interest in this culture remained.⁴

As the flower-and-willow world became but a far-off memory in reality, its discursive production in literature acquired a more significant psychic currency and a heightened element of fantasy. Although the demimonde died a slow death from the impact of the new cultures