POSTHUMANISM AND YOSHIMOTO BANANA

Since her early books, Yoshimoto Banana has increasingly explored a posthuman world in which human characters interact with non-human characters such as ‘intelligent plants’ and animals. In literary terms, Yoshimoto has often described her writing as ‘fables’. The fable has a long and rich tradition in the West and is a genre that has been used by Japanese writers such as Miyazawa Kenji. There is a significant difference, however, in the way Yoshimoto writes about animals compared with Miyazawa. Miyazawa Kenji wrote traditional fables using animals instead of human characters for a moral purpose. For example, in Miyazawa’s short story ‘The Fire Stone’ (1992), a hare by the name of Homoi rescues a baby lark from drowning. In return, the king of the larks presents Homoi with a jewel (107). At first Homoi is pleased but with the jewel comes great responsibility. Because of his personal failings, a speck appears on the stone and at the end of the story it flies away (132). This fable teaches the reader a lesson about humility. The animals in this story are to all intents and purposes human beings in disguise. Yoshimoto, however, is more interested in exploring a world of the senses in which her human characters, animals and plants are equal. She is not writing allegories. And so, she is free to create new ways of being which are not bound by a humanistic framework.

 

Yoshimoto is not the first writer, however, to explore a posthuman world. Westerling notes that in Virginia Woolf’s 1941 novel Between the Acts, ‘Animal voices interweave with the human voices in the conversation that opens the novel’ (2006, 40). In doing so, Westerling argues that Woolf ‘restored human affairs to their embedded place in the wider community of earth’s beings and forces’ (41). Given the emergence of ecocriticism in literature which seeks to move beyond a humancentric view of the world, Westerling is excited by the possibilities that ecocriticism offers ‘at the beginning of a dangerous new millenium’. According to Westerling, literature can help bring the voices that French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote were ‘assumed to be silenced’ into ‘presence for a post-humanist future’ (44). Yoshimoto, it can be argued, is exploring these same possibilities in her writing.

 

Yoshimoto’s human characters claim they are able to communicate with animals in novels such as Honeymoon (1997). In Honeymoon, Hiroshi, who has been abandoned by his parents and is the victim of bullying, is described as liking dogs more than people (17). He also says that he can sometimes ‘understand’ animals. Manaka, the protagonist and his bride, thinks he is being stupid. She tells him sarcastically that when they go and see the koalas he can tell her what they are thinking (129). However, when Manaka and Hiroshi take a boat trip to see the dolphins, they see lots of ‘magnanimous’ dolphins who ‘deign’ to play with the humans. It is observed that from God’s eyes, human beings are like dolphins playing ‘wild’ and ‘primitive’ games. By watching the dolphins, Manaka and Hiroshi learn to see themselves in a new way and find a sense of meaning and purpose in life that has escaped them in Tokyo (149 - 154). Observing animals in the wild helps Manaka and Hiroshi discover this new sense of being.

 Yoshimoto often depicts human and animal interaction in a positive light which is in stark contrast to the many examples of destructive human behaviour which are referred to in her writing. In Mizuumi (The Lake) (2005b), Chihiro, the narrator, sleeps with Nakashima-kun and suspects that he has been sexually abused because he treats sex as if it is a ‘bad thing’ (40). Later, she learns that he was kidnapped by a religious cult when he was a child. When he escaped from the cult he remembers walking past a farm where he saw some horses. Significantly, they were not scared by him and gradually he felt better until he patted them. He describes their eyes as being like the sea, ‘pretty and engulfing everything’. Nakashima-kun cried and was thankful to the horses whose wild eyes returned him to himself (192). Together he and Chihiro plan to return to Shimoda to thank the horses (204).

 Animals are important because of the role they often play in the rehabilitation of Yoshimoto’s characters. In Niji (2002a), the narrator known as Watashi (I) is given a job looking after some animals and a garden after her third nervous breakdown. After her initial reticence towards them, Watashi begins to realise that they are helping her rehabilitation (68). Having lost her zest for life she is surprised by their vigour and strength and feels guilty that they are giving her so much strength. The effect of this interaction on Watashi is not surprising given the observation by Fox that:

 

Humans relax when there are animals around – just seeing them lowers the blood pressure – and this mix of human and animal has an ancient, primitive feel to it in a world where separation of man and beast, coupled with a kind of enforced sterility, is the order of the day (Fox, 2002, 52).

Estes argues that dogs ‘are the magicians of the universe’. ‘By their presence alone’, she suggests, ‘they transform grumpy people into grinning people, sad people into less sad people…’ (1997, 130).

 Yoshimoto depicts animal human interaction on an even higher level than this, however. In her stories, animals like plants, are capable of interacting and communicating with human characters. Thus, in Honeymoon, on the night that Olive died, Manaka recalls taking her for a walk. There was a strange feeling in the air that Olive was going to die (28 – 33). In Argentine Hag (2002), Mitsuko’s father makes a tombstone for his wife in the shape of a dolphin. When she sees what he is doing, Mitsuko says, ‘I forgive my father for not being present at mum’s death. Totally.’ The dolphin tells her ‘firmly’ that it is much harder for him because he was not there (85). This is one of a number of scenes in Yoshimoto’s writing, both fiction and biographical, where dolphins and humans are shown having this kind of interaction. Even more so than other animals, dolphins have an added significance in New Age thinking. David Tacey writes in his study Jung and the New Age

It is little wonder that the dolphin and the whale have become key symbols of the New Age, because they express perfectly the condition of oceanic engagement and at-one-ment to which the New Age aspires (Tacey, 2002, 55).

Oceanic engagement is also at the heart of Miyazaki Hayao's 2008 animated film Gake no Ue on Ponyo (Ponyo on the Cliff) which is a loose adaptation of Hans Christian Anderson's 1836 fairy tale The Little Mermaid. In a recent interview, Miyazaki stressed the importance of this theme saying:

"It's my personal belief that you can't separate yourself from nature. As you dig further

into yourself, you would eventually reach the popint of returning to the ocean.

You're connected" (Miyazaki, Quoted in barlow, 20089 The Age EG 4).

 

Dolphins and humans experience at-one-ment in a number of scenes in Yoshimoto’s books. Apart from the dolphins appearing in the wild in Honeymoon (1997) and the statue of a dolphin that urges Mitsuko to forgive her father for his absence at her mother’s death in Argentine Hag (2002), in the novel Iruka (Dolphin), published in 2006, Kimiko visits an aquarium with her boyfriend on their first date. She later recalls watching the dolphins play not yet realising that she is pregnant (42). When she realises and tells Goro, her boyfriend, Kimiko then visits the aquarium to say farewell with thanks in her heart (219). Her baby is described as being a ‘little baby from the world of dolphins’ (247). It is also described as having moved ‘from the world of water to the world of air’ (252).

Given the significance of animals in the lives of her human characters, the cruelty of humans toward animals is then especially distressing in Yoshimoto’s writing. In Iruka (Dolphin) (2006), Goro’s friends take him to visit a taxidermist’s shop in Bali, where they see some illegally stuffed gorillas with glass eyes that seemed to follow them around the shop. Later, Goro and Yukiko take it in turns to throw up in their hotel room (58). Unlike the idealised restaurant and shops where Yoshimoto’s heroines work, the taxidermy shop is not a healthy environment and the shop assistants look like they too have been ‘stuffed’ (59). Later in the novel, Kimiko moves into a friend’s house where she feels ‘something bad’ (91). In the closet she finds a stuffed tanuki (badger) and pheasant in a plastic bag. She cannot understand why people stuff animals, as a trophy or otherwise. In her dreams she is warned repeatedly that there is something evil in the house. She finds more stuffed animals in the attic and when the psychic, Mami, comes to tell her that she is pregnant, they bury the animals in the garden (146). Yoshimoto is clearly concerned about the treatment of the animals and as Yukiko tells Goro in Bali, ‘all living things feel regret’ (59).

Yoshimoto’s exploration of these New Age themes has not escaped critical attention. Apart from Ann Sherif (1999), Yumiyama Tatsuya (1995) provides a general social context for Yoshimoto’s interest in healing in his paper “Varieties of Healing in Present-Day Japan”. Yumiyama writes that interest has been growing in Japan in healing since the 1970s. Three factors have spurred this interest including the oil shock in 1973, the publication of Shirley MacLaine’s book Out on a Limb in Japanese in 1986 and the collapse of the bubble economy in the late 1980s. Yumiyama notes that defining the term healing is difficult especially since its contemporary usage applies not only to a sense of harmony between body, spirit and nature, as well as having an individual focus. Yumiyama argues that healing also embraces interpersonal relationships as well as the environment and world peace. Yoshimoto’s interest in the New Age can be seen as part of a general trend in japan from the 1970s onwards.

Of interest to this discussion is a series of letters written by Yoshimoto Banana and Patrice Julien, an Italian chef living in Tokyo, published as News From Paradise (2005). On the 6^th of June, 2003, Yoshimoto wrote to Julien that soon after she had become pregnant, she had a dream in which a dolphin played with her and looked like it wanted to tell her something. She suggests that the dolphin wanted to let her know that she was pregnant (29). Clearly, Yoshimoto is not only interested in establishing links between the human and animal worlds, but also blurs the boundaries between the worlds of her fiction and her own life.

Finally, in her depiction of equitable interaction between animals and humans, Yoshimoto shares a similar sensibility with Japanese choreographer Teshigawara Saburo. Teshigawara’s dance company, Karas, performs a piece called Green, which features a cow performing a duet with a guitarist, geese marching behind a trombonist, dancing goats and frolicking rabbits, dancers and a live band. Teshigawara sees both the dancers and animals as being ‘living, breathing creatures who will respond to the music and each other’. Sato Rihoko, a dancer with the company explains, human beings ‘are animals too and everything around us is artificial, so we have lost our connection with nature’ (Young, 2005).

THE 'SHINJINRUI' AND THE VULNERABILITY OF THE FOETUS

Edward Seidensticker (1983) notes that a key feature of contemporary Japanese writing is the question of identity. The writers with whom Yoshimoto Banana has been most often compared are Shimada Masahiko, Murakami Ryu and Murakami Haruki (who have otherwise been referred to as the shinjinrui or new breed). These writers explore notions of identity in a way that breaks with traditional Japanese writing. In a sense this break with tradition reflects a growing sense of dissociation with ‘place’, hence the ‘globalisation’ of contemporary Japanese literature. But it also reflects a growing unease about marriage, employment, the ageing population, juvenile crime, political corruption, environmental degradation and the need for political and economic reform, things with which the Japanese media is preoccupied.

One of the key uncertainties in contemporary Japan is political and economic uncertainty. In the 2000 national elections, LDP ‘political kingpin’ Nakao Eiichi, one of the ‘government’s key figures’, lost his seat to a ‘novice’. Despite a lack of support in the main urban centres, the LDP continues to rule due to the support of rural voters, ensured by pork barrel politics. Nakao has since been arrested, ‘on suspicion of having accepted a 30 million yen ($A 1.9 million) bribe’ from a Tokyo construction company. Other figures within the LDP have been implicated.

Japan’s economic success and the subsequent squandering of that success are linked to a collapse of values symbolised by the break-up of the family and the destruction of the environment. In contemporary Japanese writing, characters embrace new religions and alternative life styles and experiment with alternative genders and family settings. They inhabit a society in which all levels of that society are in a state of transition. Murakami Haruki has been tackling political issues in his writing since ‘a series of domestic and international events’ including the Aum cult gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system. In interview Murakami says he:

"… once professed to believing that “detachment” was his greatest asset as a writer. However in recent years, a series of domestic and international incidents has led him to take a more engaged approach: Living overseas during the Gulf War made him think more deeply about Japanese society, as did two traumatic events in Japan – the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake; and the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway system in the same year, blamed on Aum Supreme Truth. These events made a deep enough impression on Murakami that he felt it was time to deal with a more social reality" (Ukai, 1998, 15).

At the time, Murakami’s ‘new keyword was “commitment”’. Evidence of Murakami’s new found ‘commitment’ could be found in interviews, subsequently published, with survivors of the subway gas attacks in Tokyo and then members of the cult involved in the attacks.

 

Another defining feature of contemporary Japanese writing that Seidensticker identifies, apart from the question of identity,  is that in comparison with Edo period writing, contemporary writing does not have a ‘strong sense of locale’. The new literature is ‘altogether more national and cosmopolitan’. ‘Specific places’ have been replaced by ‘that great abstraction of suburbia’.

‘Suburbia’ is a recurring theme in Shimada’s writing. Shimada notes that since he was born ‘I’ve lived in the suburbs’. The suburbs however were built to ‘maintain the system’ and the ‘economy was saved’ (2). Shimada is critical of this system which has deprived people like his parents of their ‘liberty’:

"My parents’ generation suffered all their lives under the yoke of mortgage payments, and far from being saved, their liberty was taken away from them, and they spent their lives as slaves of their employers" (Shimada, 2000, 2).

 

Shimada defines the suburbs as a ‘prison’, and describes states like Japan, which have built these suburbs, as ‘immoral’, because it is part of a system which exploits the third world and exports ‘invasion and war offshore’. Within the suburbs, ‘boredom and decadence flourish’. Shimada notes that it is only through ‘mass-produced images’ like television dramas, Hollywood movies, pop music, animated cartoons and comics that peoples’ lives overlap, creating a sense of reality enabling them to ‘preserve their internal stability’ (3-4). This notion of ‘internal stability’ is crucial to Shimada. Without it, he suggests, people can’t survive. As evidence he suggests recent ‘grotesque events’ in the suburbs:

"… which should be basically confined to the realm of fantasy, are ever increasing. Starting from cult terrorist attacks using poison gas, serial killings of young girls, doctors murdering mothers and children, primary school children being murdered by junior high school children, an infant kidnapped and murdered by a housewife and so on, destructive and hateful instincts suddenly leap out from the monotony of daily life" (Shimada, 2000, 5).

Shimada argues that, due to their very nature, there is an ever increasing number of ‘grotesque events’ occuring in the suburbs. Personality disorders and the ‘grotesque events’ that are an expression of these disorders are a common theme in contemporary Japanese literature. And within this context, perhaps the complex social issue of abortion has come to symbolise the plight of the individual, in that the vulnerability of the foetus best symbolises the vulnerability of the individual. Millett reports that although the official abortion rate in Japan is under 400,000 a year which ‘puts it on a par with Western nations’, surveys suggest that ‘about 20 to 30 percent of pregnancies end in abortion’. Mizuko (water babies) is the name given to the aborted foetus. Millett writes in relation to the mizuko:

"The high rate had had its legacy in the peculiarly Japanese practice of “mizuko kuyo”. Beginning in the 1970s, several Buddhist shrines have been erected to cater for parents honouring lost “water babies”. The shrines are highly visible from the outside, with their rows of tiny stone statues adorned in red clothing, some with children’s toys placed neatly nearby"(Millett, The Age, 5/6/00).

It has been pointed out that children have a special place in Japanese tradition. According to LaFleur, the child is associated with ‘otherworldly’ qualities.  This was demonstrated by their ‘playfulness’ and their ‘inability to connect with the serious’. LaFleur links the ‘serious’ to the ‘adult world of work and production’. He also argues that the ‘medieval and early modern Japanese tended to interpret the frequent deaths of children as caused by their being still so close to the sacred realm that they could with ease slip back into it’ (37). This leads to the notion that the mizuko ‘straddles and holds together both worlds; it is an acknowledgement of death and at the same time an expansion of faith in some kind of rebirth’ (23).

There are many examples which demonstrate the deference made to the wisdom of children in Japan. In the introduction to Festival in My Heart: Poems by Japanese children, the poet Kawasaki Hiroshi discusses the concept of ‘wisdom’ that is possessed by children. This concept of wisdom is based on the ‘innocence’ that is attributed to children:

"On the island of Okinawa there is a saying, “Wisdom from children.” By “wisdom” they don’t mean that children have knowledge or access to information, but rather that children are innocent, pure of heart, and, thus, they see the very essence of things: their senses attain to the world of the spirit and of the supernatural. When I read the poems, I am often struck by the thought that they demonstrate the truth of this proverb: children often seem to find life in inanimate objects, and this is evident in their poems. In Japan, in our earliest history, there were many who believed that gods and spirits dwelt in trees, light, land, even rocks, and who would listen to the voices therein and make offerings. And now in the present, there are children still who have soul enough to greet the natural world as a friend, innocently – I believe these are the ones who will write poems to make us adults gasp with wonder. These are things only children can put into words simply because they are children, the way a blind person sometimes may see things that sighted people cannot" (Navasky, 1993, 6).

In his essay ‘Japanese Super-Heroes and Monsters’, Tom Gill (1998) notes that Japanese children are not only wise but also possessed of great strength:

"… in Japanese folklore, small children whose thoughts and emotions are not corrupted by adult knowledge are thought to be particularly genki and capable of performing incredible feats of strength" (Gill, 1998, 49).

The significance attributed to the ‘wisdom’ demonstrated by children over the ‘knowledge’ of adults is reflected not just in Yoshimoto’s characters but also in her comments in her interview with Kawai that, for example, her writing is not concerned with facts such as recording the date. Yoshimoto is more interested in the ‘wisdom’ possessed by children than facts. She demonstrates this in her exploration of the ‘wisdom’ possessed by characters such as Yoshio in Amrita. ‘The adult world of work and production’, as LaFleur describes it, is passed over in favour of the ‘wisdom’ of children who straddle this world and the next.

Although abortion has not polarised Japanese society in the same that that it has polarised American society, the writing of the shinjinrui shows a deep sense of unease. In Moonlight Shadow, Satsuki describes her grief at the death of her lover as being like her ‘own life had stopped’. She felt that she was ‘fated to undergo one of those things it’s better not to have to experience even in one lifetime (abortion, prostitution, major illness)’ (111).  In Amrita, Mayu tells Yoshio, ‘I’m only tormented by one thing in my life, and that was giving up my two children’ (272). Sakumi is critical of her sister and says, ‘there was a place in Mayu so dark that it was frightening’ (270).

In Murakami Haruki’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles (1997), Kumiko tells Toru at the aquarium that ‘The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things’ (227). When Kumiko leaves Toru, his world is turned upside down. Part of the reason for that they have drifted apart is that Kumiko is unable to tell Toru about her abortion. May Kasahara tells Toru ‘that’s what you’re being punished for - by all kinds of things; by the world you tried to get rid of, or by the self you tried to get rid of’ (264). The novel reverberates with this theme; in the scene where Yamamoto is skinned alive in Mongolia and the scene in which the man with the guitar case peels his skin off with a knife and becomes a ‘bright-red lump of flesh’. (339) Both scenes recall the horror of Kumiko’s abortion which she is unable to communicate to Toru.

In Murakami Ryu’s Coin Locker Babies (1982, English translation 1995), the novel which inspired Murakami Haruki to ‘write something equally sustained, unlike the fragmentary two books that had brought him such attention’ (Rubin, 2005, 78), two babies are abandoned in coin lockers at a busy station. They grow up wanting revenge. As a young adult, Kiku sees a baby crying in Toxitown and is ‘struck by how helpless children were, by the way they could only just sit there and cry even when they got locked away in a box, there was just nothing for them to do but thrash around a bit and wail’ (108). Just before he kills his mother, Kiku closes his eyes and, ‘on the back of his eyelids he saw a rubber doll with red liquid dribbling from its mouth; a doll with Kazuyo’s stiffened thighs’ (210). Later when he sees the face of his mother in his dreams, ‘She’s wearing this bright red sweater, and her face – it’s bright red too – blood red. It’s not even a real face, it’s a big red egg, no eyes, no ears, no hair, no nothing!’ (245).

Interestingly, in relation to the discussion about the impact of Western literature on Japanese writing, Stephen Snyder points out significant similarities between The Coin Locker Babies and Jean Genet’s The Thief’s Journal. These include characters that are ‘… both abandoned as children and grow up to live lives of crime and homosexual prostitution, followed by great success as artists’. As well, Snyder notes two scenes that bear striking similarities such as the scene where

"… the abandoned child encounters an elderly vagrant women he imagines to be his mother… in the other, characters muse on the attractions of the planet Uranus, where the strong gravity keeps everything close to the ground" (Snyder, 1999, 217-8).

Abortion is not, however, an issue that has been discovered by the shinjinrui. In her 1963 short story Kiji (Pheasant), named after a bird that is said by the Japanese to be especially affectionate towards its young, the novelist and biographer Setouchi Harumi describes an abortion witnessed by the protagonist:

"All of a sudden, a flesh-colored mass was pulled from the patient’s insides. Looking like a sea anemone, that round, thick piece of flesh with its tight opening was the cervix. As dirty forceps were lined up in quick succession on the side table, blood began to flow from the cervix. It gushed out without stopping. The life blood that was being drained from this woman, with her dried up yellow skin, filled the discharge bowl in an instant. Makiko had a vision of a fetus – without will, without defined shape – wincing in the dark of the womb at the cold touch of the forceps, and trying to escape" (Setouchi, 1986, 208-9).

The irony of the title Kiji points to a perceived shortcoming on behalf of the parent/protagonist who has abandoned her child. The shinjinrui explore this same dilemma in even more graphic detail. The aborted foetus provides an extended metaphor for the problems facing young people in contemporary Japanese society.

Japanese attitudes to abortion are characterised by their attitudes to water and the notion of the ‘child’. LaFleur says of the significance of water in the religious rituals associated with abortion that, ‘If water serves as a source of life, it can also, by a symbolic extension, serve as that to which the dead can be returned’ (22). LaFleur notes that in the case of abortion or miscarriage, water eases the transition from the womb to the afterlife, ‘The child who has become a mizuko has gone quickly from the warm waters of the womb to another state of liquidity’ (24).

In Yoshimoto’s writing water is seen as a conduit between worlds. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles and Coin Locker Babies, water imagery is related to the menstrual cycle and fertility. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, Toru emerges from an initially dried-up well and comes to an understanding of Kumiko’s decision to have an abortion. But in Coin Locker Babies, Kiku takes his revenge on his mother and Tokyo, the city that has produced women with such unmotherly feelings, by killing her. And, in Otomo Kazauhiro’s 1988 dystopic anime Akira, perhaps the ultimate expression of revenge in the works of the shinjinrui, Testuo is filled with hate and destroys the world because he was abandoned in childhood.

The notion of revenge is important. LaFleur quotes from a Buddhist pamphlet entitled The Way to Memorialize One’s Mizuko in which it states that the foetus from a terminated pregnancy exists in a ‘realm of darkness’.  It also contains the warning that the foetus needs a ‘full apology’. The pamphlet asks the reader:

"Think for a moment how even birds and beasts, when about to be killed, show a good deal of anger and distress. Then how much more must be the shock and hurt felt by a fetus when its parent or parents have decided to abort it? And on top of that it does not even have a voice with which to make complaint about what is happening" (LaFleur, 1992, 171).

The notion that the foetus does not have a voice, is helpless and the victim of an unspeakable crime, makes it perhaps an appropriate symbol for contemporary Japanese writers. The shinjinrui show the individual struggling to create a new sense of identity in the face of the disintegration of the family, political corruption and globalisation.

MURAKAMI RYU'S TOXITOWN AND THE REAL LIFE STORY OF OKUNOSHIMA

It is a long time since I have read this book but the image of Toxitown has stayed with me. In terms of environmental catastrophe, this book examines the legacy of a murderous military past with a hidden dump of chemicals off the coast of the southern islands of Japan and the resentment of two young boys, Kiku and Hashi, abandoned in coin lockers in the early 1970s. Life is cheap, especially in Toxitown where the dregs of human society eke out a brutal existence in the shadow of the skyscrapers in West Shinjuku. The repeated image of corpses reduced to a red blob, drive the plot forward as the boys come face to face with their past.

Raised as orphans on a small island to the south, Kiku and Hashi know little about their past except for the fact that they were abandoned. When Hashi runs away to Tokyo, Kiku and his foster mother come looking for him. In one of the first of the red doll images, Kazuyo dies after being knocked to the ground in the streets. After wrapping her corpse up in a sheet like a mummy Kiku describes her in the morning:

"Kazuyo's body had apparently bled from the mouth during the night, dyeing the top half of the mummy a deep rust colour and laminating the sheet to the skin so that Kiku could see every detail of the  face and chest" (p 85, Translated by Stephen Snyder)

As a result Kiku feels claustrophobic until he wonders if 'he too was a hard red doll draped in a sheet?' The sounds from a demolition site fill the air until he imagines the city calling to him to destroy it and he is given a sense of freedom. He imagines the city 'as a sea of ashes, bloodied children wandering among the few surviving birds and insects and wild dogs...' Filled with a murderous rage, this is just the start of his plan to unleash an apocalypse on Tokyo, a plan that can now be realised through Kiku's discovery of the truth about DATURA, a chemical stockpiled by the Americans in a cave on his faster-mother's island. Significantly, he is briefly united with his mother, and kills her in what is described as an accident by the courts. What is most significant is the description of her death. He pulls the trigger and:

"A second later, her face had been ripped away and her arms spread open as she collapsed into the same crouch as before, covered now with what might have been a bright red sweater. her head was just a smooth globe with no trace of eyes, nose, lips, ears, or hair. The globe tilted at Kiku, and a muddy red pool drank in the snowflakes from the sky, giving back a fine, faint steam" (p 211, Translated by Stephen Snyder).

Human life is reduced yet again to a sticky red doll image set off by a family dispute. This combination of the breakdown of the family, the willingness of mothers to abandon their young, a world where obscene amounts of money lead to an inflated sense of self worth whilst the legacy of the past is stockpiled in piles of abandoned chemical weapons is a recipe for disaster and Toxitown is the end result.

Whilst Murakami indulges himself to some extent in a one-sided polemic against the U.S., the reality is that today the Japanese on the southern islands are facing a deadly legacy from the war that was created by their own military. The island of Okunoshima, off the coast of Hiroshima. was used by the Japanese military to create and store the chemical weapons it used on nearly two thousand occasions in China. According to activist Yamauchi Masayuki, 6,000 tonnes of mustard gas were manufactured here as well as lewisite gas, mustard gas and tear gas. After the war, much of it was buried by American and Australian troops. Two ship loads, however, were sunk in barrels at sea. A worker at the time, one of 6,700 Japanese employed at the plant, recalls that the lives of workers was secondary to the production targets set by the military. They had no protection gear and just wore cotton masks. Breathing in arsenic trioxide led to cancer rates in the workers 3 to 4 times the average. Apart from demanding compensation, Fujimoto has been to China three times to personally apologise for war crimes that he feels he helped to commit against the Chinese people. As for the barrels of poison gas, they sit quietly at the bottom of the ocean waiting to be disposed of properly. This is the real Toxitown that the Japanese government refuses to acknowledge.

YASUNARI KAWABATA VERSUS NATSUME SOSEKI ON THE GAME OF GO

I was very lucky to find a nice first edition copy of the English translation of The Master of Go by Kawabata Yasunari in the Bookends bookshop in Carlisle earlier this year. What a fabulous book shop. Three floors of meandering rooms that you can easily get lost in. I did whilst killing time waiting for the bus to Furness to start my hike along Hadrian's Wall. But that's another story... 

Kawabata says of the master "He had the good fortune to be born in the early flush of Meiji. Probably never again will it be possible for anyone - for say, Wu C'hing-yuan of our own day - knowing of the vale of tears in which the Master spent his student years, to encompass in his individual person a whole panorama of history... He was the symbol of Go itself, he and his record shining through Meiji, Taisho and Showa, and his achievement in having brought the game to its modern flowering The match to end the career of the old master should have had in it the affectionate attention of his juniors, the finesse and subtlety of the warrior's way, the mysterious elegance of an art, everything to make it a masterpiece in itself, but the master could not stand outside the rules of equality" (Translation by Edward G. Seidensticker).

Kawabata says of the Master's game "The Master had out the game together as a work of art. It was as if the work, likened to a painting, were smeared black at the moment of highest tension. That play of white upon black, has the intent and takes the form of creative art. It has in it a flow of the spirit and a harmony as of music. Everything is lost when suddenly a false note is struck, or one party in a duet suddenly launches forth on an eccentric flight of his own. A masterpiece of a game can be ruined by insensitivity to the feelings of an adversary. That Black 121 having been a source of wonder and surprise and doubt and suspicion for us all, its effect in cutting the flow and harmony of the game cannot be denied" (Translation by Edward G. Seidensticker).

Soseki's description of the game in I am a Cat "Since I know little of the world outside my master's house, it was only recently that I clapped eyes on a go board. It's a weird contraption, something no sensible cat would ever think up. It's a smallish square divided into myriad smaller squares on which the players position black and white stones in so higgledy-piggledy a human fashion that one's eyes go askew to watch them. Thereafter, the devotees of this strange cult work themselves up into a muck-sweat, excitedly shouting that this or that rediculous little object is in danger, has escaped, has been captured, killed, rescued, or whatever. And all this over a bare square foot of board where the mildest tap with my right, front paw would wreak irrevocable havoc. As Singleman might quote from his compendium of Zen sermons, one gathers grasses and with their thatch creates a hermitage only to find the same old field when the thatch is blown away" (Translated by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson).

'NATSUME SOSEKI'S: I AM A CAT'

I am a Cat by the twentieth century Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki is a great read. It is a sprawling and scathing satire of a school teacher written by his cat. There are descriptions of his friends, neighbours and family all designed to show him in the most grotesque possible light. He, of course, can't see any of this. Some of my favourite episodes include;

 

1. The narrator reflecting on his own role in the observation of the ongoing disgrace of his master: "I sometimes think I really must be blood-kin to that monster cat one sees in ancient picture books. They say that every toad carries in its fore-head a gem that in the darkness utters light, but packed within my tail I carry not only the power of God, Buddha, Confucius, Love, and even Death, but also an infallible panacea  for all ills that could bewitch the entire human race" (translation by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, Volume 1, Chapter 3). 
 
2. The narrator's description of his master the school teacher: "The others in the house think that he is terribly hard-working. But actually he works lees hard than any of them think. Sometimes I tiptoe to his study for a peep and find him taking a snooze. Occassionaly his mouth is drooling onto some book he has begun to read. He has a weak stomach and his skin is a pale yellowish color, inelastic and lacking in vitality. Nevertheless he is a great gormandiser. After eating a great deal, he takes some taka-diatase for his stomach, and after that, he opens a book. When he has read a few pages, he becomes sleepy. He drools onto the book. This is the routinue religiously observed each evening" (translation by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, Volume 1 Chapter 1.) 
 
3. A descritpion of the master's blanket: "It makes a squalid hut, whose only distinctions are the tufts of shepherd's purse sprouting from its roof, no less gaily warm  than, for all its solid comfort, the Goldfield's mansion. I am, however, obliged to confess that that blanket jars with the day's spring feeling. No doubt its manufacturer meant that it should be white. No doubt, too, it was sold as white by some haberdasher specializing in good imported from abroad. No less certainly, my master must have asked for a white blanket at the time he bought it. But all that happened twelve or thirteen years ago, and since that far-off Age of White, the blanket has declined into a Dark Age where its present color is a somber gray. No doubt the passage of time will eventually turn it black, but I'd be surprised if the thing survived that long. It is already so badly worn that one can easily count the individual threads of its warp and woof. Its wooliness is gone and it would be an exaggeration, even a presumption, to describe this scrawny half-eroded object as a blanket" (translated by Aiko Ito and Grameme Wilson, Volume 2, Book 1).
 
4. On the nature of the narrator's difference to his master: "All created things are entitled to demand of their Creator some rest for recreation. We are born with an obligation to keep going while we can, and if, like maggots wriggling in the fabric of this world, we are to keep on thrashing about down here, we do need rest to do it. If the Creator should take the line that I am born to work and not to sleep, I would agree that I am indeed born to work but I would also make the unanswerable point that I cannot work unless I also rest. Even my master, that timid but complaining crank in the grinding mechanism of our national education, sometimes though it costs him money, takes a weekday off. I am no human cog. I am a cat, a being sensitive to the most subtle shades of thought and feeling. Naturally I tire more quickly than my master" (translation by Aiko Ito and Graeme Wilson, Volume 2, Book 2).    

AN ECOCRITICAL READING OF YOSHIMOTO BANANA

In my PhD thesis on Yoshimoto Banana, I discussed the shift in her more recent writing to a focus on the environment as part of her ongoing interest in New Age themes such as healing, spiritualism and E.S.P. and communication between humn and non-human characters. This is part of a wider shift in Japanese culture from post-war concerns about nuclear catstrophe to a concern for the environment.

After the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, Ôe Kenzaburô (1995) argues that writers such as Ôoka Shôhei, Takeda Taijun and Mishima Yukio took on the job of making sense of Japan’s defeat in the war as well as the new realities of the nuclear age and in doing so ‘provided a comprehensive image of their times’ (Ôe, 1995, 66). For many readers, the fears of nuclear annihilation during this period were realised most explicitly, perhaps, in the nihilism of Dazai Osamu’s novels. Six years after the dropping of the bomb, Tezuka Osamu’s manga Tetsuwan Atomu (Atom Boy) first appeared. Interestingly, under pressure from his publishers, Tezuka modifed his original vision to ‘stress a peaceful future, where Japanese science and technology were advanced and used for peaceful purposes’ (Tezuka, Quoted in Shiraishi, 2000, 295).  In this way, the atomic age also gave birth to what Shiraishi describes as technological optimism. Nevertheless, the reality of living with the fear of nuclear annihilation was central to the task taken on by the writers identified by Ôe which elevated their writing with a sense of great importance.

In terms of his own writing about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Ôe argues that his experience as the parent of a mentally handicapped child was fundamental to his realisation that healing is possible even after such a calamity and that:

…the victims and survivors of the atomic bombs have the same sort of power to heal all of us who live in this nuclear age (Ôe, 1995, 34).

Given his criticisms of Yoshimoto’s writing, it is interesting to note that healing is a major preoccupation in both Ôe and Yoshimoto’s writing. This can be seen in Ôe’s Moeagaru no Midori no Ki (The Flaming Tree) trilogy (1993 – 1995) and Yoshimoto’s novel Amrita (1994a). Despite Ôe’s general criticism that Japanese literature was ‘decaying’ in the 1990s, Yoshimoto’s interest in healing combined with her interest in reconnecting with nature and an ongoing search for spiritual meaning gives it an extended relevance beyond the enclosed world of the shôjo.

In Spirit Matters: the Transcendant in Modern Japanese Literature (2006), Philip Gabriel identifies Ôe as being part of a ‘general post-Cold War shift from concern for a nuclear holocaust to a more generalised threat of environmental pollution and destruction’ (143). This is a shift that can be seen in Kurosawa films such as Ikimono no kiroku (Record of a Living Being) (1955), which focuses on fears of the H-bomb and atomic extinction and Dreams (1990), in which various segments deal with exploding nuclear power plants, an earth populated by ogres that has been turned into a tip for deadly chemicals and a vision of Eden in which a one-hundred-and-three year old man tells the narrator that people, especially scholars, have forgotten that they are part of nature. Gabriel is wary, however, and qualifies the association he makes between Ôe’s writing and a concern for the environment when he states that Ôe’s novel Somersault (2003) is not an ‘environmental novel’. Rather it explores the relationship of God and man (143). While Gabriel does not identify Yoshimoto as being part of this trend, he observes that the New Age influenced narratives of Yoshimoto Banana, whom he describes as a ‘pop novelist’, are evidence of the interest the Japanese reading public has in spirituality (4). Whilst Gabriel is dismissive of Yoshimoto as a ‘pop novelist’, she reflects the same shift in concern from the politics of nuclear annihilation to that of global warming and environmental degradation.

The power of nature is often evoked in Japanese popular culture. Reader (1991), Kinsella (1995) and Ueno (2004) have all argued that nostalgia for the past is a modern construct in which the furusato (rural hometown) is seen as a powerful antidote to the pressures of urban living. Thus in Miyazaki Hayao’s animated film Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbour Totoro) (1988), Mei and her sister Satsuki plant some seeds. During the night, they dance with the mythical creature Totoro and the seeds begin to sprout with such violent force that an enormous tree grows before their eyes. The power of nature is elsewhere more subtle. When her father is stuck for ideas, Mei places some flowers on his desk and asks him to play the role of ohanaya-san (a flower-seller). Her father absent-mindedly picks up the flowers and, whilst toying with them, is struck by a new idea and is able to make progress with his work.

The destruction of the environment, however, is increasingly central to the sense of ecocrisis in much popular culture in contemporary Japan. One of the most graphic images of this environmental destruction appears in the 1994 animated Studio Ghibli film Heisei Tanuki Gassen Pompoko (English title: Pom Poko) by Takahata Isao. In this film, bulldozers are shown crisscrossing leaves like tiny insects as they chew their way through the forest building new towns. Summoning all their magical shape-changing powers the tanuki try to stop the advance of the new town and protect the forest but ultimately fail. This is the same theme that Miyazaki Hayao takes up in his 1997 film Mononoke Hime in which the wild boar of the forest form a large army to protect the ancient forest against the arrival of human beings. Popular culture in this way is at the forefront of raising awareness of these environmental issues in Japan. This is the cultural context within which Yoshimoto’s more recent writing needs to be read.

In Yoshimoto's writing this can be seen there are a number of scenes in which her characters comment explicitly on the destruction of the environment. In Amrita, Sakumi writes to Ryuichiro:

I feel bad when I think that people gave up on mountains, the scent of the ocean, and the commotion in the trees just to build an upper-class suburban neighbourhood (Amrita 1994a, English Translation 1997, 250).

Further to this, in Umi no Futa (There is no Lid on the Sea) (2004), Mari wants to cry when she remembers the sea creatures that are missing in the harbour which has been ‘developed’ (60). Umi no Futa, like Tsugumi, is set in a seaside town on the Izu Peninsula and tells the story of ‘two young women who meet in the town and who gradually come to find joy in the work they do together one summer season’ (Yomiuri Daily Online, 2004). The novel is interesting because Yoshimoto not only articulates an awareness about environmental issues but also what she considers to be the best options for dealing with this problem. On the other hand, in response to the question ‘What can we do to restore the former beauty of the Japanese landscape and start living a healthy life again?’ Yoshimoto is typically reluctant, however, to advocate any large scale action. Instead she advocates that ‘such a place can be revived without much investment’. To this extent, she continues to show a preference for individual action over large-scale organised action. Thus, when the heroine starts her own business Yoshimoto says she wanted to ‘show that it’s possible for people to realize their dreams if they have firm ideals – and they don’t have to borrow money from adults to do it’ (Yomiuri Daily Online, 2004).

In Ôkoku Sono1. (2002), Shizukuishi, the narrator, lives with her grandmother on a mountain where they make herbal teas with healing properties. Despite their lifestyle being poor, people bring them food such as wild rabbits and pig while they can get fish from the river (21). In some ways, Shizukuishi reflects, it was a ‘luxurious life’ as they had a television, a video, a big stereo and the internet (25). The mountain is ‘fatally changed’, however, when the river is dammed. Shizukuishi reflects that the people who ruined the mountain are ‘hateful’ and it is observed that although the flow of the river has been altered only a little, the mountain will take decades to recover (32-3). When asked by Sugiyama Yumiko (2002) what kind of reader she had in mind when she wrote Ôkoku Sono 1., Yoshimoto replied ‘People who are tired of living in big cities’. In response to Sugiyama’s suggestion that it is an ‘ambitious’ work, Yoshimoto replies that she would like it to be part of a long running series. She sees it as ‘philosophical’ in nature and compares it to Sophie’s World (1991) and the writings of Carlos Castañeda. By ‘philosophical’ Yoshimoto is presumably referring to the increased amount of authorial commentary in her writing on topics such as the impact of environmental destruction on the lives of her characters. Whilst this destruction has a significant impact on Shizukuishi and her grandmother, Yoshimoto is, however, more interested in exploring Shizukuishi’s subsequent relationships with Kaede and Shinichiro and her grandmother’s new life in Malta, courtesy of a chance relationship formed on the internet. Thus, Yoshimoto’s interest remains fixed on the individual and in her reassuring, homespun philosophy it is the individual, rather than movements, that can make a difference.

The need to reconnect with nature in Yoshimoto’s writing then can be traced to influences from both the West such as Carlos Castañeda as well as traditional Japanese spirituality. There is a long tradition in Japanese literature, for example, that takes in the writings of wandering yamabushi (holy men) such as Ippen (1239 – 1289) and poets such as Basho (1644 – 1694). J. Baird Callicott writes that upon the introduction of Buddhism to Japan it was ‘inevitably modified by the Shinto intellectual climate’ in Japan (1997, 96). According to Callicott, pre-Buddhist, Shinto Japan pictured a natural world ‘teeming with kami, or gods, associated not only with the sky and upper atmosphere but with mountains, streams, lakes, and caverns’ (ibid.). Callicott argues that when Indian Buddhism was introduced to Japan, it was slowly transformed over the centuries so that even plants and animals were classified as sentient beings capable of reaching enlightenment (ibid.). Japanese Buddhism has influenced not only Japanese writers but also writers from the Beat generation in the 1950s such as Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder who dreamed of a ‘great rucksack revolution’ (The Dharma Bums, 2008, 73). Gunter Grass notes in his memoir Peeling the Onion (2007) that after their defeat, German prisoners of war organised various classes for themselves including Bible circles as well as a popular introduction to Buddhism (Grass, 2007, 176). The origin of Yoshimoto’s New Age interests is to be found in the meandering route these cross-cultural influences have taken.

The growing popularity of what are now identified as New Age themes in the works of these writers can be interpreted as a rejection of the nation-building goals of the industrialised nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the face of international concern about global warming, overpopulation and diminishing energy and food supplies, Yoshimoto’s writing in the second phase of her career demonstrates that the shift from concerns about the nuclear age to concern for the environment is complete. The politics of the Cold War and the leaning towards the left which dominated the thinking of the previous generation is absent in her writing. The politics that inspired Ôe Kenzaburô and her father Takaaki have largely disappeared. Yoshimoto does, however, take a polemical stand against greed and environmental issues like overdevelopment, which can be seen to share the concern felt by D.H.Lawrence who railed against ‘the destruction of the organic purpose, the organic unity, and the subordination of every organic unit to the great mechanical purpose’ (Women in Love, 1969, 260).But it must be acknowledged that Yoshimoto is more of an environmentalist, as defined by Greg Garrard (2004), than an advocate for deep ecology. The term 'environmentalist' referring to someone with concerns for the environment but who wishes to ‘maintain or improve their standard of living as conventionally defined and who would not welcome radical social change’ (Garrard, 2004, 18). Yoshimoto is clearly exploring environmental issues without advocating ‘radical social change’.

A LITERATURE OF SELF-HELP: THE JOY OF SANDWICH MAKING

While Yoshimoto Banana's writing deals with social issues such as abuse, religious cults and family breakdown, the author has said many times that she doesn't want to make these issues burdensome for her readers. In her writing, Yoshimoto refuses to make victims of her characters and, instead, she explores their ability to heal and be healed as well as their spiritual growth. An important point to consider is that unlike Yamada Amy, Murakami Ryu, Murakami Haruki, Shimada Masahiko and, more recently Kanehara Hitomi, Yoshimoto does not write explicitly about hard-core sexuality or drug use. Instead, she can be compared with Jung in her substitution of spirituality for sexuality. And while her characters are isolated, they learn to live through their senses and food, especially in the early writing,  takes the place of sex. 

Before we look at how food is viewed in Yoshimoto's writing, it needs to be pointed out that there is an absence of sex generally in shojo literature, a genre that includes novels such as Hashimoto Osamu's Momojiri Musume (Peach-Bottomed Girl) through to Kanai Mieko's Indian Summer and Yoshimoto's Tsugumi. This genre is filled with nostalgia and, as it appeals to both male and female readers, Saito Minako has argued that it represents the breakdown of traditional gender roles or even the breakdown of Japan's corporate society. Yoshimoto's early shojo novel Tsugumi, is about the 'perfect shojo who will never grow up'. Tsugumi has been sick since birth and has strong anti-social behaviours but nevertheless is part of a group of teenage girls who obsessively watch their favourite TV series together. When it comes to an end, Maria, Tsugumi's cousin says, 'I found myself in the grips of a wrenching sadness. I was only a child, but I knew the feeling that came when you partyed with something, and I felt that pain.' These feelings have been described dismissively by some critics as being part of a pre-Oedipal state filled with nostalgia, a state which privileges a childhood past over an adult future but, Yoshimoto's characters are often caught up in circumstances over which they have no control, which in this case includes Maria's parents' divorce and Tsugumi's illness. Rather than show them being damaged beyond repair, Yoshimoto focusses instead on their ability to heal themselves. This is not by growing up and leaving their adolescent world behind but by embracing it. Of course, they cannot stay in this worle forever but Maria says of this time '... those days were blessed.' Inspirational stuff! This is a literature of self-help not adolescent complaint or despair!

In place of sex, food becomes a significant element in the lives of Yoshimoto's characters. It allows them to express and to take pleasure in a non-sexual way. In the novel Kitchen, the kitchen itself can be seen as an ‘enclosed’ space or else a ‘secret room’ within which Mikage, the protagonist, tries to find a new self. It becomes a place of refuge for Mikage after the death of her grandmother. Later she joins the staff of a master chef and it becomes a workplace. Therefore, Kitchen is not only the title of the novel, but also refers to the secret place in which Mikage’s new sense of self is developed. Mikage herself says: "Dream kitchens… I will have countless ones... Alone, with a crowd of people, with one person – in all the many places I will live. I know that there will be so many more (43). Therefore the kitchen can be seen as liberating and leads to the empowerment of Yoshimoto's characters. 

Cooking is a passion for Mikage. Yoshimoto describes the thrill that she experiences in the kitchen when Mikage says: "I was not afraid of burns or scars; I didn't suffer from sleepless nights. Every day I thrilled with pleasure at the challenges tomorrow would bring. Memorising the recipe, I would make carrot cakes that included a bit of my soul. At the supermarket I wouild stare at a bright red tomato, loving it for dear life. Having known such joy, there was no going back" (59). In this way the kitchen is reclaimed as a place of creativity instead of being seen as a symbol for the oppression of women chained to the kitchen sink by domesticity. Interestingly, however, Yoshimoto rejects this view of the kitchen in a subsequent novel Amrita where Sakumi says of  the kitchen: "It's wrong for mothers, daughters, and wives to be imprisoned there forever. The kitchen is not only a place where we can create wonderful borscht, but it's also a breeding ground for malice and kitchen drinkers" (34). In this way, perhaps, Yoshimoto avoids being polemicised as a 'feminist' writer. 

While food can be seen as a substititute for sex or an outlet for creativity it is also reassuring. In the short story 'Moonlight Shadow' Sakumi is taken by Hiiragi to the place where her boyfriend Hitoshi died. Afterwards they eat tempura together and she says "It's delicious... So delicious it makes me grateful I'm alive" (125). In Amrita, Sakumi gets a fever and she is comforted by Saseko who brings her homemade sandwiches. Sakumi says "On top of everything else, the sandwiches were incredibly delicious" (181). Sakumi who is on holidays in Saipan, has a part-time job in a bakery in Tokyo called Berries which she describes as being a "like a lighthouse amid the skyline of the dark suburban streets. People never came from far away, nor did we ever have so many customers that we ran out of bread, so I never felt hurried by the lines" (239). Whilst this idealised description of the bakery is entirely unsexualised, towards the end of Kitchen, Mikage recalls:

When was it that Yuichi said to me, “Why is it that everything I eat when I’m with you is delicious?”

I laughed. “Could it be that you’re satisfying hunger and lust at the same time?”

“No way, no way, no way!” he said, laughing. “It must be because we’re family” (Kitchen, 1988, English translation 1993, 100-1).

This quote shows that while food may be seen to have taken the place of sex, there is an awareness that the human appetite can also be seen as being sexual. However, the main tendency in Yoshimoto's writing is to avoid the sexualisation of food and instead to focus on its healing and comforting properties.

Finally, as well as exploring close adolescent relationships and the joy of food, sounds are also used to punctuate the text to evoke certain moods in the reader. In Yoshimoto's novel N.P. Saki calls Kazami to tell her that she is going overseas and Kazami can hear the sounds of the airport in the background. Later, when Shoji’s bone clicks in the little box at the beach she says ‘The sound echoed in my ears for a moment, just as the rhythm of the surf stays with you’ (175). Dave Kehr, in a comparison of Western and Japanese animation, writes that while Western animators try to create a ‘convincing illusion of life’ Japanese animators attempt to evoke a particular mood through the use of colour or a single expressive gesture. Yoshimoto’s writing incorporates all of these techniques in her writing. It is this sense of a shared textual pleasure with her readers (rather than sexual pleasure) that is the hallmark of the enclosed shôjo world. This ‘separatist literature of inner space’ that is most clearly realised in Kitchen defines the first phase of Yoshimoto’s career.

JUNGIAN ARCHETYPES IN YOSHIMOTO BANANA'S WRITING

In a 2006 fax interview (see previous blog) Yoshimoto suggested that Jung had not been a dircet influence on her writing. She had not read much for it to be a influence. But nevertheless there are some striking parallels that can be drawn between his work and Yoshimoto's writing. 

Throughout her writing Yoshimoto explores a sense of identity that is compatible with Jung’s archetypes. In Kitchen, Mikage says about herself and Yuichi, ‘aren’t we really man and woman in the primordial sense, and don’t we think of each that way’ (66). Furthermore after exploring Extra Sensory Perception in her early writing, Yoshimoto explores communication between people, plants and animals in Karada wa Zenbu Shitteiru (The Body Knows All) and communication with stones in Hard Boiled. Yoshimoto’s writing has affinities with Jung’s sense of the psychic interaction between people and the natural world. Jung argued that as scientific understanding has grown the world has become ‘dehumanized’, resulting in people’s sense of isolation in the cosmos and the loss of an ‘emotional “unconscious identity” with natural phenomena’:

These have slowly lost their symbolic implications. Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god, nor is lightening his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree is the life principle of a man, no snake the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great demon. No voices now speak to man from stones, plants, and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear. His contact with nature has gone, and with it has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connection supplied.

Yoshimoto was born in the same year in which the above extract was published, 1964, and, in the second phase of her career, she is clearly interested in exploring people’s relationship with the environment in ways which Jung claims have vanished due to ‘scientific thinking’. As a result, Yoshimoto’s characters communicate with plants and animals and, as is the case in Hard Boiled, stones do still speak to man. In the world of Yoshimoto’s writing, her characters are increasingly turning away from the sterility of modern urban life and traditional social structures and seeking healing and a sense of well-being from the natural world.

Dreams are also an important part of Yoshimoto's despite her professing not to know what they mean. Carl Jung wrote that having spent half a century investigating natural symbols, he had come to the conclusion that dreams and their symbols were not ‘stupid and meaningless’. In fact, Jung argues that dreams have much to tell those who try to understand their symbols. In Kitchen, Mikage dreams that she and Yuichi are climbing a ladder. Together, they peer into a ‘cauldron of hell’. Recounting her dream, Mikage wonders:

But I wonder, as I look at his uneasy profile blazingly illuminated by the hellish fire, although we have always acted like brother and sister, aren’t we really man and woman in the primordial sense, and don’t we think of each other that way? (Kitchen, 66).

This mythic conception of themselves (Yoshimoto's equivalent to Jung's archetypes) allows Mikage to see herself and Yuichi free of the social confines to which both Okuno and Sotaro want her to adhere. It is interesting to compare Yoshimoto’s description of Mikage’s dream with an account of a similar dream by Jung. Jung describes the dreamer as a woman with a ‘highly cultivated style of life’. Her dream, however, takes her to a ‘prehistoric period’ in which ‘she sees a huge crater of an extinct volcano, which has been the channel for a violent eruption of fire from the deepest layers of the earth’. Jung argues that this refers to a ‘traumatic experience… a personal experience early in her life when she had felt the destructive, yet creative, force of her passions… she needed to break away from her family’s excessively conventional social pattern’ (153). Mikage, it could be argued, is also experiencing the need to break away from an ‘excessively conventional pattern’. During such a crisis, the Jungian psycho-analyst M.-L.von Franz (1964) writes that ‘all well-meant, sensible advice is completely useless’. Thus the arguments that Sotaro and Okuno use to persuade Mikage to drop her independence fail. Von Franz argues:

There is only one thing that seems to work; and that is to turn directly toward the approaching darkness without prejudice and totally naively, and to try to find out what its secret aim is and what it wants from you  (M. –L von Franz, 1964, 167).

Yoshimoto’s characters share the same need for certainty in an uncertain world. In the short story collection Asleep, in the story ‘Love Songs’, Fumi describes Haru as the ‘embodiment of the diaphanous image, of Woman herself, come shakily to life, stumbling around’ (85). The glimpses Yoshimoto’s characters catch of each other as archetypal men and women transcend the moment and give them a sense of identity that is more deeply grounded than the roles created by society. In the short story collection Lizard, in the story ‘Helix’, the narrator’s girlfriend reassures him that she will not forget about their relationship, ‘All thousand years of it’ she says as if for eternity.

There are many other examples of Jung's teachings that can be seen in Yoshimoto's writing. This is not perhaps surprising when considered in the light of Nobel Prize winner, Doris Lessing's comments that, she likes Jung "as all artists do". And when Yoshimoto compares the Jungian psychologist Kawai Hayao to an elder in a Native American village, I think we understand that Yoshimoto's yearning for intuitive understanding and wisdom is what drives her writing closer to Jung's teachings.    

FAREWELL TO YOSHIMOTO TAKAAKI 1924 - 2012

In March, 2012, Yoshimoto Banana’s father Takaaki passed away. A significant literary figure in Japan as a literary critic he was also heavily involved in left-wing politics and the student movement of the 1960s before later shifting his views in the 1980s when he beaome increasingly critical of Oe Kenzaburo and what he called ‘anti-nuclear fascism’. The following are some notes on the father-daughter relationship enjoyed by these writers.

1.  

1. In 1999 Ann Sherif wrote of Yoshimoto Banana, that her “devotion to popular fiction contrasts with the philosophical and scholarly emphases found in the writing of another famous member of her family: her father, writer Yoshimoto Takaaki.” This is a view that Yoshimoto encourages by suggesting that her father has had little influence on her writing, which makes an interesting corollary to the absence of the father figure (and in fact the biological family) in her early writing. Indeed, this distancing of her writing from her father’s literary activities makes Yoshimoto a literary orphan akin to the ‘orphans’ in her writing. However, one implication of this is that Yoshimoto is embracing the stereotype of the non-intellectual female writer whose writing has, according to Ericson, been described as non-intellectual and sentimental (1997) consisting of little else than ‘detailed observations of daily life’. Shimada Masahiko, novelist, essayist and director of the Japan Writer’s Association, adds weight to this view arguing that Yoshimoto’s writing is best understood when placed in the context of Japanese classics from the Heian Period, such as the The Pillow Book of Sei Shônagon (early 11^th century). Shimada argues that Yoshimoto’s writing, like the world of the Heian court women described in the Pillow Book, is a world of feeling rather than thought. Whether Yoshimoto is aware of this type-casting is unclear, but as we have seen, she has deliberately chosen to distance her writing from ‘literature’.
2. On Yoshimoto Banana’s writing style and relationship with the reading public, Takaaki compared her with the post-war cult novelist Dazai Osamu. He argues that they both speak to readers in a language that belongs to and defines them. Banana has created an intimate relationship with her readers in the same way that Dazai did with his readers. Of Dazai, Takaaki says that his fans felt that ‘only they could understand him’ and that he wrote for his readers, not for his literary editors, critics or literary friends (1997).
3. In the 1960s Ôe Kenzaburô argues that disturbances on university campuses ‘raged everywhere like a medieval plague’ (1995). Ôe agrees with Octavio Paz that these ‘identical subcultural trends’ had ‘global horizontal ties’ (1995). Interestingly, the influential post-war American translator Edward Seidensticker, says of Ôe Kenzaburô, that he found both his politics and his fiction ‘distasteful’ (2002) and seems to have taken umbrage at Ôe, who, like so many of the postwar interi (intelligentsia), including Yoshimoto’s father Takaaki, opposed the signing of the revised Security between Japan and the United States in 1960. Leith Morton observes, however, that Yoshimoto has criticised both the left and the right in his writing, resulting in what he describes as a ‘perverse complexity’, a term which interestingly could be used to describe his daughter Banana’s writing given her refusal to identify with movements as varied as feminism, the New Age and environmentalism (not to mention any trace of academic influence on her writing) in pursuit of her own form of jiritsu (independence) which nevertheless seeks to engage intelligently and creatively with the social problems that confront her generation (Morton, 2003).
4. The avoidance of ideology in Yoshimoto Banana’s writing can be classified as an example of a ‘separatist literature of inner space’ that her characters withdraw into, Yoshimoto’s writing is not, however, an example of a ‘separatist literature’ in the radical feminist sense. In fact, the focus of Yoshimoto’s writing is on the private world of the individual and not the implications their actions have in any public or social sense. Yoshimoto has said in conversation with her father Takaaki that she envisages her characters existing in a ‘pleasant place like the womb’. This along with the private nature of her writing is underlined in her statement that when she writes, she often needs to find that ‘pleasant place’ (1997). Yoshimoto may have a room of her own, but it is private and she is certainly not bound by any rules or regulations in relation to the room and its use.

HANKYU DENSHA

Hankyu Densha is a film directed by Miyake Yoshihige that was screened at the Japanese film festival in Melbourne 2011. The name Hankyu refers to a large company based in Osaka that consists of a department store chain, a railway company and some real estate developments. The central setting of the film is the local Imazu Line of the Hankyu Railway, which runs in the Hyogo prefecture connecting the cities of Nishinomiya and Takarazuka.

The film consists of series of episodes that connect the lives of a number of women and men who catch the train. As their lives intersect, the carriages in which people’s lives are contained briefly allow for these characters to share their experiences and draw strength from each other often in very difficult circumstances. There is a young woman trapped in an abusive relationship, her boyfriend exploding violently in the train on one particular trip. A high school student whose self-worth is being questioned as she doubts that she can enter the university of her dreams and then there is the young school girl who is being bullied by her ‘friends’. An older woman played by the actress Miyamoto Nobuko, wife of the now deceased film-maker Itami Juzo, takes pity on the young girl and gives her some encouragement. This leads to a chain reaction in which each of the characters is inspired by the actions of one of the others to take control of their lives. Of most interest to me in the film is how the film-makers break down the compartmentalised nature of Japanese behaviour to kick start positive change in their lives.

As a foreigner I have often been struck by the ability of the Japanese to compartmentalise their behaviour. Sometines this is a strength, for example, I saw some street peformers in Tokyo who, once their act was finished, packed up their gear and then blended back into the crowd as they made ther way to the subway station. At other imes it is a great weakness, for example, on the Midosuji line (an underground line in Osaka) I watched as a homeless man rubbed himself up against a female passenger to her obvious distress but nobody did anything. I was the only foreigner in the train and felt that I shouldn't intervene. I looked around the carriage but everybody else just kept minding their own business. After what seemed like an eternity the young woman moved away. At the next station another young woman got on the train and the same thing started all over again. The homeless man knew that he was invisible, an outcast, and as a result he could do anything he liked because no-one else was going to acknowledge his existence.  At a station in Tokyo I once came down an elevator and a homeless man was collapsed in a heap at the bottom. The commuters just lifted their feet up and walked over him. A friend in Tokyo saw something similar. A business man started giving some unwanted attention to a female primary school student on the train. She intervened, however, and made him stop. The next day, on her way home from work, she got off at the station at the same time she always did and the girl was there with her mother at the turnstile waiting to thank her. In hindsight I should have been equally proactive but I guess a primary school student is not able to assert herself in the same way that a young adult can. These sorts of behaviours have since led to the establishment of female only carriages on Japanese trains. This partly stops the problem but the film Hankyu Densha explores how people can stop yruning a blind eye to what is going on around them and in that sense it is a very powerful and liberating film.