New Nationalisms

New Nationalisms on UITV this Month!

2006-04-05T00:57:00.000-05:00

Thank you!

2006-02-25T19:43:00.000-06:00

The New Nationalisms Symposium was fabulous! Our writers were super-fabulous! Thank you all for coming and contributing to the discussion. Please continue to share your ideas, questions, and comments here.

Class visit

2006-02-22T01:51:00.000-06:00

On Tuesday, February 21, Tomoyuki Hoshino and Chizuko Naitô visited my seminar in modern Japanese literature. They answered students' questions about literature, nationalism, the emperor system, national identity, social justice, violence, and their thoughts on the future. After a long journey and with only a short night's sleep, they provided us all with a very memorable experience.

The writers are coming!!

2006-02-20T14:17:00.000-06:00

Two are already en route (in Detroit, waiting for a connecting flight to Cedar Rapids as I type). One more will be arriving tomorrow! If you have questions you'd like to ask them, please post them (in English, Chinese, or Japanese) below under the "comments" section.

The East Asia Writers' Symposium kicks off with a film screening this week!

2006-02-12T12:28:00.000-06:00

Yutaka Tsuchiya's 1999 documentary Atarashii kamisama ("The New God") will be screened this Friday, February 17, at 6:30 p.m. in the Iowa Room (335) at the Iowa Memorial Union.

As is the case with all the events connected with "New Nationalisms," this event is free and open to the public.

From the director's statement:

What is happening? Compelled by accelerating capitalism, have we all become drifting cells desperately seeking firm ground? Perhaps we have indeed. The modernist tales about Nation, Company, School, and Family have started to collapse, and individual value systems are beginning to be challenged. We are now just floating along.

And yet why does nobody say it? That we don't need a buoy; that the "Grand Tale" is now finished. I don't need any fairy tale that I cannot control. The exit lies in the smaller relationships between autonomous individuals. That is the only way for "Our Tale" to begin.

Film critic Chiseko Tanaka writes:

Through this film, the filmmaker Tsuchiya proposes that the Japanese people say a long good-bye to the [emperor] system. This is why I think The New God is a splendid and unique documentary.

Here are some links for those interested in reading more about this film:

symposis and interviews

Berlin International Film Festival entry

director info and videography

Midnight Eye review

It warrants mention that the main subject of this documentary, Karin Amamiya, travels to North Korea, where she meets with very significant figures from the Japanese Red Army/ Red Army Faction who have been living there since hijacking a plane (with swords) in 1970 (the "Yodo-go" Incident). She travels with Takaya Shiomi, who spent twenty years in prison for his connection to the incident.

Where was this “us”? Who the hell were “we Japanese”? I, for one, had no idea.

2006-02-08T23:42:00.000-06:00

from "Chino" by Tomoyuki Hoshino (translated by Lucy Fraser)

Tomoyuki Hoshino lived in Mexico for many years and has travelled extensively in Spain and Cuba. He also briefly worked as a Spanish translator. Many of his novels are set in Mexico or South America, and many of his characters speak Spanish or work in jobs that require some fluency in Spanish. In his 1998 novella Uragiri Nikki ("The Treason Diaries"), Hoshino takes the figure of the (invariably male) teen killer that dominated the Japanese media in the late 1990s and places him in Peru, where he joins the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Army in the siege of the Japanese Embassy in Lima. You can read more about this bold story here. His short story "Chino" involves a Japanese youth in search of guerrillas in the mountains "below Mexico." His essays on Spanish-language cinema, Che Guevara, and Spanish and Latin American literature appear in Japan's largest newspapers and journals. In the zuihitsu tradition, he writes essays on his own daily life and a wide range of other subjects for publications such as the Nihon Keizai Newspaper and the Tokyo Newspaper. Hoshino is also an avid soccer fan and amateur player whose commentaries on the game (including the politics of the 2002 FIFA World Cup co-hosted by Korea and Japan) have attracted quite a following independent of his fiction.

What do childhood, children, and the fetus have to do with nations?

2006-01-14T16:12:00.000-06:00

Chizuko Naitô will discuss the recent rise of so-called "gender bashing" and neonationalism in contemporary Japan. She will relate what she calls the Loliconization of Japanese society (Lolicon being the abbreviation for "Lolita Complex") to the "problem of gender inherent in neonationalism." Using texts such as Gender Free Trouble (edited by Ryôko Kimura and published in 2005) and the award-winning fiction of Yoriko Shôno, Naitô will elaborate on how sexuality, gender, and "the nation" are configured (and re-configured) in Japan today.

Su Tong's young emperor in My Life as Emperor embodies a brutality and fear underwriting "nation-building." As John Updike writes, "Gradually, [the young emperor] realizes that he possesses the power to 'obliterate' anything that annoys him." And Tomoyuki Hoshino's novel Lonely Hearts Killer includes descriptions of an unnamed and "alternate reality" Japan as "islands of children" whose prolonged reliance on an imperial father (His Majesty) has brought out the most "grotesque" (to borrow Hoshino's word) in interpersonal relationships.

English language readers are able to enjoy excellent translations of Su Tong's novels (such as My Life as Emperor and Rice). Earlier posts provide reviews, book publication and sales information, and news related to Su Tong's most recent project. Please browse the archives to read more. There are many fans and scholars of Su Tong's fiction, and my hope is that more of you will contribute comments. To post comments, click on the "comments" link after each post.

Hoshino's works are not yet available in English translation (with the important exception of Lucy Fraser's wonderful translation of "Chino"), so I'm translating and uploading as much as possible here. I'm posting my translation of the opening of The Story of Rainbow and Chloe, which was released just last week, below. I included the full text of a speech by Chizuko Naitô (translated by Maiko Shiota) in the first blog entry. Through the archives, you can also find excerpts from the opening of her new book Empires and Assassinations and other works by Hoshino. I've translated these shorter excerpts hastily in the interest of introducing blog visitors to as much as possible before the symposium. I hope to post more from Empires and Assassinations in the coming weeks.

For Hoshino readers, The Story of Rainbow and Chloe offers some immediately familiar images (projected light and sound, for example), and the gender-free bodies/language one finds in some of his other work is also evident. But I think many will agree this novel also marks quite a departure from his previous work. Here is roughly the first page:

Fetus

The unborn child of a twenty-year pregnancy.

That is my life. I have been inside my parent's body since I began residing in this world as a fetus approximately twenty years ago. There is no way for me to understand why I have been on hold and as yet unborn. My parent thinks about things like, What stroke of fate has arrested this child's development in the form of a comma-shaped stone? It keeps living inside me, just clinging on and blowing up like a sparkler bomb at the end of the umbilical cord without the strength to make my belly bigger or the strength to be born.

My own sense is that I am probably only existing as a head. Anyway, that is how I see things. At least one thing I know for certain is that only my head has grown.

For good reason I only learned of this very recently. Until then, I had never given a thought to my form. I did not even have a sense of "myself," so that was only natural.

My earliest memories go back quite a way. I heard sounds, I sensed faint shadows and light, I felt good, and I felt uncomfortable.

I heard all sorts of sounds. The sounds of my parent's heartbeat, digestion, and bones; the sounds of my parent speaking, sounds my parent heard, and the sounds of my parent's thoughts. Above all, I was transfixed by the light shows streaming in through my parent's eyes. Occasionally I experienced tremors and constriction, and I also remember the pain of times when I absorbed too much of my parent's stress.

Somewhere along the way I learned words. [and the paragraph continues...]

The opening of Lonely Hearts Killer by Tomoyuki Hoshino

2006-01-14T11:21:00.001-06:00

"Even when His Majesty died, I wasn’t fazed, not even un poquito."

And so goes the first line of Lonely Hearts Killer by Tomoyuki Hoshino.

For a few days, you could read the first 38 pages of LHK in translation on this very post, but now you can click here instead.

In the current issue of Bungei, Hoshino writes:

After writing [Lonely Hearts Killer], I was asked the following by my students and young writers. "We don't understand why you'd want to problematize the emperor. Is the emperor really that big of a presence in the lives of people over thirty?"

I felt the same way when I was younger. But then I wondered what would happen to the people of Japan if right here and right now the emperor system was abolished?

Naito to discuss Yoriko Shono, Neonationalism, and the "Loliconization" of Japanese Society

2006-01-11T22:06:00.000-06:00

For the February 25 "New Nationalisms" symposium, Su Tong and Tomoyuki Hoshino will read from their respective novels My Life as Emperor and Lonely Hearts Killer. There will also be time for audience members to ask them questions. As I mentioned in earlier posts, the University of Iowa is delighted to welcome back Su Tong and truly honored to host Tomoyuki Hoshino's first public reading in the United States!

We are also very fortunate that the literary, media, and cultural critic Chizuko Naitô has agreed to join the symposium. This is only her second presentation in the U.S. (She spoke at a MLK Week conference on the arts and social justice at Stanford University in 2004.) Her much-anticipated new book Empires and Assassinations (see this earlier post) includes a chapter on the High Treason Incident of 1910 and the distorted story of the sole female defendant spun by the Japanese media at the time. That woman, a popular figure among UI Japanarchy students, was Kanno Sugako.

The Iowa City community will no doubt be interested to know that Emma Goldman decried the High Treason Incident and spoke out in support of Kanno and the other defendants.

In her talk for the symposium, Naitô will discuss neonationalism and "gender bashing" through the fiction of Yoriko Shôno, the 1994 winner of the Akutagawa Prize for her novel The Time Slip Industrial Complex (Taimu surippu konbinaato).

Please visit the archives (to the left), where you can find the first post on this blog from December 3, 2005. There you can read more about Naitô, who is pictured here.

Bungei's Hoshino Tomoyuki Special Issue + a Book Jacket Gallery

2006-01-10T02:18:00.000-06:00

From Hoshino's online diary entry of 1/7/06:
"For some reason I've published a new book in January for three years in a row. This year, it's The Story of Rainbow and Chloe (Kawade Publishing), which goes on sale today."

The Bungei Hoshino Tomoyuki Special Issue features a new short story by Hoshino ("The Fatherless Kids' Club"), some pieces on his background and works, and all sorts of interviews essays, and props, including some with/by Tsushima Yûko, Matsuura Rieko, Shimada Masahiko (who has been a guest of UI's International Writing Program), and Yamada Eimi (just to name a few). Hoshino also provides his own commentaries on his works and some pictures.

January 14 update:
I'm reading through the new Tomoyuki Hoshino Special Issue of the literary journal Bungei, and one light-hearted (yet telling) passage made me laugh. It veers from our theme, but I decided to post this for Japanese film and pop culture enthusiasts. Masahiko Shimada poses the following question to Hoshino: "If they were going to make one of your works into a movie, which one would you want it to be? And how would you cast it?"

Hoshino replies: "Naburiai, directed by Seijun Suzuki. With Kaela Kimura as Petite, Ringo Sheena as Grande, and Masanobu Andô as Medio. I'd also like it if they made it a musical."

I was a little surprised, but I would like to see that movie too. Here's a very quickly penned (well, typed) translation from Naburiai since I know many will not have read it. (There are no gender markers in this passage in the original – other than those that might be associated with the characters' names.)

I gave my eyelids, which felt as dry as cornflakes, a good rub and then looked around the room again. Two people were curled up asleep on the wooden floor. Grande, the bigger of the two, slept in a Vassallo kick pose, as if launching into a backstroke with both arms outstretched from behind the ears and up above the head. The liquid light from the aquarium fell on those ears and spread to the scruff of the neck. The smaller one, Petite, had both arms tucked in tightly between the thighs, just like a folded-up collapsible umbrella. My leather jacket lay between the two of them like a cast-off hide. I had been sleeping face down in that hide. The three of us must have been forming the Chinese character for river, 川, on the floor in our sleep.

And here's a little more from later on in the story:

As soon as we finished work, I asked the two if they’d like to go enjoy some sunshine and beer in the grassy park. We asked an employee for directions to a liquor store, bought a pack of Tecates, and headed to the park. The sunning bench was very warm, as if a cat had just finished resting there. The three of us sat down in unison, stretched out our legs, sighed, and looked one another in the face. All of our expressions were relaxed, dripping with irrepressible smiles. The dazzlingly bright sun drew a sunny scent from our faces. We opened the bottles, toasted a perfunctory “kanpai” as if reciting a magic spell, clinked our bottles together, downed the contents – purging the bottles of their spirits, sighed yet again, sat back deep into the bench, and on my left, Petite let out a “oh, that’s good” mixed in with a long breath.

“The sun here is fabulous! Isn’t this park the perfect spot for drinking beer?” Grande squinted and looked up at the sun. I nodded my head in sincere agreement. The sweet fragrance of daphne flowers drifted in from somewhere. “Everyone is so uptight. I’ve invited them out many times, but all they ever want to do is sip tea.”

“When you say ‘everyone’, do you mean Satô and the rest?” Petite’s breath emanated dorsally and pushed across me over to Grande.

“No, no, the company people are hopeless. I meant the other translators' cliques.”

“Oh, the cliques. Why do people swarm together in cliques like that anyway?” I picked up a plum blossom that had fallen at my feet. The stamen was hairy like eyelashes and looked a little obscene.

Su Tong news and a translation list

2006-01-09T00:13:00.000-06:00

This news comes courtesy of Hualing Engle.

Su Tong was commissioned by Canongate in England to write a novel based on a Chinese mythological story. Several Nobel laureates have received similar commissions from Canongate. Su Tong has just completed the novel, a poignant story of the toll of "greatness" and political power on "ordinary" lives. A man is drafted along with hundreds of other laborers by the first emperor of China to build the Great Wall. After many years, his wife embarks on the long and arduous journey over hundreds of miles to look for him. When she reaches a spot where the wall has collapsed, she finds her husband dead amid the debris. Many of Su Tong's novels have been translated, so hopefully we can look for this one too in the coming years.

Here are some translations to check out:

English:

My Life as Emperor (我的帝王生涯)
Translated by Howard Goldblatt
Published by Hyperion East

Raise the Red Lantern (大红灯笼高高挂)
Translated by Michael S. Duke
Published by Harper Perennial

Rice (米)
Translated by Howard Goldblatt
Published by Harper Perennial

French:

Epouses et concubines (妻妾成群)
Published by Le Livre de Poche

Fantes De Papiers (纸鬼)
Translated by A. Auger
Published by Desclée De Brouwer

Je Suis l'Empereur de Chine (我的帝王生涯)
Translated by Claude Payen
Published by Editions Philippe Picquier

Riz (米)
Translated by Liliane Dutrait
Published by Flammarion

Visages fardes (红粉)
Translated by Denis Bénéjam
Published by Editions Philippe Picquier

You can also look for the following in:

German:

Die Opiumfamilie (罂粟之家)
Published by Rowohlt

Rice (米)
Published by Rowohlt

Italian:

Moglie Concubine (妻妾成群)
Published by Theorio

Spiriti Senza Pace (碎瓦)
Published by Feltrinelli

I due volti del mondo (枫杨树故乡)
Published by Neri Pozza

Quando ero Imperatore (我的帝王生涯)
Published by Neri Pozza

Dutch:

Rijst (米)
Published by Uitgeverij De Geus

Drie Lantaaarns (妻妾成群)
Published by Amerika

Su Tong has other works in translation in Sweden, Norway, Japan, and Turkey.

New Nationalisms in the News

2006-01-08T15:39:00.000-06:00

Well, not the symposium, but the topic certainly shows up a lot in the news these days.

Many thanks to Natasa Durovicova for bringing the following two pieces to my attention:

"Koizumi's Obsession with the Past Makes for an Uncertain Future" by Weiland Wagner for Der Spiegel (Dec. 23, 2005).

"Beijing's Historical Fantasies" by Brahma Chellaney for the International Herald Tribune (Dec. 12, 2005).

I'm sure many of you also saw this from today's Reuter's Reuter's wire:

Japan should try harder to convince China that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to a shrine for war dead do not glorify militarism, Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, a top contender to succeed Koizumi, said on Sunday.

But Abe also indicated he too might pay his respects at the shrine, seen in Beijing and Seoul as a symbol of Tokyo's past military aggression, if he became prime minister in September.

If you're going to be in the Bay Area in late January, you can come hear my talk about Hoshino's novella The Treason Diaries at Stanford University.

Hoshino is also now listed on the Korean literary site Moonji Publishing. More here!

Finally, if you can read Japanese, I urge you to check out Hoshino's online journal. It is, as the kids say, "off the hook." Click on the "Hoshino Tomoyuki Archives" link to the left, and then scroll down to find: 言ってしまえばよかったのに日記.

New Year's Hoshino News!

2005-12-31T11:46:00.000-06:00

Hoshino has already written a new novel, The Story of Rainbow and Chloe. Timed to coincide with the publication of this new novel on January 7 of 2006, the preeminent journal Bungei is releasing a special issue on Hoshino Tomoyuki! It may be a while before the new issue gets to the University of Iowa library, so I would love to hear from those of you who get to see it first! If you visit Hoshino's website (link to the left), you can see the jacket cover for The Story of Rainbow and Chloe.

You'll also want to check out Lucy Fraser's excellent translation of the story "Chino" at the Japanese Fiction Project sponsored by the Japanese Literature Publishing and Promotion Center (J-Lit Center).

Why "New Nationalisms"?

2005-12-27T20:24:00.000-06:00

Last month, my students and I discussed the following article, which speaks to the need for a symposium such as New Nationalisms.

"Ugly Images of Asian Rivals Become Best Sellers in Japan"

Some highlights:

A young Japanese woman in the comic book "Hating the Korean Wave" exclaims, "It's not an exaggeration to say that Japan built the South Korea of today!" In another passage the book states that "there is nothing at all in Korean culture to be proud of."

In another comic book, "Introduction to China," which portrays the Chinese as a depraved people obsessed with cannibalism, a woman of Japanese origin says: "Take the China of today, its principles, thought, literature, art, science, institutions. There's nothing attractive."

The two comic books, portraying Chinese and Koreans as base peoples and advocating confrontation with them, have become runaway best sellers in Japan in the last four months.

It isn't hard to find news stories (on Japanese history textbooks or North Korean abductees) that might fuel the market for such "ugly images." According to the Kyodo Newswire, the Japanese Foreign Minister, Aso Taro, characterized China's increased military spending as a "considerable threat" just last week, and stories of North Korean "threats" are almost part of the daily fare in today's Japanese news media.

Many of you will remember that Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao recently decided to cancel his scheduled meetings with Prime Minister Koizumi when the Japanese prime minister continued to visit the Yasukuni Shrine (even after a High Court decision in September ruled that these highly controversial trips to the shrine were unconstitutional).

Here you see a photo of Koizumi visiting the shrine, as well as some images of people protesting his visits (with signs in Japanese and Korean), demanding he listen to "the voices of Asia."

Suggested reading:
"Asia Battles Over War History"
"The Emperor Showa Standing at Ground Zero: On the (Re-)configuration of a National 'Memory' of the Japanese People"
"The War Anniversaries: Harbingers of Things to Come"
"The Social Origins and Consequences of Contemporary Japanese Populism"
"Empire and Nation Revisited: Fifty Years After Bandung"
"What Role Japan's Imperial Family?"
Official Website for the Yasukuni Shrine

Please feel free to post comments and questions by clicking on "comments" below.

In His Own Words

2005-12-19T19:22:00.000-06:00

Click on the image below to view a larger version of this essay, which appeared in Japan Book News (Winter, 2002). If you prefer to see the piece in its original context, click on this link and then click on the "Japan Book News" icon. (You'll need Adobe Acrobat to read it.) You might also be interested to see Hoshino quoted in a Guardian essay on Ôe.

The original Japanese is essay is here.

"A Genuinely Powerful Imagination"

2005-12-19T13:33:00.000-06:00

What an honor it is for the University of Iowa to host what will be Hoshino Tomoyuki's first public reading in North America!

Hoshino is a prolific writer who has been celebrated for both his innovative use of language and provocative (and politically charged) fictional worlds. He stands at the vanguard of the contemporary Japanese literary scene. His new novel The Worussian-Japanese Tragedy first appeared alongside a piece by Nobel laureate Ôe Kenzaburô in last year’s New Year's special issue of the preeminent literary journal Gunzô.

The critic Kawamura Minato writes, "The power to imagine is the power to transform reality. In that sense, [The Worussian-Japanese Tragedy] wholly demonstrates a genuinely powerful imagination."

Hoshino will be reading from his 2004 powerhouse novel Lonely Hearts Killer. This richly layered novel begins with the sudden death of a fictional young emperor, a bold move for several reasons that I will discuss more in future posts to this blog.

If you have read Lonely Hearts Killer and would like to comment on it or share your thoughts (or questions for the author), please use the "comments" link below.

My Life as Emperor

2005-12-16T00:06:00.000-06:00

New Yorker Review by John Updike

The University of Iowa is delighted to welcome back Su Tong, who will be reading from his novel My Life as Emperor.

"From the celebrated author of Raise the Red Lantern comes a spellbinding novel about life in the imperial court of a child emperor."Hyperion

Penguin India has published a special Indian release of Su Tong's My Life as Emperor. The following is PI's description of the novel.

Opening with a child's ascension to the throne of the Xie Empire, Su Tong's latest novel is a historical tour de force. Charting courtly life, he vividly evokes many characters - the concubines, eunuchs, advisers and protectors - but it is the portrait and narration of the tale by the child emperor, a boy of few talents who is suddenly thrust into a position of power, which is most compelling. Constantly facing a threat from the two step-brothers who covet his position, and unsure of the intentions of his mysterious grandmother, Lady Huangfu, his rule is characterised by fear, incompetence and his own unchecked cruelty.

Can the child ruler gain a greater understanding of human existence and compassion and stave off the curse that haunts him - or will his rule ultimately be recorded as one of slaughter, decadence and failure?

An extraordinary and chilling dramatisation of the dark side of nation-building, Su Tong's latest novel is above all a brilliant exploration of the complexities and failings of human nature.

Please also check out the following links:
Excerpt from the article Wounded Words: Scar Literature: "...the avant-garde short stories of the mid-1980s (Yu Hua's The Past and the Punishments or Su Tong's The Escape of 1934) tended to address the question of historical memory or lack thereof in an increasingly commercial modern era, rather than detail actual events of the Cultural Revolution."

Su Tong Interprets Madame Bovary at the Shanghai Library

Review of Raise the Red Lantern, the Ballet

Empires and Assassinations

2005-12-15T22:20:00.000-06:00

Excerpt from the opening of Empires and Assassinations: Looking at the Organization of Modern Japanese Media Through Gender (2005) by Naitô Chizuko

Stories pervade – everywhere. One could even say that stories are not only that which is written to be literary, but that which is routinely born out of an arrangement of words. For example, a storytelling quality is pronounced in the language the news media uses to relate certain kinds of incidents in ways that inspire in readers a desire to know.

The gap between her pedigree as an elite graduate of the private Keiô University and the reality of her life as a "woman of the night" is attracting attention to the murder of Ms.□□□□ , a 39 year old OL ["office lady"] at Tokyo Power whose body was discovered in an apartment in Tokyo's Shibuya District. What was the reason that led her to loiter around love hotels at night? (Shûkan Post, April 4, 1997)

When news of this incident first broke, the top-tier elite Keiô graduate and Tokyo Power OL's nightlife as a street prostitute drew attention, and various media outlets, beginning with this publication, investigated the details of her mysterious personal life. (Shûkan Gendai, August 9, 1997)

These excerpts come from weekly news journal reports on the so-called "Tokyo Power OL Incident" of 1997. The victim was a woman, and the notion that this woman was a "top tier elite OL" by day, but had a completely different face by night was scrutinized repeatedly as a source of "attention" by the media. The reason why relates to the various particulars of this incident that lent themselves to it being narrated as a story.

First and foremost, the mark of woman alone holds news value for its difference when both the sender and receiver of information are assumed to be male in the masculinized media world. Deviance from the norm or standard is more likely to pique curiosity, so it is desirable for a protagonist to have some distinguishing characteristic, scar, or differential negative in a story. Second of all, the extreme "gap" between her afternoons and evenings opens up a wide range for story development and promises of the depth so appealing in stories. The seeming endlessness of the story can raise the curiosity and expectations of readers higher and higher as they are drawn further along for the ride. Third of all is her "mysterious personal life," which is imbued with sexual meaning. You want to know because it is "mysterious," and a sexual element is added to that desire, so the desire then multiplies and becomes a force that propels the story. In a context such as this, the story will always move in ways that discriminate against that character.

(translated by Adrienne Hurley)

Stay Tuned for More Information and Updates!

2005-12-03T17:20:00.000-06:00

In the coming weeks, I will post more biographical information on the writers and details on the symposium and related events. In the meantime, please enjoy the following taste of what is to come and contact me at adrienne-hurley@uiowa.edu if you have any questions. Please also feel free to leave your comments and questions below by clicking on the "comment" link at the end of this post.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦
"Su Tong was born in Suzhou, China, in 1963 and graduated from Beijing Normal University with a degree in Chinese literature. He is the author of the novel Rice and the three-novella collection Raise the Red Lantern, the title story of which was made into an Oscar-nominated film by Zhang Yimou. Su Tong now lives in Nanjing, China." (From the Hyperion Press)

Su Tong's new novel, My Life as Emperor was reviewed for the New Yorker by John Updike, who speculates, "Su Tong’s purpose in relating his combination 'pleasure cruise' and 'scary dream' must be, in part, an indictment of the imperial system, with its drastic inequities, its elaborate cruelties, its implacable protocols."

From Publishers Weekly:

It takes mere days for a shy, wistful 14-year-old prince to turn into a full-fledged terror as emperor when rule over the fictional Xie Empire is unexpectedly bequeathed to him in this gorgeous bloodbath of a novel [...]. Told in the first person, the book chronicles the boy-emperor Duanbai's matter-of-fact demands, appetites and diversions, which involve everything from settling paltry old scores with lethal force to removing the tongues of discarded concubines. [...]

[Su Tong] claims in his preface that this "scary dream on a rainy night" is set "in no particular time"; applied to today's world, it becomes powerful allegory.

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Harper Collins:

Set in famine-stricken 1930s China, Rice chronicles the complete debasement of a city family after it takes in a young man named Five Dragons, a starving wanderer from the provinces whose desire for power and sex is insatiable. In this mesmerizing novel, Su Tong explores the connections between hunger, sexuality, and brutality. Rice is used as food and currency, as an aphrodisiac and an implement of sexual torture, as a weapon for murder and a symbol of everything good. Lush and sensual, combining a strange comedy with a dark undercurrent of violence and written in hypnotically beautiful prose, Rice is a novel of startling richness and furious creative energy.

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

The literary and cultural critic Naitô Chizuko's book Empires and Assassinations (帝国と暗殺), a stunning indictment of the modern Japanese media's storytelling practices and collusion with imperial aggression, was just published by Shinyosha. I will be posting translated excerpts in the near future. The following is her paper “Literature in Japanese and the Emperor System," presented at “Representing Change,” an MLK Week Symposium on the Arts and Social Justice Movements held at Stanford University on January 17, 2004. Naitô was born in 1973.

1. Writing in Japanese and the Structure of the Emperor System

The Japanese language was once conceived of as if it belonged to the Emperor. Since the onset of modernity, that structure imbued with a focus on the Emperor has simply been reorganized. Therefore, when writing novels in Japanese even today, for example, one cannot help but be deeply affected by the structure of the Emperor system.

This problem is not limited to novels as linguistic arts. For example, even in the current Iraq war, couldn’t we say the remarks of Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who is passionately supporting America and cultivating a friendly relationship with Bush, serve as examples of the structure of the Emperor system still at work in the Japanese language? Put simply, the Emperor system structure that has lived on in the Japanese language is a structure that, at its center, is empty, nothing. We are not supposed to question the meaning of that emptiness. The “Emperor” who is supposed to be at that center has turned into the unspoken given that, if you are Japanese, anyone would know, and that feeling or sense that any Japanese person would understand has come to supplement “Him” in this structure. The feeling that “if you’re Japanese, anyone would understand” is related to an exclusionary consciousness of nation or race and extends to exclude even those “incorrect Japanese” who don’t try to understand that feeling. So, you can see that this is a structure that can engender a variety of forms of discrimination. Thus, we have to question the meaning of that emptiness at the center.

Let me give you an example. Koizumi emphasizes a friendship between Japan and the U.S. that is based on the Japanese-US Mutual Security Treaty when explaining why Japan is supporting the U.S. in the current war. This friendship is seen as a given. The premises behind it are left unexamined in this structure. The “obvious premise” becomes the empty center and remains unchallenged as one of the things “any Japanese would understand.” In effect, because the Emperor system maintains absolute power even as the empty center, people get the feeling that they more or less understand. In other words, this structure prohibits the examination of what that center means.

This kind of structure has appeared in many Japanese narratives. Conservative stories and conservative official discourse deploy this structure to appeal to people’s emotions. In other words, without knowing it, people who use the Japanese language are interpolated into this narrative structure, oblivious to the Emperor system that makes it possible. Countless novels have succumbed to this imperial narrative structure. Such Japanese novels contribute to the perpetuation of a discriminatory interpretive system.

Fundamentally, we might think of language arts such as novels as steeped in the dissimilation of words, which we might, in turn, be prone to see as conducive to fighting the existing structures. Indeed, Japanese novels must be written with fresh approaches to the imperial structure. Of course, as long as it is written in Japanese, one cannot be completely free of the Emperor system, but it’s necessary to take it on consciously in order to resist the myriad forms of discrimination this structure produces in contemporary culture and society.

Nakagami Kenji, who died in 1992, is an example of someone who vigilantly stood his ground as a novelist in this relationship between novels and the structure of the Emperor system.

2. The Emperor System & the High Treason (or Taigyaku) Incident: Looking at Nakagami Kenji

Nakagami Kenji made various comments about this problem of the Emperor system and the Japanese language. Out of these, I would like to focus today on a particular concern of his, the High Treason Incident.

First, let me describe this High Treason Incident. This incident occurred in 1910, about 100 years ago, during the time when Japan occupied Korea, and it had a chilling and suppressive impact on the socialist movement. A group of four, headed by a woman named Kanno Sugako, had planned an assassination plot that was discovered. This triggered the arrest of several hundred socialists across the nation. In the end, 26 central characters in the socialist movement were put on trial, starting with the world-renowned socialist Kotoku Shosui and his partner (and assassination plot leader) Kanno Sugako.
Incidentally, at one point Kotoku Shosui sought refuge in San Francisco to escape government persecution and oppression.

At the time, there was an incredible law regarding a “High Treason Offense,” which ruled that it was a crime to even think about inflicting injury upon the Imperial Household, and the sole sentence was the death penalty. For such a High Treason Offense, the trials were to be held in secret, and the defendant had the right to trial only once. 24 out of the 26 were found guilty and sentenced to death. The following day, 12 of them were given a reduced sentence of life in prison as a special favor from the Emperor himself. While it may be surprising, the death penalty was executed just one week later for the remaining 12 whose death sentences had been confirmed.

While there is some evidence to suggest that four, including Kanno Sugako, may have actually plotted an assassination, the historical consensus holds that everyone else was innocent. In his piece Hanabi, the novelist Nagai Kafu described the shame he felt as a writer and the guilt he felt for his silence during this High Treason Incident despite his familiarity with the writings of Emile Zola, who protested during the Dreyfus Affair.* The High Treason Incident was one that greatly impacted many other writers as well.

However, it wasn’t until after the end of WWII that the High Treason Incident was found to have been based on false accusations. Postwar research to restore the reputations of those who had nothing to do with the assassination plot proved that the government manufactured the High Treason Incident, trumping up charges for an expedient reassertion of its power.

After these research findings were made public, throughout the 1970s and 80s, Nakagami Kenji earnestly spoke out about the High Treason Incident, writing about it in his novels as well. Amongst those sentenced in the incident was a group called the “Kishu group,” and Nakagami Kenji’s hometown is in Kishu. Nakagami Kenji does not focus on the fact that the incident was based on false accusations, but rather, takes as his subject an evaluation of the assassination plot itself.

The Emperor assassination plot has been described as having been impossible to execute in all practicality due to its lack of specifics. However, exposed, as it were, in its un-executed state (beginning with newspaper media), it spread into the written spaces of the Japanese language and became an incident of words. Thus the intention to make visible the empty center that is the “Emperor” was realized in words.

Miyashita Takichi, who by all accounts appears to have planned the assassination with Kanno Sugako, said “we wanted to show that the emperor, like us, is human and would bleed.” In other words, by making the Emperor, who is the absolute but empty center, into an object of murder, a vivid object with a real presence, the whole structure could at last be made visible. (Moreover, a woman, Kanno Sugako, was involved in this plot. As women were extremely oppressed in society at the time, that a woman was involved in the assassination plot of the Emperor is in and of itself significant.) This High Treason Incident can be viewed as an incident of words rather than any actual murder or event. Because of this, the imaginations of writers have been repeatedly piqued to dramatize this historical incident in fiction.

In the works of Nakajima Kenji, the problem of social class-based discrimination is an especially prevalent theme. Although the words “covert discrimination against buraku” are never used, the roji (“alley” or “ghetto”), the primary setting for his later works, clearly suggests discrimination against buraku and the system of social classes formed by the Emperor system.* (His novels also explore how the elements of ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality create and contribute to patterns of discrimination.) Back to the High Treason Incident, the alley through which discrimination against buraku is expressed and the assassination plot are linked in Nakagami’s fiction: the alley is the class outside of the class system, the “class below the class system,” and the Emperor is “the class above the class system.” Resistance to the emptiness at the center of the Emperor system appears in his novels in this way. However, it is a bit disappointing that Nakagami Kenji makes no mention of Kanno Sugako.

3. The Emperor & Romantic Love: Shimada Masahiko’s Endless Canon Trilogy

Nakagami Kenji passed away in 1992, and after his death, various “Nakagami Kenji theories” were written, mainly by male researchers and critics. But in the late 90’s, female critics such as Suga Hidemi and Watanabe Naomi wrote critiques focusing on the High Treason Incident or the structure of the Emperor system within his literature. I think it is safe to say that such critiques exist because Nakagami Kenji’s novels inspired them. These critiques make clear that between the Meiji Era and the end of WWII the kind of Japanese language structure that could hold a law such as the High Treason Offense led to a self-censoring situation, one in which novels did not directly depict the Emperor. Even today, in post-WWII Japan when the High Treason Offense no longer exists and the Emperor has gone from being the sovereign leader to a symbol, the situation has not changed. Even though it is no longer a criminal act, directly criticizing the Emperor or writing material that insults the Emperor or Imperial Family has repeatedly led to violent attacks on the writers – or their families or their publishers – by right wing groups and/or individuals. It is for this reason that some have argued novels tackling the problem of the Emperor system head-on need to be written.

Shimada Masahiko seems to have thought up his Endless Canon Trilogy as a way to take up such calls. This trilogy takes the current princess Masako as its model for a central character and involves the prohibited romantic love between a princess-to-be (Fujiko) and the protagonist, Kaoru. The background to this love story involves Kaoru’s father, who was in love with a woman who was the lover of Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme United Nations Commander in Japan after Japan lost WWII, as well as Kaoru’s grandfather, the son of Madame Butterfly and Pinkerton. Kaoru wanders around America and war-torn Japan, chasing after memories of his own mother. According to the blurb on the dust cover of Part One of the trilogy, The Resident of the Comet, “Spurred on by romantic love’s genes, the desires of four generations of a single bloodline transcend the centuries.” The story, we are thus instructed, involves some sort of romantic love passed down through the generations through the males of this family – from grandfather to father and on down to Kaoru.

Part One was published in October of 2000, and Part Two was written the following year and was supposed to be published, but because it coincided with the pregnancy of Princess Masako, the model for Fujiko, publication had to be delayed. I believe this was a measure taken primarily to avoid right wing attacks upon concerned parties. Shimada himself has written about this experience in an essay. Publication of the central portion of the trilogy, the section dealing with the romance between Kaoru and Fujiko, was thus postponed.

So, Part Three, The Love of Etrof, was published in a literary magazine before Part Two ever appeared. In Part Three, a heartbroken Kaoru has moved to the island of Etrof and from there continues to send e-mail messages to Fujiko. Etrof is an island included in the “Disputed Northern Territories” over which even now Japan and Russia are negotiating for property rights.

Early in 2003, Part Three, The Love of Etrof, was published in book form, and then that fall, Part Two, A Beautiful Soul, was finally published. In the latter part of 2003, this whole episode garnered considerable attention as a matter of free speech (as well as injurious speech and outright violence).

Though it was a much anticipated novel, the response to Part Three was not very good. There were many criticisms, the most frequent of which went something like this: “This novel follows the structure of the Emperor system too closely and serves it too much.”

In the interest of time, I would like to leave aside further discussion of such critiques and organize the salient points of criticism in my own way.

First of all, I believe Shimada had every intention to write the ultimate romantic love story that would rock the nation and threaten the Emperor system. But somewhere along the way that intention to break a taboo by writing about romantic love devolved into a repetition of a “taboo” scenario that is forgiven in fiction. The romance between Kaoru and Fujiko in Part Two is more or less a tracing of the story line in the Japanese classical text the Tale of Genji. In the Tale of Genji, the eponymous hero, Hikaru Genji, engages in taboo sexual relations with empresses and women who are to become empresses. In short, Shimada Masahiko’s piece simply repeats this taboo of a male main character engaging in sexual behavior with the wife of the Emperor or the candidates for becoming empresses. At some point along the way, he must have been taken in by the power of stories written in the Japanese language and reproduced this simple formula.

This, I believe, resonates with the fact that by postponing publication, the central portion of the novel, that is, Part Two, remained empty even at a (forced or coerced) meta-level. Of course this empty center, again, is the Emperor system itself at work.

In the “Epilogue” of Part Three, Shimada touches on the “power” of “attachment” in “a love sealed away,” one that will someday become romance reincarnated. Or, as he writes, “even though the love has been sealed away, the day when the seal will be broken will surely come.” Shimada also writes, “when love’s forbidden seal is broken, the foundations of the Emperor system and structure of the nation are shaken.” I think we can see this statement as betraying how the Emperor system is at work in the trilogy itself. I say this because the “breaking of the seal” is the central power of the entire work, and yet it is not written in the novel. In short, this novel has a plot with a nonexistent center.

Not only that, but this trilogy contains many discriminatory descriptions of women and I cannot end without mentioning that the entire story never moves beyond rudimentary male-dominated male fantasy. I believe that the lack of consideration for gender dynamics is related to the fact that the structure of the whole novel loses to the force of the conservativeness of the story.

Though I have made many negative statements, I think it is clear that Shimada Masahiko’s novel is an ambitious work that takes into account Nakagami Kenji’s legacy and recent calls for writers to challenge the Emperor system. What I would like to emphasize here is that despite this, what Shimada Masahiko has written only serves to support the structure of the Emperor system. That is to say, Shimada Masahiko’s work proves how hard it is to write about the Emperor system in the Japanese language.

Finally, I would like to wrap up with some bright stories. Presently, I have been hearing rumors that writers such as Shono Yoriko, Tsushima Yuko, Matsuura Rieko and Hoshino Tomoyuki have been preparing novels. In fact, Hoshino Tomoyuki has just published his novel Lonely Hearts Killer this month. The act of writing always carries exciting possibilities for change – change of existing structures and of readers’ perceptions. I would like to end today’s presentation by emphasizing my hopes for such novels and the changes to come. Thank you very much.

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Hoshino Tomoyuki was born in 1965 in Los Angeles. His family returned to Japan in 1968. He graduated with a degree in literature from Waseda University, where he now teaches Creative Writing. After working for a while as a newspaper journalist, he moved to Mexico, where he lived, studied, and worked from 1991-95. His debut novel The Last Gasp was published in 1997 and awarded the Bungei Prize. His second novel The Mermaid Sings Wake Up was published in 2000 and awarded the Mishima Prize. In 2003, he was awarded the Noma Bungei award for Fantasista, a collection of three novellas. His other novels include The Poisoned Singles Hot Springs (2002), Naburiai (2003), Lonely Hearts Killer (2004), Alkaloid Lovers (2005), and The Worussian-Japanese Tragedy (2006). He also writes essays (for newspapers and journals) on topics such as soccer, politics, literature, Latin America, consumer culture, film, Che Guevara, Japan's relationship to the rest of Asia, and cultural/national identity.

The following excerpts from the 9/24/05 entry from Hoshino Tomoyuki's web journal were translated by Maiko Shiota.

[...] Of course, it often gets tiring to continuously stay aware. At times we want to run away from there. There are no ways to escape, but one wants sometimes to temporarily turn off the switch of awareness. It was possible for me to do so this summer while being away from Japan. Thanks to that, I was able to learn the results of that megalomaniacal, large-scale comedy-like election a few days after the fact as though it were somebody else’s problem in some far away place (though I did vote in an absentee ballot). I was also saved for a while from having to know about the results of the LDP’s elections for its party leader, which were practically declarations of wanting to be "another one of Koizumi's children."

[...]

Koizumi’s sweeping victory (not a landslide victory for the LDP) was predicted before the elections. The unpleasant premonition I had when I saw Prime Minister Koizumi’s news interview right after the dissolution of the House of Representatives was a sign of that avalanche. But, there is such a difference in predicting this would happen and the actual weight of that prediction becoming reality. At the stage of prediction, there is a possibility that it might not come true, but once it becomes reality, every other possibility has disappeared. Even though there is always the possibility that things may change in the future, the political power we have already relinquished will not return until their time in office is up. The meaning of this is so frightful that one wants to stop even thinking about it.

If I think of it in terms of the industry I am a part of, in the 90’s, a million-seller was published at about the rate of one book every few years. Still more, million-seller novels were published at the rate of maybe one every 10 years, if even that many. Since coming into the 21st century though, there have been numerous million-sellers every year. However, this does not really mean that the publishing world as a whole is profitable. Publishing is also extremely divided between the winners and the losers. As you know, this is a phenomenon seen in all kinds of aspects of Japanese society.

What supports this phenomenon is the mentality to want to throng to something. In the last few years, I feel that the numbers of those who openly express fanatic tendencies have increased exponentially. I felt a deep fear of this tendency during last year’s bashing incidents of the Japanese hostages in Iraq. I even think that there is nothing scarier than the fanatic masses. But Japan is becoming more and more like that kind of society. Similarly, South Korea seems to be taking on the same tendencies, and China is nurturing that fanaticism as part of national strategy.

Thus, I could surmise the great possibility that Koizumi would win by a landslide with no opposition. Indeed, just as the bashing incidents of the hostages in Iraq escalated because of the internet, I heard that in this election as well, young adults began the uncritical praise of Koizumi over the internet. Though there are differences in the seriousness of the content, it is probably very similar to the structure of the unstoppable popularity of “Sekai no Chushin de Ai wo Sakebu” (“I Proclaim My Love from the Center of the World,” a widely popular book and movie in Japan). However, to actually begin such a phenomenon and allow a mighty state power to exist has meaning way above the limits of my imagination. I write fiction to imagine things way beyond limits of imagination, and yet, I have come to a realization that I cannot catch up and feel that I am constantly in danger of losing sight of what is happening.

[...]

As long as the electorate remains this fanatic, even if Koizumi resigns, similar people will continue to hold political power. This fanatic mentality constantly desires people or arguments to which all responsibility can be delegated, and on the other hand, requires the existence of an evil enemy that clarifies their identity (for Japan that is North Korea right now, and perhaps Russia’s Putin will join later). This type of grotesque nationalism is developing all over the world, in Japan, in Korea, in China, in Taiwan, in the United States, in Russia, in the public of the Islamic nations. The words, “the century of neo-nationalism, the age of nationalism once again,” are going round and round in my head.