Table Of ContentInto the
Fantastical Spaces
of Contemporary
Japanese Literature
Into the
Fantastical Spaces
of Contemporary
Japanese Literature
Edited by Mina Qiao
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Qiao, Mina, 1989- editor.
Title: Into the fantastical spaces of contemporary Japanese literature /
edited by Mina Qiao.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical
references and index. | Summary: “Into the Fantastical Spaces of
Contemporary Japanese Literature examines selected contemporary Japanese
writers and their use of fantastical spaces. Such spaces grant access to
phenomena occluded from everyday life, including the geographically
peripheral, the culturally marginalized, the psychologically liminal,
and the physically intangible”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021055709 (print) | LCCN 2021055710 (ebook) | ISBN
9781793646125 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793646132 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Japanese literature--History and criticism. | Space in
literature. | Liminality in literature. | Space perception in
literature. | Place (Philosophy) in literature. | LCGFT: Literary
criticism.
Classification: LCC PL721.S65 I58 2022 (print) | LCC PL721.S65 (ebook) |
DDC 895.609/006--dc23/eng/20220112
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021055709
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021055710
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Contents
Into the Fantastical Spaces of Contemporary Japanese Literature:
An Introduction 1
Mina Qiao
Chapter One: The Layered Everyspace in the Fiction of Murakami
Haruki 15
Matthew C. Strecher
Chapter Two: Shōjo, Mother, and the Uncanny Space in Ogawa
Yōko’s Writings 31
Mina Qiao
Chapter Three: Textual, Liminal, Fantastical Spaces in Kanai
Mieko’s Early Writings 51
Anthony Bekirov
Chapter Four: Cannibalistic Space and Reproduction in Japanese
Speculative Fiction 71
Kazue Harada
Chapter Five: Ports in a Storm: The Poetics of Space in Hino Keizō 95
Amanda C. Seaman
Chapter Six: The Foreign Land outside Japan: An Attempted
Solution to Abjection in Murakami Ryū’s Fiction 115
Francesca Bianco
Chapter Seven: The Fantastical Space of Exile in Tawada Yōko’s
Memoirs of a Polar Bear 137
Barbara Hartley
Chapter Eight: Minding the Gap in Kawakami Hiromi 163
Mina Qiao and Matthew C. Strecher
5
6 Contents
Index 189
Index of Works 193
About the Contributors 195
Into the Fantastical Spaces
of Contemporary Japanese
Literature: An Introduction
Mina Qiao
“Is a snail without its shell homeless or naked?”
This joke popped up during a recent classroom discussion of Ogawa
Yōko’s “Danjiki katatsumuri” (2013; “The Fasting Snails”). The short story
features an unnamed female narrator’s travels between a secluded “starvation
treatment” hospital and her spiritual lighthouse, a windmill where the isolated
attendant keeps colonies of pet snails.1 The humor comes from the absur-
dity of the mental imagery, but also because it destabilizes the relationship
between space and body. Our perception of space cannot be divorced from
the physical sensations or an awareness of the body, and thus our definition
of self-identity. The question then becomes, “Is a snail without its shell still a
snail?” The image helps us visualize the sociopsychological distance between
the physical space we inhabit to the core of the self—in other words, from
our identities to our ibasho (Japanese notion for a place of belongingness).
In “Fasting Snails,” the windmill is a physical manifestation of the narrator’s
desires for food (and by extension, sex), which has been oppressed by the
hospital. As she climbs the staircase leading up to the windmill, she gradu-
ally awakens to her own body and its cravings. Ogawa’s short story incorpo-
rates the exploration of space and embodied cognition and typifies a broader
tendency among her generation of Japanese writers: namely, the dissolving
margins between the fantastical space and the fantastical body.
Japan has a long textual history of connecting space to the body. Indeed,
there can be no sense of space before the self-cognition of the body and
its functions: only formlessness and chaos. In the Japanese creation myth
described in the Kojiki, the archipelago was born from the female deity’s
body as a result of sexual intercourse:2
1
2 Mina Qiao
Izanagi asked his spouse Izanami, “How is your body formed?” She replied,
“My body, formed though it be formed, has one place that is formed insuf-
ficiently.” Then Izanagi said, “My body, formed though it may be formed, has
one place that is formed to excess. Therefore, I thought I would like to take that
place in my body that is formed to excess and insert it into that place in your
body that is formed insufficiently and give birth to the land. How would this
be?” Izanami replied, “This would be good.”3
In this traditional cosmology, the origin point of space is regarded as a literal
extension of the body. The association of body, spirit, and nature in premod-
ern Japanese aesthetics is central to the evolution of haiku, tanka, and fiction
(e.g., The Tale of Genji).
Modernity presented the first epistemological challenge to this understand-
ing of contiguity between self and space. According to Karatani Kōjin, the
Meiji period saw a “perspectival inversion” among artists, leading to a new
distinction between landscape and interiority.4 As Karatani puts it:
Landscapes, [. . .] which seem to exist before our very eyes were only discov-
ered as “landscapes” in the third decade of the Meiji period by writers whose
“interiority” rejected what up until then had been the external world. Since this
time, landscape has been perceived as what exists objectively, while realism has
been seen, either as the tracing of that objective existence or as the capturing of
a landscape, which is even more “real.” Yet there was a time when “landscape”
did not exist, and its discovery was predicated on an inversion.5
Modernity collapsed the boundaries of the self to the individual corporeal
unit. Under modernity, the thinking-feeling self no longer extends into the
natural world. The written language reforms of the genbun itchi move-
ment, the wave of Naturalism, and the popularity of the confessional genre
“I-novel” abandoned affection and adornment in literary expression and
encouraged writers to look inward as part of the project of modernizing
Japan.6 Put another way, modernization cultivated a newfound sense of inner
self vis-à-vis external space.
Changing understanding of the self calls for a shift in the literary represen-
tations of space. For Japan’s modern novelists, this was related to urbanization
providing a new and distinct form of external space as well as unprecedented
lifestyles. As Maeda Ai and many subsequent researchers have observed, this
accentuation of urban space relates to the expression of modern selfhood.7
The Japanese flaneurs roam about in the cities and commit their encounters
and adventures to paper. In their writings, their psyches often correspond
with the cityscape. The spaces of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s Shanghai, Mori
Ōgai’s Berlin, Natsume Sōseki’s Tokyo, and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s Osaka all
An Introduction 3
stem from the authors’ keen observations and lived experiences, and in turn,
speak for their minds.
In the postwar period, we see a shift from the naturalism that predomi-
nated modern literature to science fiction, surrealism, and magical realism.
Equivocal and Kafkaesque spaces emerge in the allegorical narratives by
Abe Kōbō, Kanai Mieko, and Kurahashi Yumiko. These writers continue to
participate in the tradition, deploying space as a means to delineate the mod-
ern self, while making use of fantastical elements to expand the imaginative
boundaries of space and identity. These fantastical spaces manifest the experi-
ences and sensations of postmodern Japan—the enduring impact of the col-
lapse of the economic bubble, and the Aum Shinrikyo incident, as well as the
anxiety resulting from present-day political and economic circumstances. As
John Treat writes, “The dissociation we witnessed in so much of everyday life
in Japan at the millennium may be the consequence of the shattering of the
integral, solitary self before the onslaught of a post-post-industrial capitalism,
its nature is unknown to us and thus traumatic.”8 Japanese writers collectively
envision this sociocultural trauma in fantastical landscapes, with Murakami
Haruki as the best known exponent.
Murakami emerged in the aftermath of the 1960s–1970s student movement
to become one of the most significant figures in contemporary world fiction,
thanks in large part to his fantastical approach to space.9Against naturalis-
tic representations of urban and suburban spaces, Murakami ventures into
abstract worlds to voice his own generation’s ambivalence and sense of loss,
interrupting otherwise realistic narratives with magical and supernatural ele-
ments.10 In his representations, the everyday world and non-everyday world
form an allegorical parallel to one another. Through the creation of what
Matthew Strecher terms the “metaphysical realm,” Murakami’s works cre-
ate spaces for discussions of war, human nature, memory, and trauma that
are excluded from mainstream discourse.11 Murakami’s career has witnessed
the economic growth and student movements in the 1960s–1970s, the con-
sumerist fever in the 1980s, the recession in the 1990s, the “age of religion”
(Miyadai Shinji’s term) around the turn of the century, and the parade of both
natural and human-made calamities from the Kōbe earthquake and Aum sub-
way sarin attack of 1995 to the 3/11 triple disaster in 2011 that have shaken
Japanese people’s faith in narratives of linear progress.12 His protagonist,
often a male narrator “Boku” (Japanese male pronoun for “I”), travels to the
metaphysical realm for a solitary quest for identity and answers. These motifs
of self-discovery amidst contemporary social maladies occurring in fantasti-
cal spaces are regarded as a Murakami trademark.13 It is not, however, his
exclusive domain.
Given the long history we have observed of porous boundaries between
self and space in Japanese fiction, we see similar techniques are at play in
