| Chapter 1: | Distance, Containment, and Connoisseurship: The Privately Dying Demimondes of Bokutô kidan and “ ‘Iki’ no kôzô” |
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of convenience and capitalism in the early part of the twentieth century, and although it was sullied by the transnational sex trade that prevailed during the Japanese colonial empire, Kafû and Kuki reconstructed it in fiction as an ideal world, safely removed by centuries or geographic location from the modern world that would destroy it. The consequence of this representation of an idealized and old-fashioned realm was, paradoxically, that in order to accommodate their visions, Kafû was forced to rely on new, experimental modes of narrative and Kuki on new methods of philosophical inquiry into Japanese aesthetics.
The texts of Kuki and Kafû are not mere elegies, nor self-indulgent diaries of erotic adventures. They present the perennial territory of the karyûkai as remote and incorrupt, proud and inviolable—even if only in textual fantasy—to shifting trends in politics and aesthetics. As such, they offer an alternative to the state-controlled regime of the interwar period and to the fast, triumphant move away from the past and the legacy of WWII in the 1950s. These texts also articulate how a world of regulated sexuality, at once intimate and performative, could be positioned to critique, question, and subvert social trends and political norms—even as it was succumbing to these very same pressures and taking its bow from the twentieth-century stage.
Kuki Shûzô's Iki: Time, Space, and a Distant World
—Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”5
Traditionally, the karyûkai acted as a kind of bridge between the public and the private, as a sphere in which the typically private activities of sexuality entered a semipublic but spatially delineated realm. The distinction between public and private was a delicate and almost contradictory one that made sense only in the context of gendered power relations, as Nina Cornyetz wrote: