Postmodern, Feminist and Postcolonial Currents in Contemporary Japanese Culture: A Reading of Murakami Haruki, Yoshimoto Banana, Yoshimoto Takaaki and Karatani Kōjin (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Postmodern, Feminist and Postcolonial Currents in Contemporary Japanese Culture: A Reading of Murakami Haruki, Yoshimoto Banana, Yoshimoto Takaaki and Karatani Kōjin Atsuko Ueda (bio) Postmodern, Feminist and Postcolonial Currents in Contemporary Japanese Culture: A Reading of Murakami Haruki, Yoshimoto Banana, Yoshimoto Takaaki and Karatani Kōjin. By Murakami Fuminobu. Routledge, London, 2005. xiii, 206 pages. £65.00. This book, with its daunting title, prompts us to rethink the status of theory in our academic practices. It provokes us to reconsider theoretical issues that many of us, perhaps naively, thought were behind us. What does it mean for us to "use" theory, as the author claims to do in this book? What determines theory to be "Western" and "non-Western"? What assumptions underlie the question of whether "Euro-American theory" is applicable to non-Western cultures? The theoretical focus of the work is made abundantly clear in the title and the pages of the book. Yet, from the beginning, I was puzzled at a basic level: what constitutes "theory" for the writer? This question arose as I read the introductory chapter entitled "Western Ideologies and Japan." A subsection on "Postmodernism, Feminism, Postcolonialism and Japan" includes a cursory discussion of "Euro-American studies on Japan based on Western postmodern perspectives," as well as a discussion of Euro-American theory in Japan (p. 11). On "Euro-American studies on Japan," the author refers to Postmodernism and Japan, Japanese Encounters with Postmodernity, and Multicultu-ral Japan, along with John W. Treat's work on Yoshimoto Banana and Susan Napier's book The Fantastic and Modern Japanese Literature.1 Murakami then claims the following: "However, other than these studies, as far as I know, no serious attempt has yet been made to use Euro-American theories of postmodernism, feminism and postcolonialism to analyse contemporary Japanese literature in English" (p. 12). I probably do not have to list specific works to contradict such a statement for readers of The Journal of Japanese Studies, nor do I have enough space to list them all. [End Page 251] However, it would be too easy to say that the author did not conduct sufficient archival research or that he is merely ignorant of Japanese literary studies in the Euro-American context. There must be some of that too, but more important is the way such a characterization exposes his view of what constitutes theory. His statement prompts an interesting question: when does theory constitute itself as theory in our academic practices? For the author, it appears that a work needs to overtly claim a certain theoretical framework, such as postcolonial theory or feminism, for it to display its theoretical engagement. Theory, in other words, must be named as such for Murakami to recognize it as theory. Otherwise, I cannot explain the absence of many works on Nakagami Kenji, ōe Kenzaburō, ōba Minako, Yamada Eimi, and others from the list above, nor his outlandish comments, such as "After the early 1980s postmodernism had little impact in Japan" (p. 13), and "other aspects of postmodernism . . . such as its critique of rationalism, power systems, the structure of discrimination, and utopian/dystopian worlds, have not been given sufficient attention in Japanese postmodern literary criticism" (p. 13). It is certainly not valid to claim that Japanese postmodern literary criticism has not paid enough attention to such issues. Consider, for example, the extensive amount of study on the nation-state and its ideology in the 1980s and 1990s, studies that analyzed the nation's oppressive scheme, structures of power, and the modern systems of discrimination. Similarly, Murakami claims that "it was . . . only in 1996 that a round-table discussion . . . entitled 'What is the Postcolonial Thought' took place and introduced Euro-American postcolonial thought to Japan" (p. 15). His discussion precludes much scholarship on Okinawan and Ainu studies, as well as resident Korean studies that were widespread before the round table took place. Clearly lacking from the author's notion of theory is the notion that theory is inscribed in the language we mobilize to analyze texts. It is further inscribed in the gaze of the analyzing subject, which manifests not only in how we approach our objects of inquiry...