The Demimonde in Japanese Literature: Sexuality and the Literary Karyûkai
Powered By Xquantum

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

Chapter :  Introduction: The Demimonde as Genre, Metaphor, and Space
Read
image Next

demimonde is both a place and a semiotic construction, mediated by the performance of erotic relations between the customers and prostitutes. But, because the demimonde was an actual place, its loss functions as a powerful catalyst for its invention on the page. As Judith Butler wrote,

Places are lost—destroyed, vacated, barred—but then there is some new place, and it is not the first, never can be the first. And so there is an impossibility housed at the site of this new place. What is new, newness itself, is founded upon the loss of original place, and so it is a newness that has within it a sense of belatedness, of coming after, and of being thus fundamentally determined by a past that continues to inform it. And so this past is not actually past in the sense of “over,” since it continues as an animating absence in the presence, one that makes itself known precisely in and through the survival of anachronism itself.8

This “belatedness,” or sense of anachronism, Butler addressed may be considered a phantasmal agent of nostalgia, or a feeling in which the past “continues as an animating absence in the presence.” Formed from the Greek roots nostos, meaning “to return home,” and algos, meaning “pain,” the word “nostalgia” refers to a longing, infused with a mixture of pleasure and suffering, to bring the past—often an idealized, prelapsarian past—home, into the present, or to a savoring of its flow into the present moment (as Mikhail Bakhtin would have said, thus privileging a presumed authenticity in the past over the future9).

Nostalgia can be understood as a memory (what Marilyn Ivy called “embodied memory”10) that is excessively invested in a particular place, person, idea, or time. It is, as will be shown, an essential motivator and theme of many demimonde texts written in twentieth-century Japan. Nostalgia relates to both space and time. As Svetlana Boym wrote,

At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress.11