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

As the pleasure quarters were disappearing during the twentieth century, writers contended with this loss by opening up a space for the demimonde within their narratives. However, in the process, they had to cope with a series of complex temporalities: that of the demimonde itself, of textuality, and of the nostalgic memories which in part enabled its recreation in stories and which rejected the relentlessness of historical time.

This is one reason why the texts I treat in this book have as much to do with time as they do with space. Moored in deep traditions, staged and repetitive encounters, and cyclical events and rituals, the Japanese karyûkai, or pleasure quarters, always possessed a malleable temporality—one that is better described as circular rather than linear, but whose complexity in fact defies any simplistic binary. What changed in the twentieth century was that the karyûkai segued from a world that was marked out in actual space to a world that was gradually enclosed (perhaps as a way to register its vanishing) by imaginative space. Yet, its historical disappearance only lent it power as an enduring and polyvalent figure of the imagination.

The Historical Demimonde in Japan:
Textuality and Containment

From its very inception, the state-organized karyûkai became embroiled in an important and intricate textual history. Even if the demimonde's shift from a physical reality to an imaginative reality (and perhaps also, even more recently, to a digitized, virtual reality, within the space of the Internet) was new to the modern period in Japan, the idea of this space exceeding its boundaries through textuality—as thereby transcending its physical territory, wherein carnal desires were satisfied but other desires were potentially ignited—was not. Throughout the Edo period (1600–1867), social policies regarding the demimonde reflected the authorities’ fears of pathology and untamed sexuality, as well as their wish to maintain control over their subjects’ activities.¹²

By setting aside strictly regulated districts such as Tokyo's Yoshiwara as outlets for the so-called necessary evil of prostitution and other