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.
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