| Chapter : | Introduction: The Demimonde as Genre, Metaphor, and Space |
|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
(including those by Western writers) and the demimonde's most ardent observer, the flâneur, who, as Baudelaire once claimed, was a person who walks throughout the city in order to experience it.7
I examine primarily the case of Japan from the very beginning of the twentieth century to the early 1990s through the analysis of fiction, critical essays, films, photographs, and performances by Nagai Kafû, Kôda Aya, Tanizaki Junichirô, Kuki Shûzô, Mishima Yukio, Hosoe Eikoh, Tamura Taijiro, Murakami Ryû, Ohno Kazuo, and Matsumoto Toshio. However, I also make use of comparative examples from Western demimonde literature for several reasons.
For one, I do this in order to bring the unique aspects of the Japanese texts to the fore. After all, although the twentieth century marked great changes in society, culture, and literary representation for the entire world, Japanese writers and artists were shaped by their own particular historical and cultural context, as well as by the conventions and legacies of their long tradition of demimonde literature, so the differences between their texts and Western ones should not be in any way elided. Comparisons to Western writers may also provide some grounding for those who are well read in the Western canon but unfamiliar with Japanese literature.
Finally, the twentieth century was the first full century since the sixteenth to be marked by an open dialogue between Japan and any foreign country, which resulted in constant cross-cultural influences and fantasies of the exotic other on both sides in the early part of the century. (To name just two opposing examples, there was the Japonisme movement in the West, which attracted such artists and musicians as Claude Monet, Édouard Manet, Gustav Klimt, Vincent van Gogh, French demimonde chronicler Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Giacomo Puccini, and W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan in The Mikado. In contrast, one could note the way in which Kafû's texts were inspired by his extensive readings in French literature, notably Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education). From the beginning, however, this exchange was darkened by Japan's concern over foreign—particularly Western—adulteration of its native culture. The seemingly amiable ties were also clouded by American attitudes