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

toward Japan, which tended to view it as a naïve country, available for cultural plunder and easily taken advantage of, particularly since America had forced Japan to open its borders in the 1850s. This concern subsequently blackened into the full horror of violent global power struggles by the 1930s, including Japan's attempts at colonial dominance in Asia, the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan's eventual wartime defeat, and its postwar occupation by United States forces.

Despite the exceptional events of the twentieth century, my temporal focus is not meant to suggest that demimonde literature is central only to that century. On the contrary, the demimondaine is indisputably one of the most popular figures in literature of all periods. This is especially so if, along with the self-evident courtesans, prostitutes, and kept women (such as Nana, Moll Flanders, Flaubert and Honoré de Balzac's working women, Theodore Dreiser's fallen girls, the variegated courtesans of Han Bangqing's The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, and any number of characters from the canonical Japanese fiction of Ihara Saikaku, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, Kafû, and Kawabata Yasunari), her group is allowed to include the pimps, dandies, derelicts, artists, and students who hover in the shadowy alleys of and disport in her disreputable neighborhoods. Within narrative, she haunts a variety of social and historical settings: luxurious palaces and down-and-out brothels, boom economies and war-torn landscapes, myth and dream. Owing in good part to this flexibility, perhaps, the demimondaine plays a major role in (re)constituting the narrative center of some of twentieth-century Japan's most significant fiction, even as the existent pleasure quarters were themselves suffering from the consequences of historical reality.

Although the demimonde in history cannot, of course, be mapped directly onto the space as it was represented and disseminated in literature, and vice versa, there are nevertheless similarities between the two spheres. Like its historical counterpart, the imagined demimonde was a discursive construction, influenced by the nativist convictions of Japanese writers, texts from both the literary canon and the fringe, conflicting political stances, the stresses of colonialist expansion, and the fears—both rational and not—of legislating authorities. In this sense, the