Naoki Sakai is an important and prominent thinker in Asian and cultural studies and his work continues to make itself felt across a broad range of both national and disciplinary borders. Originally finding a home in the otherwise circumscribed field of Japan Studies, Sakai's writings have succeeded in large part in destabilizing that home, exposing the fragility of its boundaries to an outside that threatens constantly to overwhelm it.
Bringing together an expert team of contributors from North America, Europe and Russia, this volume takes the groundbreaking work of Naoki Sakai as its starting point and broadens the scope of Cultural Studies to bridge across philosophy and critical theory. At the same time it explicitly problematizes the putative divide between "Asian" and "Western" research objects and methodologies, and the link between culture and the nation.
The Politics of Culture will appeal to upper level undergraduates and graduates in Asian studies, cultural studies, comparative literature and philosophy.
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1 Novelistic desire, theoretical attitude, and translating heteroglossia
Reading Natsume S
seki’s Sanshir
with Naoki Sakai
Michael K. Bourdaghs (Natsume S
seki, 1899)1
Novelistic desire
… the process of learning does not necessarily lead to the inauguration of the initial project. The learning does not actually take us to the destination that was indicated at the moment of departure, of the initial investment of our desire to know. [ … ] Instead of edging toward the promised goal, we may be overwhelmed and made erratic by the sight of many different social relations that have been made available through the work and labor of languages. We may begin to lose ourselves and the sight of our destination. [ … ] In that sense, it does not produce a ‘work.’ It resembles the ‘work’ of making a product according to a preconceived plan much less than a failure in the execution of such a plan. Therefore, what this ‘unwork’ accomplishes is the dispersion, displacement, and fragmentation of the core of desire itself. Desire to arrive at the destination is displaced by many different desires for different relations; the desire to know an unknown language decomposes and multiplies into many heterogeneous desires.
(Sakai 1997: 35–36)2
Natsume S
seki (1867–1916) is frequently hailed as Japan’s greatest modern novelist. His major works are customarily grouped into threesomes: the first trilogy, consisting of Sanshir
(1908), And Then. … (Sore kara, 1909) and The Gate (Mon, 1910); and the second trilogy, consisting of Until After the Spring Equinox (Higan sugi made, 1912), The Wayfarer (K
jin, 1913) and Kokoro (1914). It is a remarkable body of work, especially given S
seki’s relatively short career: he wrote fiction only during the last twelve years of his life. Moreover, there are many other brilliant stories, novellas, and novels that so far elude capture into this triangulating schema.
But the critics (myself included) keep trying, of course, because that is what critics do. Literally hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been written on S
seki in Japanese: he has remained a figure of fascination over the century since he published his first stories. A number of themes have been proposed as the key to his oeuvre. One widely held version is that S
seki is the great Japanese novelist of psychological interiority, the first writer to capture the inner life of the modern subject. The Encyclopedia of Japan entry on the author gives the standard line: “At first his style was florid and pedantic, combining the traditional haibun (essay style employed by haiku poets, usually studded with haiku) and kambun (Chinese prose) styles with European modes of expression. Eventually he developed a more colloquial and flexible prose style better suited to examining the depths of human psychology.”3 In this version of modernization theory, S
seki marks the success of Japan’s mimetic identification with the West, so that his mature style of narrating individual interiority provides one benchmark for measuring the Japanese nation’s emergence as a modern national subject.
Even critics of modernization theory tend to accept this definition of S
seki. The respected Japanese scholar Kamei Hideo, for example, in an extended critique of the ideologies of interiority that have defined “modernity” in Japanese literary discourse since the 1880s, argues that:
Among the modern novelists of Japan, the most vigorous producer of the image of the human as burdened with an “interior,” embedded within the family, was Natsume S
seki. It is not without reason that S
seki studies have concentrated on this, cranking out author studies that forcibly project this “interiority” onto S
seki’s own life. (Kamei 1999: 237–38)4
Here, S
seki is critiqued as one of the ideologues of modern humanism and Civilization and Enlightenment in Japan. This view is not necessarily mistaken, but for various reasons I want to map out another line of reading here. I want to focus on a different, more explicitly anti-humanist dimension in S
seki’s works; one that undermines both the “objective and subjective fallacies” shared across even putatively opposed schools of thought such as romanticism and realism (Girard 1965: 16). This version of S
seki lays stress on his early aesthetic of hininj
(non-human), derived from the detached practices of haikai sketching, or shaseibun (Turney 1978: 285–97). It also focuses on his explicitly theoretical writings, which are often dismissed as secondary to the fiction.
It is hardly an original gesture in reading S
seki to point out the relevance of René Girard’s theory of imitative, triangular desire. Under this form, the third-party mediator – the rival whose model ignites the subject’s desire for the object – must be excluded in order for the subject’s sense of autonomy to be sustained. Karatani K
jin, for example, notes that in Kokoro the character Sensei’s desire for the daughter of his landlord only appears after his friend K falls in love with her, setting up an ambivalent love/hate relationship between the two men. The novel reveals how our “consciousness and desire, which appear to us as immediate (or unmediated), are already mediated by the other,” so that our own interiority only reaches us at some delay (Calichman 2005: 126).5 Karatani in turn cites Sakuta Keiichi, a sociologist who tried to retheorize his own discipline, shifting it from a predominately binary mode of thought to one based on the intersubjective triangle. Sakuta too employs S
seki’s Kokoro as a key text (Sakuta 1981: 134–47). Stephen Dodd has drawn persuasive connections between the triangles depicted in Kokoro and the emergence in Meiji Japan of “homosocial” forms of desire (Dodd 1998: 473–98). The triangular logic in Kokoro is so powerful that a major debate was set off in the 1980s when a new generation of critics began filling in missing angles and sides, carrying the novel’s abruptly suspended storyline forward to what they believed were its implicit trigonometric resolutions.6
We can find many obvious instances of imitative desire in other works by S
seki: The Gate, The Wayfarer, Grass Pillow, Until the Spring Equinox and Beyond, and And Then … all revolve around romantic triangles, and I am still barely scratching the surface. If S
seki can be called a novelist of psychological interiority, then, we must note that he never fails to explore how the desires of the interior are intersubjective, how that desire is actually desire for the desire of the other – that of the third-party mediator. Moreover, as in Girard, characters caught up in these triangles generally get trapped under the crushing demands for infinite sacrifice that such an Oedipal structure invokes: both K and Sensei in Kokoro commit suicide, Daisuke in And Then … suffers a nervous breakdown, and S
suke in The Gate finds himself utterly desiccated, refused even the solace of religious salvation.
In order that my own reading here not seem too obviously imitative of previous scholarship, I want to focus on a work that does not so easily reduce to triangular logic: Sanshir
. I have to begin by confessing that the first character in the eponymous hero’s name (san:
) means “three.” The second character in that name (shi:
), though, complicates matters, because it means “four,” and in fact this hints at the nature of this work, or unwork. Nihei Michiaki states the problem succinctly: “Here we have three men and one woman: Ninomiya, Sanshir
, and ‘the handsome young man who came and took Mineko away,’ and, on the other hand, Mineko” (Nihei 2001: 84).7 We might also throw in Haraguchi the painter, Y
jir
the classmate, Hirota the professor, and Nonomiya’s sister Yoshiko. In other words, too many sides for a proper triangle, echoing the hint embedded in the hero’s given name, which might be translated “third or fourth son.”8
This does not mean that Sanshir
sidesteps the problems of desire. In the first chapter, Sanshir
rides the train that carries him from rural Kyushu to Tokyo, where he will enroll in the university. He engages in a conversation with a fellow passenger, a man Sanshir
will later learn is none other than Hirota, a professor at the university. After discussing the appetite for peaches of the famous poet Masaoka Shiki (in real life, a close friend of S
seki’s), Hirota declares:
You know, our hands reach out naturally for things we like. There’s no way to stop them. A pig hasn’t got hands, so his nose reaches out instead. I’ve heard that if you tie a pig down and put food in front of him, the tip of his snout will grow longer. It grows and grows until it reaches the food. Single-mindedness is an awesome thing. [ … ] It’s lucky for us we’re not pigs. Think what would happen if our noses kept stretching toward all the things we wanted. By now they’d be so long we couldn’t get on a train.
(Rubin 1977: 13; translation slightly modified)
Unbeknownst to Hirota, this remark serves as an ironic commentary on what happened to Sanshir
the previous night: an older married woman, one whose dark skin reminds him of his rural hometown and whose husband is away working in semi-colonial Dairen, has seemingly tried to seduce the youth. Sanshir
clearly felt a charge of interest: she repeatedly captured his gaze. But he was ultimately unable, or unwilling, to act on her apparent availability. Her parting words the following morning echo painfully in Sanshir
’s ears: “Anata wa yoppodo mune no nai kata desu ne” (SZ 5: 282), or, in Jay Rubin’s translation “You’re quite a coward, aren’t you?” (Rubin 1977: 9). Depending on how we translate mune here, though, she could also be accusing Sanshir
of lacking heart, passion, or even breasts. One is tempted to translate her dismissal as “You really don’t have any balls, do you?”
This bothers Sanshir
. Not just because the woman seems to be laughing at him, but also because he is sure he does have mune. Th...
Table of contents
Routledge/Leiden Series in Modern East Asian Politics and History
