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.

A REAL WILD CHILD: THE MUSIC OF TAMA

My love affair with TAMA began in 1990 when I saw them on Japanese TV. Chiku, one of the members, was asked why he had a band-aid on his forehead? He said because he was coming on TV. When I found the CD Sandaru, the packaging was a knockout, especially the photos of Chiku in his old style clothing and Yoshikawa, the drummer, in his singlet. The music is mostly acoustic and the lyrics and melodies explore a naive, childlike view of the world.

Yukio, stage name Mojo Rising, imports musical instruments from around the world and is an enthusiastic player of the didgeridoo. You can listen to him playing digeridoo (and other instruments) on a 2008 CD called Oto no Tegami (Letter of Sound) and his latest CD Spiral Rainbow 2013. A group he plays with call themselves Poetical Planet. Recently Yukio sent me a copy of a PASCALS CD and Chiku’s live DVD, recorded in a Tokyo izakaya in 2005. On the DVD, Chiku drinks and plays guitar, ukelele and gazoo. A respectful, mainly female audience listen head bowed as Chiku, gap-toothed like a vagabond (think Tora san or Sugawara Bunta) sings some very wistful, lyrical and beautiful melodies. There are tales of sleeping sharks, fish swimming through the night and then there is the story of Giga, the dog. In a scene reminiscent of the shop on the cover of Parthenon Ginza, one of the best of the TAMA CDs, Chiku performs in the small shop with the menu lining the walls…

TAMA had a prolific career despite the early departure of Yanagihara Yoichiro to begin his own solo career. Since the demise of TAMA, Chiku and Ishikawa Koji have joined forces with the ukele collective known as PASCALS. In retrospect, TAMA celebrated Japanese life in a way that is raw, earthy and whimsical. The Japan that people enjoy when they go to the sento, drink sake at a bar or go to a local matsuri. This part of Japanese culture is all about local traditions that connect people with their community; hence TAMA celebrate archetypal figures such as the rear-car man and other symbols of a fast disappearing Japan in their songs. Hunched over his guitar and singing his sad songs about lame children walking under blue skies Chiku is a great sentamentalist.

Unbelievably, urban hippies like Chiku live their lives in the hustle and bustle of Tokyo staging small scale events celebrating their freedom. Dr Umezu is another one of these free spirits. A legend on the saxophone, he toured Melbourne in the early 1990s with the jazz pianist Itabashi Fumio. After the show at a now defunct venue on Lygon Street in Carlton, they collapsed in the lift from sheer exhaustion. During the interval the piano needed re-tuning. Chiku has recorded a live event together with Dr Umezu in 1994. These inspired (and drunken) ramblings rely on risk taking and trust, and Chiku's gap toothed smile is a reminder of the free spirits that Yoshimoto Banana talks about when she recalls the 'wild' children she grew up with in downtown Tokyo.

KANEHARA HITOMI AND THE SHOCK OF THE NEW?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

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