KANEHARA HITOMI AND THE SHOCK OF THE NEW?

In 2009, Kanehara Hitomi was a guest at the Melbourne International Writer’s Festival. In front of a small but enthusiastic crowd Kanehara was interviewed by Paddy O’Reilly the author of a collection of award-winning stories The End of the World, a novel The Factory, and a novella Deep Water. During the interview Kanehara reassured the audience that she had not personally shared the experiences of her characters. Given the hard boiled nature of some of these experiences this was a great relief to the audience! The following excerpt from my PhD thesis on Yoshimoto Banana looks at the success of writers like Kanehara Hitomi in light of Yoshimoto’s career.

The success Yoshimoto Banana has achieved in her writing has undoubtedly helped to raise the profile of female writers in Japan. The latest example of this success came on January 15^th, 2004, when the 130^th Akutagawa Prize went to two young female writers Wataya Risa, nineteen years old, and Kanehara Hitomi, twenty years old. Previously, the youngest recipients had been male and included Shintaro Ishihara and Oe Kenzaburo, both twenty-three at the time. Of the 2003 winners, Ashby (2004) writes that ‘It’s been amazing to experience all the excitement surrounding the latest winners of the Akutagawa Prize’. Of the five finalists in 2003, three were women. In relation to the media interest that this provoked, Saito Minako is reported as suggesting in the Asahi Shimbun that there is an element of sexism in the ‘media frenzy over the two girls’. Why, she wonders, is it normal for men in their 30s but not young women to be finalists? (Saito in Ashby, 2004).

Saito’s response suggests that gender is still an issue which Japanese women have to contend with in their professional lives. It corroborates Yoshimoto’s observation that it is difficult for a woman to be accepted as a ‘writer’ in Japan.  Despite more and more Japanese women abandoning the stay-at-home life of their mothers and grandmothers they are still treated as curiosities. According to Saito, however, there has been a ‘change in the attitudes of the older men in the literary establishment’. Writers such as Yoshimoto Banana and Murakami Haruki have paved the way for such a change.

Given Yoshimoto’s prolific output, it is unlikely that critics will jump to the conclusion that Kanehara has said everything that she has to say or that the future of Japanese literature is in danger. Yoshimoto Banana, like Murakami Haruki, has moved on to what she has referred to as the second phase of her career and started to engage with a broader range of social issues in her writing. This is a move that, in Murakami’s case, long time critic Oe Kenzaburo has applauded. Jay Rubin (2005) writes that Oe Kenzaburo, the chief spokesperson for the Prize committee which awarded Murakami the forty-seventh Yomiuri (Newspaper) Literary Prize for 1995, said that in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Murakami was able to respond to the expectations of a wide audience whilst exploring themes that are deeply his own (Rubin, 2005, 235).

An ongoing feature of shifts in literary taste is the ‘shocking’ nature of such change. Ishihara Shintaro won the Akutagawa Prize in 1955 for Taiyo no Kiseki. In a review of Ishihara’s 2004 memoir Ototo (Younger Brother), Todd Croswell and James Bailey suggest that with sales of 2.6 million copies, Tayo no Kiseki  ‘made the Akutagawa’ (Croswell and Bailey, 1996). The translators in the 1966 English language version Season of Violence noted that:

The stories in this collection of translated works are, in a word, shocking. They are shocking for their content no less than for their being completely different, image-breaking portrayals of postwar Japanese youth (Season of Violence, 1966, 7).

What was so shocking was the ‘wild, wilful, and seemingly amoral youth of the story’ (John G. Mills, Toshie Takahama, Ken Tremayne, Introduction to Season Of Violence, 1966, 7). People’s capacity to be shocked by the new does not seem to be diminished by time. There was just as great a sense of shock ten years later when Murakami Ryu won the Akutagawa Prize with his novel Almost Transparent Blue (1977). Murakami’s characters, members of the counter-culture, embark on various drug-fuelled escapades that include group sex with African American soldiers from the Yokosuka army base. There is a heightened awareness in the novel of their non-conformity. A policeman says to the group:

“Hey, you kids, you’ve got it too much your own way, it bothers us, all of you lying around naked in the daytime, maybe it doesn’t matter to you, but some people – not like you punks – know how it is to feel ashamed” (Almost Transparent Blue, 1977, 102).

  

Yoshimoto Banana herself shocked the literary establishment in 1988 when Kitchen was nominated for the Akutagawa Prize. This time the shock was due to Yoshimoto’s literary influences that included children’s manga such as Doraemon and Stephen King. If she had been writing about bad sex, bad drugs and youth ‘gone bad’ she might have been more acceptable. She could have been filed away with the school of rebellious male writers like Dazai Osamu, Ishihara Shintaro or Murakami Ryu or equally rebellious female writers like Yamada Amy for behaving badly. Instead, Yoshimoto Banana has created a literary style distinguished by its New Age pursuit of spiritual rather than sexual awakening. Her characters (both human and non-human) communicate on an intuitive level or through their dreams rather than on a physical level.

An interesting aspect of change in relation to this discussion to Yoshimoto as a female Japanese writer is the ongoing nature of change. This thesis has discussed the debate that surrounded the emergence of the modan ga-ru in the 1920s and the controversy shrouding the exact definition of the term shojo and therefore the specific nature of the threat posed by this figure. The freedom that postwar Japanese couples enjoyed by the 1960s, compared with previous generations, was the subject of much controversy described largely in photographic evidence in Life World Library Japan published in 1966, written by the influential translator Edward Seidensticker. There are photographs of young couples going on dates which their parents ‘could not’, young people protesting in a Tokyo Tomobishi tea room and a group of raritteru (sleeping pill addicts) partying at the beach. Seidensticker lets the photographs do the talking but notes that:
       

        The urban youth of today are heavily engaged in the search for new values to
        replace old dogmas in which they have no confidence. It is a process prickly
        for themselves and painful to their elders, who still submissively accept the
        authority of family, religion and state that is so brusquely rejected by their
        restless children. Sometimes the quest of youth ends bleakly in a withdrawal
        into self, but more often it ends in the excitement of new ideas and new heroes
        (Seidensticker, 1966, 83).

Today, forty years later, the dangers of ‘withdrawal into self’ identified by Seidensticker appear to be very prescient. This is so, especially taking into account the amount of controversy surrounding the figure of the otaku (anime fanatics) and hikki komori (social withdrawal) in the Japanese media. Moreover, this is precisely the tendency exhibited by so many of Yoshimoto’s characters that perhaps enables her readers to identify so closely with her writing in such large numbers, not just in Japan but globally. On the other hand, rather than being a writing of despair, loneliness and alienation, Yoshimoto has made a ‘withdrawal into self’ a step taking her characters on a journey of self-discovery and healing. It is a non-confrontational way of transforming the self which conforms to traditional expectations of self-effacement in Japanese society but also draws in the idea of retreating into an ‘inner space’ favored by British women writers that enabled them to create their own voice in a ‘separtist literature of inner space’.

While Yoshimoto celebrates life, looking to heal the body and soul through acts of self expression and a Jungian communion with nature, Kanehara questions the need to eat and views the body as an alien object. There is great hostility shown towards the body and a deep rooted suspicion about its needs. Whilst these two writers approach the body and its needs from very different perspectives, both challenge traditional notions about the place of women in Japanese society. Women's writing, once dismissed in Japan as being subordinate to men's writing, has proved to be diverse and individualistic, challenging traditional notions about women finding fulfillment finding marriage and motherhood.