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

the pleasure quarters that Kafû, Aya, theorist Isoda Kôichi, and others favored in their writings about this wasting world. Therefore, I use the term karyûkai (or its most common, if loose, English translation of “pleasure quarter[s]”) in speaking of the Japanese districts—either the most traditional examples, such as Yoshiwara, or those districts such as Yanagibashi in Nagareru or Tamanoi in Bokutô kidan, which, though not as flashy or organized as Edo-period Yoshiwara and Gion, nevertheless retained some of their systems of etiquette and aesthetics.

However, the word karyûkai, unlike the word “demimonde,” generally refers to a physical space. In contrast to the term “demimonde,” which might be seen as a Foucaultian construction in which institutions and the exercise of power equally traverse the real and the semiotic, the karyûkai is grounded in a physical world—a world of flowers and willows, teahouses and walled streets. Though the term karyûkai of course symbolizes a whole realm of erotic possibility and as such transcends the mere delineation of a physical locale, it is particular to a nation and its traditional cultures and thus has less flexibility than the term “demimonde.” The word “demimonde,” in contrast, can refer in this book to either a Japanese or another national instantiation of the place, genre, or metaphor, as discussed earlier.

Complicating the definition of the term “demimonde” is the fact that the venerable karyûkai was not the only demimonde chronicled in twentieth-century Japanese fiction. Two distinct kinds of demimondes had emerged in Japan by the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s. One was the newer culture of cafés, staffed by jokyû, or bar girls, and trading in glamorized, mass-produced caricatures of Western pop culture and beauty standards. The other was the traditional karyûkai, a realm that was far more codified and cyclical, with centuries of aesthetic and cultural history, as well as an exhausting script of erotic proprieties, behind it. By the 1920s, the café-culture demimonde had largely become the setting for fashionable, trend-setting movements—which the karyûkai had been throughout the Edo period—and the karyûkai had settled into functioning as a bastion of tradition which could be cited, albeit reductively, by nationalists as emblematic of a pure, uncorrupted “Japaneseness,”