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

ways in which trauma may be worked out through the pleasures of not just narrative but the acts of reading and writing themselves.

Worlds and Words

Because a variety of terms exist—in both Japanese and English, but particularly in the former language—to denote women who sell sex and the concentrated districts wherein they do so, it is necessary to include some explanation of the terms I use in this book. The demimonde and literature have been entwined since the latter's inception as a popular art form; indeed, the second definition of the word “demimonde” in Webster's is “writers of the lowest kind—ghostwriters, hacks, and publicists.” From Giovanni Boccaccio and Ihara Saikaku to James Joyce and Kafû, both Western and Eastern writers have documented the spaces and women that were devoted to sexuality. However, the very fact that the demimonde was so widely imagined and represented in fiction problematizes the task of trying to circumscribe the term.

The word “demimonde” has always suffered from a kind of schizophrenia, referring as it does to both a place and persons. It specifies a peripheral space of concentrated, commodified, staged eroticism, but it can also designate people who embody such a fringe erotic lifestyle, whether they are physically located within a sex district or not. In other words, whereas some demimondes are officially situated, as in the case of licensed prostitution quarters that are cordoned off from the rest of the city, others are more mobile—composed, for instance, of kept women who circulate through various social classes and neighborhoods. Therefore, I intend to define the demimonde as a larger cultural phenomenon that plays on a dialectic of otherness and containment. It is a commodified arena of sexuality that, as a commodity, transgresses the typical boundaries of inside/outside and often attracts and embodies various qualities such as deviance, decadence, rebellion, disreputability, amorality, a stress on appearances, and a frankness regarding carnality, artistry, and performativity. Another way of putting it is that the demimonde is an “inside” world to which outsiders go.