Historicizing Japan’s Abject Femininity: Reading Women’s Bodies in Nihon ryōiki

Abstract

Throughout Japan's long history the female body has occupied an axiomatic role in the literary transmission and subversion of normative culture values, frequently being ambivalently figured as an object of simultaneous desire and disgust. Although commonly deployed Western theoretical modes offer a number of potentially fruitful avenues of inquiry into the problem of the feminine within the Japanese cultural imagination, in attempting to theorize these representational trends it is crucial also to consider the manner in which women have been envisioned historically within Japan. This article examines constructions of the female body within Japan's earliest setsuwa collection, Nihon ryoiki, whose compilation marks a pivotal moment in the proliferation of Buddhist doctrine within Japan. In doing so, it seeks to locate intersections between modern theoretical discourses on the abject feminine and the ambivalent treatment of women's bodies within early Japanese literature and culture.KEYWORDS: Nihon ryoiki-setsuwa-Kyokai-Buddhism-women-bodies(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)In recent decades popular Japanese literature has become increasingly sat- urated with images of monstrous femininity as a number of writers have depicted women's bodies in various states of horrifying, and often fascinat- ing, grotesquerie. In horror, crime, and science fiction, women are often marked by physical deformity or disfigurement; some are mutilated or dismembered, and still others are presented as undergoing metamorphosis or possessing cyborgic qualities. In less fantastical prose, as well as in poetry, such natural pro- cesses as menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and lactation have in numerous instances been figured not as phenomenon akin to life, but rather as ones linked to undesirability and death. Playing upon long-standing representational prac- tices whereby the feminine is envisioned as occupying predominately marginal social spaces (and perhaps most commonly the domestic sphere), such concep- tualizations of the female body frequently engage in a kind of double-othering of the feminine-a tactic that in its most insipid forms can serve to legitimize the subjugation of women, and which in its most intellectually engaging ones poses a major threat to the patriarchal status quo. Moreover, many of the most compelling literary representations of the feminine in its least desirable itera- tions are offered by women writers themselves in efforts not only to undermine conventional perceptions of femininity, but also to underscore the possibilities of one's negotiation, reconceptualization, and destruction of a historically con- structed feminine space. These phenomena can be linked to a number of devel- opments within Japan's post-wwii literary schema-among them an expanding female readership that demands the presence of subversive women in fiction, as well as a growing number of writers, male and female, popular and literary, who are eager to problematize conventional notions of femininity-and specifically Japan's long-standing domestic logic-via the literary medium.In the work of French philosopher Julia Kristeva, the concept of abjection is described as a traumatic confrontation with an object that, though somehow famil- iar to the viewing subject, is envisioned as defiled due to its existence outside of the symbolic order-that is, the realm of knowledge in which the viewing subject's self-conceptualization is embedded. There looms within abjection, she writes,one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, neverthe- less, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful. …