Amorphous Identities, Disavowed History: Shimada Masahiko and National Subjectivity

Abstract

“I am my own, independent (hitori no) Tower of Babel,” proclaims Akuma Kazuhito, the protagonist of Shimada Masahiko’s (b. 1961) Boku wa mozōningen [I am an automaton] (1986).1 This essay reads a sampling of Shimada’s narratives written between 1985 and 1989 as a set of discursive forays into dominant modern Japanese models of individual and national subjectivity, forays that unsettle the practice of marshaling Japanese literature to complicity with those cultural models. His characters persistently inhabit the interstices of identifying categories, bartering their erotic bodies in the contemporary global market economy. These 1980s texts are liberally peppered with postcolonial and postmodern jargon and concepts, such as that of in-betweenness. Because of these and other attributes U.S. Japanologists frequently designate (and dismiss) Shimada as a “postmodern writer.” I want here to rethink how these postmodern traits signify—as not mere reproduction of but as politically informed commentary—in these