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

defining a particular woman's class within the caste of sex work can be difficult. Because of this, I use words such as “prostitute,” “sex worker,” “whore,” and “demimondaine” interchangeably and without any intended pejorative implication. However, the label “geisha” will be reserved for Japanese women who were trained in the geisha's arts and/or called so by the text itself. The term “courtesan” will apply only to prostitutes of a higher economic status and, in general, a greater refinement.

Questions of Disparate Traditions, Gender,
and Chronology

Although I concentrate primarily on Japanese fiction, traditions of and evolutions in demimonde literature extend far beyond Japan, and they impacted many Japanese writers of the modern period. Thus, in my exegesis of the Japanese works, I strongly and, I believe, insightfully rely on comparative readings of Western demimonde texts (which, in some cases, may be a novel with just a few scenes set in the demimonde), including those by James Joyce, contemporary American writer William Vollmann, William Faulkner, George Washington Cable, Jean Genet, Balzac, Emile Zola, Flaubert, Lawrence Durrell, Gerard de Nerval, Ishiguro Kazuo, and W. Somerset Maugham. Just as important, in my view, are my inclusions of the often lesser-known but searing voices of such non-Western/postcolonial demimonde works by Algerian female author Assia Djebar, Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, Salman Rushdie, Indian writer Prakash Kona, and Chinese novelist Han Bangqing.

Because the demimonde, as stated earlier, has always existed vis-à-vis other institutions and influences, it is all the more appropriate to approach demimonde literature from a comparative perspective. Whether Western or Eastern, however, it is immediately noticeable that most of the Japanese writers/directors to be examined are male (with the notable exception of Aya, who wrote Nagareru after she herself worked as a maid in a geisha house), so that what will be explored are male fantasies about a space that was largely inhabited, in historical reality, by working women. This gender disparity becomes even more interesting in the context of a