| Chapter : | Introduction: The Demimonde as Genre, Metaphor, and Space |
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sense, as textual pimps, luring bargain-lusting outsiders into the pleasure quarters.
In this way and others, the demimonde reconfigured the borders of national, metropolitan, cultural, and social institutions and constitutions, even as its own borders were changed over the centuries. Indeed, throughout this book, one repeatedly encounters examples of the demimonde's power as what I call—following sociologist Georg Simmel's terminology for certain social structures and monetary transactions—“a supra-spatial institution.” In the temporal realm, such supraspatial institutions have parallels with the eternal, the timeless; in the spatial realm, they have “a real and fundamental solidarity with space everywhere.”17 In other words, such institutions extend beyond their physical borders and are not fastened to specific chronological moments, because they dwell persistently in the mind, in the imagination, and at the threshold of impulse. The historical demimonde—a city within a city—had properties similar to those Simmel ascribed to a city as a whole, in that its sphere of influence does not end at its geographical frontiers.
Even when physical borders existed, as with the walls around Tokyo's Yoshiwara pleasure quarter, the city dweller's volatile perception of space could transcend those demarcations. (This is one reason why the idea of the karyûkai as an inviolable space was a fantasy, albeit a powerful one, as shown in chapter 1.) As Simmel wrote,
Thus, city dwellers are constantly, if unconsciously, in the process of recreating and resituating the demimonde, despite the best efforts of authorities to keep its influence contained.
The demimonde's supraspatial quality gave Japanese writers and artists even greater license for their fictional expressions of this world, and