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.