Paper short abstract:

The paper will discuss the works of pioneering science fiction writer Suzuki Izumi in the context of Japanese counter culture. I will read Suzuki's works in the light of Yoshimoto Takaaki's theory that highlights the dangers of "communal illusion" of the state.

Paper long abstract:

Critics generally consider the seventies as a decade of political lethargy in Japanese Literature, following the failure of the student movement in the 1960s. However, when one examines the works written in the "less than prestigious" genre of science fiction, one finds quite a lot of critique and criticism of contemporary society and politics. Perhaps this is not surprising, as many have already noted that science fiction is a genre particularly suited for political criticism.

This paper will discuss a short novel In the World of Women and Women (Onna to onna no yo no naka, 1977) by a pioneering woman SF writer Suzuki Izumi (1949-1986). I will read this novel in the light of "communal illusion" theory of Yoshimoto Takaaki that extols a union of two people as a site of resistance to any doctrine or dogma, presented as a communal good. First, I will briefly summarize Yoshimoto's theory, and then will move on to discuss Suzuki's work. Using the reading of the feminist scholar Ueno Chizuko, I will show that this novel both reflects Yoshimoto's theory of "communal illusion," and questions its gender aspect that Yoshimoto left unproblematized. Through my analysis of Suzuki's work, I will demonstrate that political and critical impulse was alive and well in Japan in the 1970s.

Paper short abstract:

This study focuses on the representations of the politically oppressed that appear repeatedly in Kōbō Abe's early works. The study concludes how the author's experience of "absence" connects politics and literature at the linguistic level through the text of "presence".

Paper long abstract:

It is generally agreed that the relationship between politics and literature is hyponymy or rivalry. Based on such notion, the analysis that involves extracting the representation of author's political attribute and political influence directly from literary texts and returning it to social context has become dominant in the studies of the interaction between politics and literature. Politics utilizes literature for ideological control; however the literature being surrounded by politics can unconsciously acquire the power of a revolution against politics in the process. This study considers that politics and literature exist as a mirror image of each other, and they perceive their own subjects by realizing their mirror image. Furthermore, the author's "experience" involves an interaction between politics and literary texts. Namely, the actual experience of the author is functioning as a mirror and therefore it is relating politics and literature to each other, thus reflecting them.

"Experience" has been discussed over a long time in the historical context that emphasizing individuals. As the end of the war subverted the traditional political structure, literature also came to transform the dismantling of the subject as a universal theme. While the existence of such individuals is being ignored, however it is important to consider the framework of knowledge based on a notion that the "experience" can be recognized through the text,. The innovative aspect of this study is in the point of creating a concept of "blank zone" that appears in the middle between the author's experience which has been recognized as "absence", and the text which has been recognized as "presence".

Firstly, this study focuses on the representations of the politically oppressed such as Manchukuo, desert, villages and communities that appear repeatedly in Kōbō Abe's early works, and confirms the peripheral meaning symbolized by such political existence within the texts. Secondly, the study clarifies the representation of the political oppression that is born in Abe's unconsciousness during the process in which experience of "absence" is projected on the text of "presence". Finally, this study reveals how the author's experience connects politics and literature at the linguistic level through the text.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a reading of the female protagonist's train ride in Shono Yoriko's "Taimu-surippu kombināto" as a non-linear, private, yet historical mode of remembering that calls into question the notion of a coherent self/narrative and historical other whithout erasing the female I.

Paper long abstract:

In "Origin's of Modern Japanese Literature" Karatani Kōjin wrote of landscape that it was a 'structure of perception' before it became a representational convention. The discovery of landscape, he argues, gave birth to modern subject/object relations as well as modern Japanese literature. We need not go back to Kaja Silverman or Theresa de Lauretis' re-readings of Lacan to know that such divisions run alongside gendered lines. As is the case with the 'home' and furusato in Japanese literature: Both tend to be the scenic object of an aestheticizing, desiring male gaze, whereas woman does not 'have' a furusato. For as the phrase "haha naru furusato" indicates, she often is (made) the home, coalescing with the landscape, becoming one with the furusato. Female characters moving out of the 'home', through space, thus, have always been an important focus point for feminist inquiries into representation. This is the broader framework I situate my analysis of Shōno Yoriko's "Taimu-surippu kombināto" (1994) in.

The more specific frame crystalizes around the question of how the female protagonist's train ride functions within this novel. Not quite circular but not linear either, her moving through the post-industrial urban spaces of Tokyo on lines such as the Chuo- and Keihin-Tohoku, but especially the Tusurumi line enables, as I will demonstrate, a non-linear, private, yet historical mode of remembering. Not a post-modern mode of remembering from 'beneath' or into the 'beyond' of dominant History, this moving through space instead tells histories as what we, with Eve Sedgwick, could call the synchronic, spatial "besideness" of "a number of elements" lying "alongside one another": A mode, so Sedgwick in "Touching Feeling", that "permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking" such as "subject versus object". Yet while "Taimu-surippu kombināto" through this mode of moving between personal/historical elements does call into question the notion of a coherent self/narrative and an objectifiable (historical) other, the female I does never completely dissolve; A point, as I will argue, that makes this novel a potentially feminist one.