Between literature and subculture: Kanehara Hitomi, media commodification and the desire for agency in post-bubble Japan

Abstract

Kanehara Hitomi won the 2004 Akutagawa Prize to a tremendous fanfare. The media spectacle served to commodify both the violence and the sex in Snakes and earrings (Hebi ni piasu, 2004), as well as the unconventional lifestyle of this 20-year-old middle-school dropout. Kanehara's work earned the distinction of high culture via this prestigious literary prize, but she is simultaneously seen as representative of a problematic youth subculture. UK/US cultural studies theory suggests a reading of text and author as an expression of subcultural resistance to the commodification process and to mainstream Japanese society. But questions remain as to how this resistance translates into political expression in an era of conservative politics and so-called apolitical youth. Ultimately, resistance is not found in the subcultural self-identification of the young protagonist Lui. Rather, working from within the media spectacle, Kanehara utilizes a literary legacy of the body in order to make her writing relevant in the virtual, hyper-commodified culture of twenty-first-century Japan.