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

eliding this hazard of rhetoric and ideology, however, I have concluded that it is more appropriate to face it head-on, for the demimonde, at least as it materialized on the written page in the twentieth century, was itself a world of traps, illusions, fantasies, and intimacies, and any analytical project which pretends otherwise would be disingenuous. For why do scholars write of things, if not because they themselves have succumbed to allures that transcend the purely intellectual? I believe that ultimately this almost sensual investment in one's subjects, rather than impairing or limiting one's critical view, can lead one to greater insights.