by Ian Buruma
All this would be camp, if it were knowing. But it is not. Young Japanese girls appear to find the pink bridges, the gay romances, the rock stars in drag, the girls dressed as boys who fall in love with other boys, beautiful. Akogare—romantic longing—is the term they use for this dream world, far removed from the demands of reality. What would be the highest of camp in another context can become cute in Japan, redolent of childhood. It is rather like the chosen name of the author Yoshimoto Banana. “Banana” is the kind of sobriquet that would suit a Brazilian drag artist. But the publicity photograph of the author hugging a little puppy dog is cuteness personified. The fact that her father is the most famous philosopher of the 1960s New Left gives her name an extra air of incongruousness, as though there were a young German novelist called Banana Habermas.
Yoshimoto Banana’s extraordinary success—more than 6 million books were sold in two years while she was still in her twenties—has made her so famous that the Japanese foreign ministry was handing out copies of her book to foreign visitors at the 1993 G-7 Summit in Tokyo. They may not have realized what peculiar fantasies lurk behind Yoshimoto’s cute exterior.
Yoshimoto Banana’s stories are clearly related to the androgynous teenage universe of Takarazuka and girls’ comics. The characters in Kitchen, a book of two short stories, include a transsexual father and a boy who dresses up in his dead girlfriend’s school uniform. Yet there is nothing overtly kinky about these transformations. In the title story, a young girl called Mikage, who is left alone in the world after her grandmother dies, goes to live with Eriko, the transsexual, and his/her son, Yuichi. She more or less lives in their kitchen, cooking delicious food, trying to soothe her lonely heart. In a way, the kitchen is to Mikage what drag is to Eriko: a refuge from loneliness after the death of a loved one. Yuichi explains how his father became his mother:
“After my real mother died, Eriko quit her job, gathered me up, and asked herself ‘What do I want to do now?’ ”What she decided was, ‘Become a woman.’ She knew she’d never love anybody else. She says that before she became a woman she was very shy.”
In the second story, entitled “Moonlight Shadow,” Hiiragi’s taste for wearing his dead girlfriend’s clothes is equally matter-of-fact. And it, too, is an escape from loneliness. His girlfriend, Yumiko, died in a car crash, together with his brother Hitoshi. Hitoshi’s girlfriend is called Satsuki, and the story is told in her voice. She wants to know why Hiiragi insists on going around in Yumiko’s school uniform:
When I asked him if he wore it for sentimental reasons, he said that wasn’t it. “Things are just things, they can’t bring back the dead. It just makes me feel better.”
What cooking is to Mikage, jogging is to Satsuki. As Satsuki says,
His sailor outfit—my jogging. They served exactly the same purpose.… Neither recourse was anything more than a way of trying to lend some life to a shriveled spirit. It was a way to divert our minds, to kill time.
The Italian scholar Giorgio Amitrano pointed out the connection with girls’ comics in his introduction to the German edition of Kitchen. He wrote that Yoshimoto’s stories, with their odd sexual disguises and morbid emotions, are not only like many Japanese girls’ comics, but also owe much to horror movies and the impressionistic style of Kawabata Yasunari’s novels. This is more weight than the book can possibly carry, but the point is well taken, for a fascination for horror and death is as much part of girls’ comics as the cuteness and androgynous fantasies.
The tone of Yoshimoto’s stories is strange, for it veers from childlike naïveté to flights of bizarre fancy, which is just like most Japanese comic books for teenagers. Sometimes her prose is direct and simple, and sometimes it reads like a young girl’s diary, filled with poetic sadness: “Suddenly, to see that the world was so large, the cosmos so black. The unbounded fascination of it, the unbounded loneliness …”
Children often dream of flying out the window of their bedrooms, following some fairy or another to a never-never land without parents, to a new family of children and freaks. Yoshimoto’s characters are a bit like such dreaming children—except that they are not children; they just dream like children. Instead of fathers and mothers, there are the surrogate fathers and brothers, dressed in women’s clothes.
But neither of her stories celebrates or even suggests new sexual possibilities, as one might assume. Indeed, sex, like real parents and siblings, is absent. Yuichi never becomes Mikage’s lover, and neither does Hiiragi become Satsuki’s. Not sex but death permeates both tales: the death of Eriko, stabbed by a mad suitor; the death of Mikage’s grandmother; and the deaths of Satsuki’s boyfriend and Hiiragi’s girlfriend. Death, loss, the melancholy fleetingness of life, these are brooded over endlessly with the feverish sensibility of Victorian children’s tales. This is where Kitchen is both contemporary and very traditional—hence, perhaps, the perceived shades of Kawabata, who, incidentally, wrote some of his stories for an audience of young girls. But it is a pop version of Kawabata, as though The Izu Dancer or Snow Country were written for the Takarazuka theater.
The two most common phrases in classical Japanese literature, as well as in modern pop songs and in Yoshimoto’s book, are sadness (kanashimi) and nostalgia (natsukashisa). Translated into English, this can sound odd: “The sound of his voice made me want to weep with nostalgia.” Or “Somewhere deep in my heart I felt I had known her long ago, and the reunion made me feel so nostalgic I wanted to weep tears of joy.” Weeping tears of nostalgia is not something one comes across often in Western literature. Not that the emotion doesn’t exist, but it is not usually so histrionically expressed; or, rather, what sounds histrionic in English is perfectly ordinary in Japanese. Perhaps “nostalgic” isn’t even quite the right word for natsukashii, but I don’t know of a better one.
Nostalgia is closely linked to that other key element of Japanese aesthetics: mono no aware, the pathos of things. Sadness about the transience of life is, in Japanese art, a thing of beauty. Again, like nostalgia, it is not easy to translate. But you find instances of it all through Yoshimoto’s book:
When I finished reading I carefully refolded the letter. The smell of Eriko’s favorite perfume tugged at my heart. This, too, will disappear after the letter is opened a few more times, I thought. That was hardest of all.
Nostalgia is one reason why so much in Japanese art is about reliving the past, or fixing the flow of time, as in a haiku. The ghosts of the dead appear in Noh plays rather as Christ did to his disciples after the crucifixion. Sometimes they return to torment or exact their revenge, and sometimes to liberate the living from being haunted by death. And sometimes just to say good-bye. In “Moonlight Shadow,” Satsuki sees her dead boyfriend for one last time, when he appears one night on a river bank:
My tears fell like rain; all I could do was stare at him. Hitoshi looked sadly back at me. I wished time could stop—but with the first rays of the rising sun everything slowly began to fade away.
The beautiful pathos of things is linked to the Japanese cult of purity, of uncorrupted youth, of the cherry blossom in full bloom. It is the fleetingness of the cherry blossom’s life (about a week in Japan) and the speed at which decay and corruption spoil the pure beauty of a young boy or girl that bring on the sense of exquisite sadness. Here is where classical Japanese aesthetics meets the world of Takarazuka, girls’ comics and Yoshimoto’s stories. For in all these instances there is a deep nostalgia for the purity of youth, before sex roles are clearly defined, before social hypocrisy corrupts, before the rot sets in. In Japanese fiction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, homosexuality was often celebrated for this reason: boys’ love was considered to be purer than the heterosexual kind; it was uncontaminated by the demands of reproduction and other family duties.
Since family duties are (or at any rate were) particularly onerous in Japan and sex roles so rigidly defined, it is no wonder that young girls so often long to stop time and to retreat into a fantasy world of purity, a
ndrogyny and prepubescence. Yet, of course, women have written about sexual love. Lady Murasaki wrote about little else in her Tale of Genji. But even she, who still enjoyed a high status in the rarefied sphere of the Heian court, was filled with sadness: she pined, she longed, she was nostalgic. Subsequently the status of Japanese women steadily declined and women’s stories, whether written by women or men, became sadder and sadder. Love so often ended in tragedy because there was no room in Japanese society for love. Marriage had nothing to do with romantic love. And women who loved outside the home, in fiction and in fact, overstepped their social borders, and their passion had to end in death. Sex in the fiction of the Edo period (1603–1867) was almost entirely confined to the licensed quarters. But only men wrote about this floating world of paid love. Ihara Saikaku’s The Life of an Amorous Woman (1686) is one of the masterpieces of this genre. Women, being confined to the brothel or the home, hardly wrote anything at all. They were the sacrificial victims of love in the male imagination, and often in reality too.
Love, wrote Tanizaki Junichiro in 1932, was liberated for the Japanese by European literature. He meant that romantic love in modern Japan had become a serious subject, not an excuse for dramatic suicide. Before there was only sex, with prostitutes, actors, boys; now sexual love would strike a blow for individual freedom. Women writers took up this theme too. But it is interesting that one of the greatest literary masterpieces of the early modern period (and indeed of modern Japanese literature tout court) should still be so traditional, in content and in form. It is a novella entitled Growing Up, written by Higuchi Ichiyo and published in 1895. The story is of a young girl growing up in a licensed quarter of Tokyo. What makes her sexual awakening, her growing up, so sad is that we know how she will end up—in the brothel with her elder sister. Freedom, as this story shows, belongs to the child. The loss of innocence means bondage, not freedom. To become a woman is to enter the prison that society has provided—in this case a whorehouse, but it could just as well have been the home.
Things have changed since 1895, to be sure. Japanese women have more freedom than ever before. One of the most remarkable statistics of modern Japan is that in recent years more women than men have initiated divorce proceedings. (In Higuchi Ichiyo’s time, a woman did not even have the right to ask for a divorce.) And yet, as far as sexual love is concerned, things have not changed as much as it may seem. For the alternative to pure sex is still very often a sad nostalgia for lost innocence.
What has changed is that the description of sex, from a predatory point of view, is no longer a male preserve. A young woman writer called Yamada Emi made her reputation by writing novels about working as a dominatrix in an SM club, and her passion for black men. In Bedtime Eyes, she describes her lover, a black GI, as a sweating sex object. His character is as flat and featureless as the courtesans in pornographic woodblock prints of the Edo period. Foreigners, and especially black men, have taken the place of prostitutes in the Japanese erotic imagination. A recent nonfiction best-seller entitled Yellow Cab, by Ieda Shoko, featured examples of wild sexual adventures enjoyed by Japanese women visiting New York. This is not the love that Tanizaki talked about, but at least it is women doing all the talking.
Sex with foreigners, in fantasy or in fact, is a long way from the pink dreams of innocent gender-bending. And yet there is a connection. Just as the licensed quarters were a traditional escape for men from the duties of family life, sexual adventurism overseas has become a modern escape for many independent women. Marriage for most Japanese women is still a social trap, commonly known as “the graveyard of life.” It means the end of a career, of economic independence. And, since heterosexual love in Japan usually means marriage, an increasing number of career women are stuck with celibacy, with or without trips abroad.
The alternative is of course the sexless intimacy of the fag hag and her chosen friends. The heroines of Yoshimoto’s fiction are not exactly fag hags, nor are they innocent. Mikage and Satsuki are young women, but grown-up sexual relationships are still beyond their grasp. Instead, in the security of their private kitchens, they dream nostalgic dreams, and shed melancholy tears about the passing of time. This is the stuff of great Japanese poetry, and absolute kitsch. Yoshimoto Banana is not yet a mistress of poetry, but she is a past master of kitsch.
1993
Edward Seidensticker
AN AMERICAN IN TOKYO
Of all the emotions one might associate with Tokyo, that most modern of cities, nostalgia would not rank high in the minds of most people. Yet that is precisely what many lovers and literary worshipers of Tokyo feel: a poignant sense of what has been lost. The aficionado, wandering through the Tokyo streets, finds his memory jolted with reminders, like pleasant little electric shocks, of what once was and is no more. One such aficionado, Philippe Pons, the Tokyo correspondent of Le Monde, put it well in his book D’Edo à Tokyo:
Walking through Shinjuku in the company of a friend and initiator, who picks up fragments of his memory, collected in the course of his own wanderings, is to walk in the traces from which emerges a kind of archeology of illusion.
It is of course the city’s very modernity, the unhinging pace of change, that elicits nostalgia; for it is only memories that lend a sense of continuity, of meaning, to a place which, without them, would be little more than a kaleidoscopic bazaar of senseless gimmicks, spurring its denizens to buy and sell and live faster, ever faster.
Edward Seidensticker, perhaps the most distinguished living celebrator of Tokyo in the English language, is steeped in nostalgia. Tokyo Rising: The City Since the Great Earthquake, continuing where his Low City, High City left off, from the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, when much of the city burnt to a crisp, is suffused with the melancholy remembrance of things past. This elegiac mood is deepened by Seidensticker’s wry commentary on the changes that continue to chip away at his great affection for the city. But then grouchiness about the present is inevitable in literary nostalgia, which necessarily precludes enthusiasm for the new. And, if expressed with sufficient wit, there is as much pleasure to be derived from grouchiness as from its concomitant desire to catch the shadows of the old before they fade forever.
In his Tokyo elegy Seidensticker follows, sometimes literally, in the footsteps of an author he much admires, and about whom he has written a classic book: Nagai Kafu. Kafu (he is always known by his first name) lived from 1879 to 1959, and saw his native city almost completely destroyed twice: during the earthquake in 1923 and again during the fire-bombings in 1945. He wrote novels, short stories and discursive essays of varying quality, but he was a master at evoking the changing moods of his city—change wrought by the seasons, but also by the hands of man. The prevailing mood of everything Kafu wrote is nostalgia.
Like all romantics, Kafu was an escapist. His entire life can be seen as an escape from the stern, stuffy, eminently respectable world of his father, a businessman and a bureaucrat who embodied the mixture, so typical of his time, of social conservatism and an unshakable faith in Western-style progress. He was the kind of Meiji patriarch who agreed with the famous Kabuki actor of that era that “the theatre of recent years has drunk up filth and smelled of the coarse and the mean.” And, like the actor, he wished “to clean away the decay.”
Kafu did not wish to clean away anything: he wallowed in decay. He disliked progress as much as conventional morality, and from a very early age he sought refuge precisely in the coarse and the mean, among the actors, comedians, musicians and prostitutes of the old city, the Shitamachi, or, as Seidensticker translates it, the Low City, to the plebeian east of Tokyo, where history cast its longest shadows. Kafu was a rebel, to be sure, but in his loathing of the modern world and his morbid love of decay (when he wasn’t visiting brothels, he was prowling around cemeteries) he was a rather reactionary rebel. Or perhaps “reactionary” is not quite the right word; like Seidensticker, he liked to mourn for the past without really wishing for its revival, for he was always too curious to s
ee what silliness people would come up with next.
As a young man, Kafu spent some years in America, partly in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which was not at all to his taste. He was happiest roaming around the brothels and opium dens of Manhattan’s Chinatown, where his connoisseur’s nose picked up his favorite odor of decadence. Back in bustling, brash, modern, Meiji Japan, he turned his back in disgust on the literary world, with its coteries, its academic positions, its prizes, and spent the rest of his life in the company of geisha, strippers, whores and a few scattered fellow enthusiasts of the low life, which revolved around such noted red-light districts as the Yoshiwara in the heart of the Low City. In his book on Kafu, half of which is biography and half translation of Kafu’s stories, Seidensticker quotes the following passage, so typical of Kafu’s mood:
There was a sad, plaintive harmony in the life and scenes of the Yoshiwara, like that of Edo plays and ballads. It was not the creation of novelists who put their skills to the uses of their tastes. And it was not limited to the Yoshiwara. In the Tokyo of past days there was a sad harmony in the crowded lowland flats and in the quiet hilly sections, too.… But time passed, and the noise and glare of the frantic modern city destroyed the old harmony. The pace of life changed. I believe that the Edo mood still remained in the Tokyo of thirty years ago. Its last, lingering notes were to be caught in the Yoshiwara.