Mishima Yukio Research Articles

Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right ed. by Kimberly Jannarone

Reviewed by: Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right ed. by Kimberly Jannarone Michael Shane Boyle VANGUARD PERFORMANCE BEYOND LEFT AND RIGHT. Edited by Kimberly Jannarone. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015; pp. 334. Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right seeks to "correct" the temptation of performance scholars to equate formal experimentation and institutional opposition with leftist politics (7). Across fourteen essays edited and introduced by Kimberly Jannarone, the volume focuses on vanguard performance, a category as tempted as any by this "political fallacy" (2). At a historical moment when what counts as Left and Right seems increasingly up for debate, the collection makes a timely intervention into the criteria that scholars use to judge the politics of radical performances practices. The preference for vanguard signaled in the book's title is meant to both sidestep and foreground the "historical and political critical baggage" carried by the more familiar term avant-garde (6). This includes the avant-garde's association with an array of European and North American art movements from the first half of the twentieth century, as well as its alignment with loosely progressive political projects. Understood in this light, vanguard performance becomes a capacious category that refuses the sort of geographic, periodizing, and political assumptions that over-determine the meaning of the avant-garde. But without such defining qualities, what does vanguard performance actually describe? As presented here, vanguardism at its root designates a radicalness that has less to do with particular ideologically inflected intentions than with principled stances against a shifting status quo. The essays collected in Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right—several of which have previously appeared elsewhere—rightly contend that the political Left has no monopoly on antagonism or innovation. As a category, vanguard performance both encompasses and calls attention to myriad instances of artistic invention and political subversion that emanate from the ostensible Right. Even as Jannarone insists that the category of vanguard performance has wide geographic and historical scope, much of the collection remains focused on the well-worn terrain of war-torn Western Europe before 1945. Several of the chapters offer what amounts to a travelogue of European fascist aesthetics: Patricia Gaborik takes us to Italy, where Luigi Pirandello worked comfortably within a Mussolinibacked arts milieu; Monica Achen surveys pre-Nazi expressionist playwriting in Germany; and Graham White turns to the failed aspirations that British novelist Henry Williamson held for England's fascists. [End Page 280] Unsurprisingly, the exemplar for vanguard performance in this book is the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose work figures prominently in a handful of the essays. Only two contributions look beyond Europe or North America: Kara Reilly's careful look at the ritual suicide of Yukio Mishima in 1970s Japan; and Katherine Profeta's sweeping discussion of the pivot that Zhang Yimou made from subversive filmmaker to architect of the 2008 Beijing Olympic opening ceremonies. The republication of Richard Schechner's meditation on the 9/11 attacks could be considered as another exception, although he situates the events within a familiar genealogy of avant-garde performance. As a result, the collection's major contribution to defining vanguard performance comes through its focus on the political ambivalence of radical practices. Vanguard performance is not just a category that covers diverse political intents, but is also a critical concept that acknowledges the ease with which a radical practice can itself slip into the status quo. Jannarone's pithy introduction sets out as the volume's "central paradox" this claim that "innovative performance designed to challenge established power structures can be deployed in deliberate, passionate support of established and even oppressive power structures" (1). Of course, this is less a paradox than the very historical soil from which most cultural production grows—an ambivalence that James Harding describes in his chapter as the vanguard's "cutting edge" (241). Odai Johnson presents a case example of vanguardist ambivalence by tracking how state-sponsored fascist cultural movements in Germany and Italy actively retooled the modernist aesthetics of major figures in interwar dance, such as Mary Wigman and Rudolf Laban. Ambivalence can operate in other ways as well. Ann Pellegrini's contribution, for instance, tracks how the transformative aesthetics of homophobic...

A Study on “Kinkakuji” by Yukio Mishima

A Study on “Kinkakuji” by Yukio Mishima

Some Theoretical Issues on the Plagiarism in Literature

이 논문의 목적은 최근 신경숙과 박민규에 대해 제기된 표절혐의에 관련된 몇 가지 이론적 쟁점들을 검토해보는 데 있다. 두 경우 모두 작품에서 출처를 밝히지 않은 차용은 표절이며 표절혐의자는 절도죄를 범한 것과 마찬가지라는 단순논리, 즉 ‘표절근본주의’라고 지칭될 수 있는 이데올로기에 지배되고 있다는 것이 필자의 입장이다. 신경숙은 단편 ｢전설｣에 미시마 유키오의 ｢우국｣의 몇몇 문장이 그대로 사용되고 있다는 근거에서 표절작가로 비난받았다. 그러나 표현상의 유사성을 빌미로 문학작품을 표절의 결과물로 단정 짓는 것은 매우 좁은 시각으로, 여기에는 차용된 단어나 문장들이 그 나름의 독자적인 예술적 성취를 이룩한 전혀 다른 새로운 작품세계의 형성에 기여하는가의 문제가 도외시되어 있다. 박민규의 경우 표절 문제는 정보가 인터넷을 통해 제한 없이 유통되는 ‘포스트모던의 조건’과 관련지어 논의되어야 한다. 박민규는 단편 ｢낮잠｣과 장편소설 ｢삼미 슈퍼스타즈의 마지막 팬클럽｣이 인터넷에 올라 있는 발상과 표현을 베끼거나 차용했다는 이유로 표절 혐의를 받았다. 그러나 이는 기원을 알기 어려운 다차원의 정보들이 흘러다니는 인터넷 환경에서 작업하는 작가들의 입지를 고려하지 않은 결과다. 문학에서의 표절 문제는 근대사회에서 독창성과 창조성의 관계라는 더 근본적인 문제로 이어진다. ‘독창적’ 표현에 대한 배타적 소유권 주장은 자본주의의 도래와 더불어 저작권과 지적 재산권 개념이 도입되면서 대두되었다. 표절은 그 윤리적 성격과 시간에 구애되지 않는 특성 때문에 지적 재산권과는 구별되지만 둘은 서로 혼용되기도 한다. 여기서 과거의 언어 표현을 자유롭게 사용하고자 하는 작가의 욕망은 그런 용법을 범죄적이고 부도덕하다고 비난하는 근본주의적 표절관과 충돌하게 된다. 최근 두 작가에게 제기된 표절혐의는 이 같은 표절 이데올로기가 문학 창작의 영역에 강하게 개입해 있는 증좌로 보아야 할 것이다.This essay proposes to elucidate some theoretical issues related to the recent accusations of plagiarism against the two writers, Kyungsook Shin and Minkyu Park. In both cases, the accusations were caught in a simplistic supposition, which I designate as ‘plagiarism fundamentalism’, in which any borrowings from others’ works without permission or declaration must be a plagiarism and the plagiarists should be condemned as having committed a crime of theft. Shin has been condemned as a plagiarist on the ground that her short story “A Legend” contains several sentences which have some verbatim similarity with Mishima Yukio’s in his “Patriotism”. But it reveals very narrow viewpoint to judge literary works as results of plagiarism just for the reason of such similarities found in some expressions. We should consider whether the borrowed words or sentences contribute to form a totally new and different world of works with an artistic achievement of their own. In the case of Park, the issue of plagiarism should be discussed in terms of a ‘postmodern condition’, where information is widely flowing and being distributed through the worldwide web without check. Park was accused of plagiarism for the reason that in his short story “A Nap” and The Last Fan club of Sammi Superstars he copied or borrowed some ideas and expressions he found during his Internet searching. Itself having a relatively lesser authenticity, a variety of multi-levelled information flowing through the Internet circumstances should be more available to a free use for the writers. The question of plagiarism in literature leads to a more fundamental question of relationship between originality and creativeness in the modern society. The privileged ownership on the ‘original’ expressions derived from the advent of capitalism along with an emerging concept of copyright and intellectual property. Though the issue of plagiarism is distinguished from that of intellectual property in its ethical characters and timelessness, the two has been usually intermixed and confused with each other. This causes a continual conflict between the writers’ desire to take a free use of the past expressions of words and the fundamentalist standpoint of plagiarism which condemns such usage as criminal and immoral. The recent cases of plagiarism accusation should be recorded as showing how forcefully an ideology of plagiarism can intervene into the area of literary creation.

육체와 표면, 전후 일본의 정치 에로스 -미시마 유키오의 <우국>과 오시마 나기사의 <감각의 제국>

육체와 표면, 전후 일본의 정치 에로스 -미시마 유키오의 <우국>과 오시마 나기사의 <감각의 제국>

Topoi of Violent Death and the Psychotic Body in Mishima Yukio’s Yūkoku

La nouvelle Yūkoku (Patriotisme, 1961) decrit le suicide rituel (seppuku) du lieutenant Takeyama Shinji et de son epouse Reiko lors de la tentative de putsch ultranationaliste du 26 fevrier 1936. L’arriere-plan ideologique de la nouvelle, l’evidente pulsion de mort qui anime les personnages et la place preponderante accordee a la description de l’eventrement ont amene la plupart des commentateurs a interpreter ce texte sous un angle biographique et/ou thematique. Mishima ne se contente toutefois pas, dans Yūkoku, de broder sur ses propres fantasmes et de jouer de facon litteraire avec ses fetiches politiques. A travers le motif de la mort volontaire, il retravaille aussi des figures tres presentes dans la litterature nationale. L’objet de cette etude sera de montrer quels sont les topoi presents dans Yūkoku et de voir comment ils s’articulent les uns aux autres. Nous proposerons, a l’issue de cette analyse, une relecture de la nouvelle a travers la grille interpretative du corps psychotique qui offre un denominateur commun a ces representations heteroclites.

The Role of Ogura-hyakunin-isshu in Haru-no-yuki, a Movie Directed by Isao Yukisada and Based on Yukio Mishima's Novel

The Role of <i>Ogura-hyakunin-isshu</i> in <i>Haru-no-yuki</i>, a Movie Directed by Isao Yukisada and Based on Yukio Mishima's Novel

미시마 유키오(三島由紀夫)의 ‘대중’ 인식 전후적 ‘대중’ 담론의 가능성과 한계

This study examined the extent to which the image of “the public” had changed in Japan in the 1950s and 60s. Furthermore, this study analyzed the awareness of Mishima Yukio, known as one of the most prominent right-wing writers in Japan, toward the public. The study also investigated the differences and similarities of this awareness. The meaning of the term “the public” has changed slightly in accordance with the time and place. However, it is the concept for which the mass production of wage earners, the population influx into urban areas, the enhancement of average thinking and life due to the development of mass media, etc., become the premises. It is known that the term “the public” became established in Japan in the 1920s. This was the period during which industrialization, capitalism, and the dissemination of mass media such as magazines and radio was underway in Japan. However, the discourse of popular culture during this period vanished after failing to materialize, because it was overwhelmed by the totalitarian atmosphere created by the war. The discourse about “the public” began to revive in Japan during the late 1950s and 1960s. This period was best described by high economic growth, an increased in white collar workers, the formation of a leisure culture, and the dissemination of media such as television. In addition to these urban cultural phenomena, the political events that could give shape to the discourse about “the public” took place. Of those events, the most prominent was “the struggle against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty” that occurred in 1960. In the course of “the struggle against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty”, Mishima became aware of the power of “the public” by watching the emergence of discourses pertaining to “the public” and “the citizen” in Japanese society. However, owing to the failure of “the struggle against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty”, he realized that it would not be possible to revolutionize a society only through solidarity of its citizens. In the 1960s, Mishima thought that a Japanese-style model, which should include the public’s unity over fragmentation and the recovery of “totality”, would be needed instead of a Western model that favors the growth of a citizen class. In other words, Mishima’s belief that spiritual unity and a resting place should be sought from Japan evolved into an obsession with “Japanese tradition” and “the Emperor system”.

Mishima: entre o amor e o desejo

The confessions made by Yukio Mishima in his autobiographical novel “Confessions of a mask” (1949), are taken in this article to illustrate how this subject moves – just like in a Moebius band – from love to desire in a circling movement. In his childhood, he was divided between his grandmother’s love and the sexual desire for princes and soldiers. In his youth, he was divided between his spiritual love for Sonoko and the carnal homosexual desire for Omi. The cleavage that is unveiled between love and desire is subsumed by the cleavage of “flesh and spirit”. On one side, “flesh”, the carnal homosexual desire, the desire for what is imprinted in masculinity, strength, ignorance, rude gestures, careless talk, on the other, spirit, all that which is related to intellectuality. Mishima tried to constitute two poles of purity and perfection, two absolutes, denying, thus, the castration of the Other. He pursued the solution of division of the self, which presented itself in polarities, but the chasm that divided him between “love and desire” was never filled out.

Mar da fertilidade: um mergulho no vazio e no silêncio

This essay intends to analyze how the Buddhist theme of “reincarnation” and the concept of impermanence were used in the work Sea of Fertility, by Yukio Mishima (1925-1970). Besides, it is our intention to prove that the adoption of the Buddhist theme of “reincarnation” as a linking element of each volume of Sea of Fertility deepens the reader into an existential emptiness, both aesthetically and philosophically. Thus, this essay is the experience of a reader, who saw, in a work whose title is Sea of Fertility, paradoxally, an emptiness

The Closed Hand: Images of the Japanese in Modern Peruvian Literature by Rebecca Riger Tsurumi (review)

Reviewed by: The Closed Hand: Images of the Japanese in Modern Peruvian Literature by Rebecca Riger Tsurumi César Ferreira Riger Tsurumi, Rebecca. The Closed Hand: Images of the Japanese in Modern Peruvian Literature. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2012. Pp. 313. ISBN 978-1-55753-607-5. The theme of The Closed Hand: Images of the Japanese in Modern Peruvian Literature is the role of Japanese culture in contemporary Peruvian letters. Rebecca Riger Tsurumi posits that Peruvian writers present conflicting views about Japanese culture and its place in mainstream society. Japanese characters are seen either negatively or as the object of satire or victims of Peruvian nationalism after WWII. She also examines Nisei (second generation) writers who provide perceptions of immigration and personal experiences. While documenting Japanese emigration to Latin America at the end of the nineteenth century, the author also focuses on initial literary expressions of Japanese culture by contextualizing Japanese immigration that was triggered by the lack of manual labor. Even though Japanese assimilation was difficult throughout the twentieth century, Japanese-Peruvians came to the forefront when Alberto Fujimori, a Nisei son of emigrants from Japan, became president in 1990. The Nisei are the largest group among the approximately 80 000 Peruvians of Japanese descent. The first manifestations of oriental imagery in Latin American literature appeared in modernista prose and poetry by Rubén Darío, José Martí, and others, who first stressed the ideographic nature of Japanese literature and haikus in Spanish. In another chapter, the author examines Fushía, a Japanese-Brazilian adventurer in Mario Vargas Llosa’s La casa verde (1966). His dark past begins in Brazil and ends in the Peruvian Amazon. After becoming a cult figure that plundered Indians and routinely kidnapped women, he is ravaged by disease, persecuted by the authorities, dying, and seeks refuge at a leper colony. Riger Tsurumi questions this portrayal of Fushía, who undermines the traditionally positive image of the Japanese community in Peru. In passing, she also examines two minor female characters in Vargas Llosa’s Travesuras de la niña mala (2006). The author proceeds to examine images of Japanese people in the stories “Matavilela” and “Muerte de Sevilla en Madrid” by Miguel Gutiérrez and Alfredo Bryce Echenique, respectively. Gutiérrez explores social tensions by examining the persecution of Japanese-Peruvians during World War II; seen through the eyes of a child, this story narrates an assault on a store owned by a Japanese family in the 1940s. In contrast to this hard-core realism, Bryce Echenique tells the story of a Japanese tourist who accompanies the protagonist Sevilla in a humorously absurd trip to Spain. According to Riger Tsurumi, the tourist’s caricaturesque portrayal and the protagonist’s tragic journey illustrate the thorny lack of communication between East and West. [End Page 162] In other chapters, the author focuses on Las dos caras del deseo (1994) by Carmen Ollé and Puñales escondidos (1998) by Pilar Dughi. Ollé’s novel examines the role of a young Japanese descendant, who seemingly embodies traditional Japanese values, but her youthful approach to race and sexuality permits the novel’s protagonist to abandon her monotonous lifestyle and deal with her lesbian desires. In Dughi’s novel, Japanese literature also serves as a catalyst for change for the protagonist. This thriller explores her personal transformation through Japanese writers Endo Shusaku, Abe Kobo, Dasai Osamu, and Mishima Yukio, which stimulates her to rethink traditional views about society, religion, and love. In another chapter, the author discusses two short novels by Mario Bellatin, who questions the relationship between reality and fantasy in his works. El jardín de la Señora Murakami (2000) focuses on a young female whose misfortunes typify the contradictions between tradition and modernity in Japanese culture. And irony and satire abound in Shiki Nagaoka: Una nariz de ficción (2001), which tells the story of an aspiring writer whose fascination with text and photography make him a cult figure upon his death. Known for his experimental writing and his explorations of Japanese culture, Bellatin’s fiction always draws attention to the art of storytelling. While several writers discussed in this study depict Japanese culture from an...

The Collected Poems of Ai by Ai (review)

Reviewed by: The Collected Poems of Ai by Ai Grace Bauer (bio) Ai. The Collected Poems of Ai. W. W. Norton. Admirers of Ai’s work will welcome the arrival of these Collected Poems, which chronicle the career of one of the most distinctive voices (and Ai’s poems give us many voices) of her generation. A mere glance at her book titles— Cruelty (1973), Killing Floor (1979), Sin (1986), Fate (1991), Greed (1993), Vice (1999), Dread (2003), and the posthumously published No Surrender (2010)—alerts readers to the fact that this poet is going to take us to the dark side of the street. Those seeking celebration, transcendence, affirmation, escape, or easy comfort had better look elsewhere. And yet, there is something about the poems that draws us in despite ourselves. I first discovered Ai’s work in The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets sometime in the mid-seventies. Her poems stood out immediately as being unlike anything else in that particular anthology—or any other anthology I had ever seen. The speakers in the few poems included—and in the first three collections from which they were chosen—assert themselves with a kind of desperate self-assurance that forces us to acknowledge the existence of people and situations we might prefer to deny or ignore. The poems are raw and disturbing, even shocking—but entirely convincing. As Yusef Komunyakaa says in his introduction to the Collected Poems, “We believe Ai’s various speakers even when we don’t wish to.” To a large extent, Ai’s poetic strategies remain consistent throughout her career. The dramatic monologue/persona poem predominates, as does the first person, the present tense—and violence, always violence—on the domestic, national, and global level. David Wojahn, in a 1986 New York Times Book Review article, proposed that we “imagine a Browning monologue written in the terse manner of Sam Shepard and you have a good idea of what Ai sounds like.” While the poems are definitely “monologues,” her characters often say things we would not expect anyone to actually say out loud in any play, movie, or real-life situation—giving us a blow-by-blow description of their actions, even as they’re being performed. For instance, take this passage from “Finished” (from Greed): You force me to touchthe black, rubber flaps [End Page 169] of the garbage disposalthat is open like a mouth saying, ah.You tell me it’s the last thing I’ll feelbefore I go numb. There’s as much “stage direction” here as “dialogue.” The female speaker may be revealing a bit of her inner thoughts and feelings, but she is also telling the husband she is addressing what she is doing and what he is doing, even as their mutual actions unfold. In the hands of a lesser poet, this kind of artifice might seem awkward, but in Ai’s work, it often adds to the disturbing power of the poems. Both the “I” and the “you” in this scene are unstoppable. Pain is their default mode; the violence is happening and it is going to happen. While there is an undeniable consistency of subject matter and technique throughout Ai’s work, these Collected Poems reveal how her poems evolved over the course of her career. In her first book, Cruelty, the poems tend to be short— usually less than a page each—and written in short, often end-stopped lines and clipped declarative sentences. The speakers, frequently identified in straightforward titles that function almost like labels—“The Country Midwife,” “The Color Thief,” “The Tenant Farmer,” “The Child Beater,” “The Dwarf,” and so on—reside in a no-man-or-woman’s land that seems to exist both in and out of time. Details suggest a rural, possibly southern, setting (lots of porches and fields and dirt, beat-up pickup trucks and wagons), though primal desperation is the true locale these characters inhabit. In the second book, Killing Floor, the poems begin to get longer, the sentences more expansive. There’s a greater use of enjambment. Several poems are written in the voices of noted historical figures, such as Leon Trotsky, Yukio Mishima...

Literature of Bushidō: Loyalty, Honorable Death, and the Evolution of the Samurai Ideal

This essay will address the evolution of the samurai warrior code (bushido), concentrating on its depiction in several prominent works of Japanese literature from 1185 to 1989. This essay will argue that rather than a concrete set of principles, bushido was actually a malleable set of romanticized qualities supposedly possessed by the samurai that were repeatedly adapted to a changing Japanese society in order to maintain a national identity predicated on the warrior class. Beginning with the introduction of the samurai through the Tale of the Heike, this essay will then proceed to discuss the blatant romanticization of the samurai until the early 1900’s as illustrated in such prominent works and mediums as the house codes of various feudal lords, Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s Hagakure, and Nitobe Inazo’s Bushido. The militarism of the Pre-World War II period will then be analyzed along with Eiji Yoshikawa’s Musashi while the culture of death affiliated with the Second World War will be examined as the high-water mark for romanticized bushido as a means of national identity. This essay will then conclude with an analysis of Mishima Yukio’s Patriotism, the definitive end to the Japanese people’s overt identification with samurai and their idealized code by 1989.

Recreating Japanese Men Edited by Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall (review)

Reviewed by: Recreating Japanese Men Edited by Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall Mark McLelland (bio) Recreating Japanese Men. Edited by Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2011. x, 347 pages. $68.95, cloth; $30.95, paper; $30.95, E-book. Two decades on from Gail Lee Bernstein’s pioneering anthology Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945 (also from University of California Press) comes another fine collection of essays, this time focusing on the transformations that have taken place in conceptualizing Japanese manhood, from early Tokugawa-period samurai through to the postmodern era of gendered robots. Like the earlier collection, this volume does not attempt to be comprehensive, nor does it give general overviews of how gender relations shift across various epochs. Instead, each chapter provides a detailed investigation of the meaning of manhood in relation to a set of specific historical circumstances, albeit organized according to three general themes. The first section of essays, grouped around the theme “legacies of the samurai,” explores how different groups of men have positioned themselves in relation to both the real and imagined military ethos of the samurai. Anne Walthall’s chapter on the addition of guns to the archery and sword-based martial practices of the samurai points out how ownership, use, and proficiency of firearms needed to be integrated with wider conceptions of military masculinity. She notes how, during the long peaceful years of Tokugawa rule, gun ownership featured as a status symbol and firearms and marksmanship were more associated with hunting than martial valor. Luke Roberts’s chapter looks at the same early Tokugawa period but focuses on the experience of the merchant class and on the life of one specific merchant who left a memoir reflecting on the course of his life. In his memoir, Enomoto Yazaemon (1625–86) discusses his “wild youth” where he frequently engaged in acts of violent retribution when he felt his honor to be at stake. His escapades are significant because they show that in the early years of Tokugawa rule, the masculinity of the merchant classes was as tied up with defending honor through violence as was that of the samurai. However, by the time Yazaemon had turned 40 his masculine identity had been reoriented to establishing his family’s success in business which required subservience to and not challenge of the developing status system. This acquiescence resulted in what Roberts terms “the stabilization of the division of labor into hereditary households” (p. 64). Michele Mason’s chapter looks at bushidō, a term frequently associated with samurai masculinity but which was only popularized in the writings [End Page 199] of Nitobe Inazō at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mason usefully argues that discussion of this supposed “code of ethics,” rather than pointing to an actually existing sense of masculine discipline, instead indicates a masculinity in crisis. As she points out, bushidō was largely invented at a time when Western discourse defined Japan as a feminized, uncivilized, childlike country. Mason goes on to look at how the concept traveled into the postwar period through the work of Mishima Yukio and the lesser known right-wing agitator Hyōdō Nisohachi, who again “reinvented” the tradition to speak to a perceived crisis of masculinity brought on by Japan’s defeat and occupation by the United States. The final chapter in this section, by Sabine Frühstück, continues the theme of military masculinity, asking what it means for male members of the Self Defense Forces (SDF) to serve under a U.S.-drafted “peace constitution.” Frühstück’s ethnographically informed argument is particularly effective in pointing to the double sense of alienation that many male SDF career soldiers face. The majority are recruited from “socioeconomically underprivileged backgrounds” (p. 95) and are likely to have failed their exams to enter university. Furthermore, throughout their careers they are soldiers who will never see battle and can only enter the international arena as service providers. The theme of marginality is picked up in the next grouping in the collection, “Marginal Men,” which offers four chapters that look at modes of masculinity that can be seen as lacking or failing in some...

Fact and fiction – Japanese social norms in Mishima Yukio’s “patriotism”

Fact and fiction – Japanese social norms in Mishima Yukio’s “patriotism”

Yukio Mishima Consideration as a Movieman

Yukio Mishima Consideration as a Movieman

Abstract 3598: Cell of origin in radiation-induced premalignant thymocytes with differentiation capability in mice conditionally losing one Bcl11b allele.

Abstract Mouse thymic lymphoma (TL) has been used for study of radiation carcinogenesis because of its high incidence. The lymphoma or leukemia is a mouse model of human T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemias (T-ALL), which is a malignant clonal expansion of thymocytes that accounts for about 15% of ALL cases. Ionizing radiation can damage DNA, and the cells with damaged DNA are assumed to be the cells of origin in tumors. However, which cell in the thymus or the bone marrow leads to TL remains obscure. Bcl11b gene encodes zinc-finger transcription proteins, mutations or deletion of which has been found in 10-16% of T-ALL. Bcl11bKO/+ heterozygous mice are susceptible to thymic lymphomas when γ-irradiated, and irradiated Bcl11bKO/+ mice generate clonally expanding or premalignant thymocytes within atrophic thymus. Resembling clonal expansion of thymocytes was reported in the T-ALL model overexpressing LMO2 oncogene. Interestingly, LMO2-induced clonally expanding thymocytes persist long-term and comprise cells with the stem cell-like self-renewal property that function for the bone marrow stem cells before TL development. In this study, we developed Bcl11bflox/+;Lck-Cre and Bcl11bflox/+;CD4-Cre mice, in which loss of one Bcl11b allele occurs in thymocytes at the immature CD4−CD8− stage without expression of CD4 and CD8 cell surface markers and at the CD4+CD8+ double-positive (DP) stage, respectively. Those mice were subjected to γ-irradiation of 3Gy at 8 weeks of age and their thymocytes were characterized of clonal expansion, differentiation and cell number. The clonal expansion was observed in only the former mice, suggesting the origin of the premaligant thymocytes not in the DP cells, the cell type seen in a majority of TL. The clonally expanded thymocytes possessed common rearrangement sites at the TCRβ locus but they underwent rearrangement at various different sites at the TCRα locus, and their majority showed mature phenotypes, a higher expression of TCRβ and the CD8 expression. This suggests the presence of a subpopulation of immature thymocytes that is capable to rearrange DNA at the TCRα locus in DP cells to continuously produce further differentiated thymocytes. We also found the decrease in thymocyte number in irradiated Bcl11bflox/+;Lck-Cre mice. This probably reflects the reduced proliferation of bone marrow-derived progenitors, and this reduction may weaken the competition in niche with premaligant thymocytes and help for them to survive and proliferate. Citation Format: Ryo Kominami, Rieka Go, Satoshi Hirose, Yukio Mishima. Cell of origin in radiation-induced premalignant thymocytes with differentiation capability in mice conditionally losing one Bcl11b allele. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 104th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2013 Apr 6-10; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2013;73(8 Suppl):Abstract nr 3598. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2013-3598

Two-timing modernity: homosocial narrative in modern Japanese fiction

Until the late nineteenth century, Japan could boast of an elaborate cultural tradition surrounding the love and desire that men felt for other men. By the first years of the twentieth century, however, as heterosexuality became associated with an enlightened modernity, love between men was increasingly branded as feudal or immature. The resulting rupture in what has been called the homosocial continuum constitutes one of the most significant markers of Japan's entrance into modernity. And yet, just as early Japanese modernity often seemed haunted by remnants of the premodern past, the nation's newly heteronormative culture was unable and perhaps unwilling to expunge completely the recent memory of a male homosocial past now read as perverse. Two-Timing Modernity integrates queer, feminist, and narratological approaches to show how key works by Japanese male authors--Mori Ogai, Natsume Soseki, Hamao Shiro, and Mishima Yukio--encompassed both a straight future and a queer past by employing new narrative techniques to stage tensions between two forms of temporality: the forward-looking time of modernization and normative development, and the perverse time of nostalgia, recursion, and repetition.

Twelve Views from the Distance

78 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews Mutsuo Takahashi. Twelve Views from the Distance. Jeffrey Angles, tr. Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press. 2012. isbn 9780816679362 Mutsuo Takahashi is one of the most prominent contemporary Japanese poets to have thematized homoeroticism . This superb translation of Takahashi’s autobiography—nominated for the 2013 Lambda Literary Award—is an excellent companion to the poet’s other translated works such as Poems of a Penisist (1975). Takahashi’s oeuvre ranges widely , traversing various genres from poetry to haiku, tanka to noh, and from Greek tragedies to fiction and the essay form. In his autobiography , he adopts a plainer prose style to narrate his family history, one that is filled with unhappy episodes . Yet for the reader, the sadness is somewhat mitigated because of Takahashi’s optics of the weak that looks at this worldly cruelty as if from another world. Takahashi was born in 1937 in northern Kyushu, Japan’s gateway to the continent in the ongoing Sino-Japanese War. He lost his father when only three months old and was later separated from his mother, who went to work in China and became the lover of a Japanese business owner. When she returned after a year, she seemed a stranger to him. Thereafter, Takahashi tells us, his life was shaped by absence and separation. What allowed him to endure his solitude were the old songs and sometimes bloody tales that his grandmothers told him. The experience, he suggests, aided in the cultivation of his poetic imagination. The environment in which Takahashi grew up was permeated by forms of violence, both public and private. His uncle died in a military hospital after being drafted and sent to Burma. And there was violence inside the home as well: the young Takahashi was often physically punished for no reason by his own mother and his relatives. Later he attended school, which he remembers as a time of coerced socialization; in the classroom, a caste system of princes and paupers existed, against which he occasionally rebelled. In this atmosphere, the other major force defining his relationship to others was eros. Sexually awakened and curious, the boys collectively indulged in erotic play where heterosexuality and homosexuality were not yet differentiated. Takahashi also tells us that one day he discovered a copy of the erotic book that his deceased father had transcribed, an encounter he describes as an erotic reunion with this imagined parent. Yukio Mishima, who also wrote on homoeroticism and formed a close friendship with the author, writes in the Japanese edition that the search for a father is the main focus of Takahashi ’s autobiography. However, it is precisely the father theme that distinguishes Mishima and Takahashi. If the former sought to compensate for the loss of the father as authority figure in postwar Japan through his radical nationalism , the latter seemed to embrace that very lack itself. In fact, Takahashi shows sympathy for his Korean neighbors who welcomed Japan’s defeat in 1945 as a liberation. At the end of the book, he presents a poem in which he promiscuously melts into the crowds, becomes anonymous, and is no longer present. This imagery affirms absence as such and represents a commentary on Takahashi’s politics. Takeshi Kimoto University of Oklahoma ...

Yukio Mishima, the Unambiguous, and Myself: Living through a Writer’s Legacy*

The recent release by Criterion on DVD of Paul Schrader’s film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters(1985) and Mishima’s own film Patriotism(1965) has caused the author of this essay to reconsider his relationship with the late Japanese writers’ books and literary legacy. Believing that these fine films’ presence on DVD will stimulate much renewed discussion of Mishima both in the US and Japan, the author recalls his first discovery of Mishima’s existence shortly after his famous suicide in 1970, reading and responding to his literary output, and prodding famous authors such as Tennessee Williams and Cormac McCarthy for their thoughts on Mishima’s influence. The author’s two poems about Mishima are included to illustrate his changing inner perceptions of the internationally famous writer and the (now-fading) adverse reaction to his work in Japan caused by his politics and his virtually public suicide.

文節パターンに基づいた文章の書き手の識別

This paper proposes a method for authorship identification based on phrase patterns that occur in the Japanese language, using literary work, student’s work, journals to carry out actual proof analysis. The results showed that a writer’s writing characteristics could be told clearly in phrase patterns. Using Random Forests, the correct ratio for identifying the authors from two arbitrary authors of literary works as well as student compositions was 99% and 92% for journals. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed method, a comparison between phrase patterns and trigram of POS was conducted. There was no obvious difference found in the rate of correct identification of writer between phrase patterns C and POS trigram. However, when the data of the phrase patterns C were combined with morphological data, it can obtain a higher rate of correct identification of the writer than having combined the data of POS trigram with morphological data. Based on this, we carried out an analysis on the authorship doubt surrounding Kawabata Yasunari’s works and the works of Mishima Yukio, HMakoto and Sawana Hisao. Phrase patterns analysis suggested there was no doubt surrounding the authorship in Kawabata’s work.