part0012

In the previous two chapters we have discussed the role of fantasy women in the fiction of both male and female writers. In the writings of both sexes there exists a pattern of development whereby male and female are increasingly left sundered and alone, the male characters lamenting, even raging against this fact and the women characters often celebrating it. For both male and female characters the use of the fantasy woman also became a means of exploring their own identities, often with disturbing results. If there is no Heimat, no womb, where is the Japanese self located? Even worse, in a postmodern world of endless change and fragmentation, is there even a fixed self to find? This chapter continues to focus on the exploration of the self through fantasy but this time by discussing the variety of alternative beings, or, more accurately, alternative selves, that are presented in modern Japanese fantasy. Even more than the fantasy females previously discussed, these alien identities are ambivalently delineated. The presentation of the alien ranges from the threatening and grotesque to the attractive or even seductive, sometimes within the same texts, and it is this complexity which makes it so challenging a subject in both literary and extraliterary terms.

In extraliterary terms, an exploration of alien selves brings up controversial questions from socio-anthropology and linguistics as to the nature of the Japanese self. Many commentators have argued that the traditional Japanese “self” is more diffuse and other-directed than the more individualistic Western self. 1 Although this may well be true, the texts examined in this chapter suggest, at the very least, a strong concern with the notion of self in the modern period. Furthermore, there also appears to be a changing perception of the self between the generation of Meiji writers and the writers of the contemporary period.

Among such turn-of-the-century writers as Sōseki, for example, we can find a substantial sense of unease with the self. This feeling of unease undoubtedly reflected the Meiji generation’s awareness of itself as profoundly different from the previous generations of premodern Japan. It is also probably linked with the fact that the whole notion of the individual was still regarded as a potentially dangerous, even frightening, import from the West. As Sōseki himself pointed out in one of his most famous speeches, “My Individualism” (1992), “…there lurks beneath the surface [of the philosophy of individualism] a loneliness unknown to others” (p. 309).

This unease with individual identity vis-à-vis society continues through the Taishō period and into the postwar period, achieving perhaps its most brilliant expression in the works of Abe Kōbō whose Tanin no kao (1964) (trans. The Face of Another 1970) is a classic meditation on the individual self in relation to others. In recent decades, however, this unease seems to be being replaced by a new sense of security and even desire for self-exploration on the part of contemporary fantasists. Thus, Murakami’s protagonist in his 1985 novel Sekai no owari to hΏdoboirudo wandΏrando (trans. Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991)) retreats into the security of his own mind, stating that he has “responsibilities” to the thought world he created. Akira’s violent young protagonist, Tetsuo, takes the opposite tack, participating in a series of metamorphoses that ultimately threaten the entire world. Tsutsui’s short story, “Kaomen hōkai” (Collapsing Face) (1978) goes even further than Akira, celebrating a postmodern collapse of identity.

In literary terms, the notion of an alien self is also exceptionally interesting. The alien in modern Japanese fantasy comes in many forms. These vary greatly from period to period, from the traditional talking beasts in Kyōka’s works such as Yashagaike (Demon Pond) (1981), which he wrote in 1913, to the dead comrades brought back to life to help prevent nuclear war in Oe’s PinchirannΏ chōshō (1976) (trans. Pinchrunner Memorandum (1994)). In other cases the alien is a sinister inner presence, an alternative self appearing in dreams as in Sōseki’s Ten Nights of Dream, or hallucinations as in Akutagawa’s “Haguruma” (1927) (trans. “Cogwheels” (1965)) .

In other postwar media such as film or manga, the alien sometimes seems omnipresent, a staple of popular culture throughout the postwar period. One can trace a fascination with the alien back as early as 1953 to the scaly prehistoric monster in the movie Godzilla, which became first a domestic and then an international hit. In recent years perhaps the most striking rendition of the alien has been the aforementioned series of grotesque metamorphoses undergone by Tetsuo in the 1989 comic and animated film Akira .

As this chapter discloses, however, the alien is also an important presence in “pure” literature. Although it appears in many forms, two types are perhaps the most important—the ghost and the monster—both of which have their roots in premodern culture. The vengeful ghost, usually female, is the mainstay of most premodern horror stories and of the popular kabuki theater and also appears frequently in woodblock prints. But the high culture Nō plays also contain many ghosts, who are less horrific engines of retaliation than they are poignant vehicles of memory, incapable of detaching themselves from earthly passions.

In both cases these ghosts are attached to the past, an aspect which becomes increasingly important in the modern period. In modern literature both the vengeful and the pathetic ghost appear, not only as reminders of a personal past but as reminders of Japanese history as well. Ghosts also range more widely in their effect on the human characters: in the works of Sōseki and Akutagawa they are usually still terrifying, but in Kawabata’s or Murakami’s postwar stories they can be seen as rescuers, saving the protagonist from the miseries of modern isolation. 2

Monsters are an even more varied category. Premodern Japanese literature contains an enormous variety of demons and ghouls ranging from the prosaic river-dwelling kappa or water sprite to the ominous Dream Eater of Buddhist theology. These monsters are outsiders who threaten the collectivity, but who can be avoided or appeased. In modern popular culture that tradition lingers in the image of Godzilla, whose nuclear-activated presence threatened the Japanese islands in the immediate postwar period, and whose descendants have continued into the present day in comics, animation, and live-action cinema.

Increasingly in the modern period, however, the really monstrous is located inside the self, a feared alter ego. This monster is less a menace to society (although it may be that as well) than a threat to the person it inhabits or to the people immediately around him or her. Thus, Akutagawa’s short story “Jigokuhen” (1918) (trans. “The Hell Screen” (1961)) envisages the artist as monster, whose monstrousness is engendered, paradoxically, by his own prodigious artistic talent. Unlike Godzilla, Akutagawa’s artist endangers only his daughter and finally himself, but the personal quality of his attack makes him all the more terrifying.

Frequently in modern fantasy ghosts and monsters combine. Sōseki, for example, writes about a monstrous child in his “Dream of the Third Night” who, as an emblem of an unresolved past, also has a ghostlike aspect as well. Murakami’s Hitsuji o megurō boken (1982) (trans. A Wild Sheep Chase (1989)) concerns a quest for a phantom sheep which is both monstrous in its bizarre powers and ghostlike in its ability to summon up certain hidden aspects of modern Japanese history.

The complexity of the alien brings forth appropriately complex and memorable literary treatments. Indeed, fantasies of the alien in modern Japanese fiction contain some of the best and most powerful works of modern Japanese literature, especially in the short story form. Many of these fantasies are of what I term the “internal alien”, works where the alien presence is an interior, psychological one. They include everything from the classic horror stories of Akutagawa to Sōseki’s psychoanalytically chilling Ten Nights of Dream, to Oe’s poignant “Agwhee the Sky Monster,” or the aesthetic delights of some of Kawabata’s eerier Palm of the Hand Stories .

Although varying greatly among themselves, one aspect that all these fantasies of the alien have in common is the importance of reader response to them. Western critics have increasingly argued that the tale of terror or horror, the genre under which the alien usually finds itself classed, is one whose effects are particularly dependent on creating certain powerful reactions in the reader. As Todorov says of the fantastic in general, “[it] produces a particular effect on the reader, fear, or horror or simply curiosity—which the other genres or literary forms simply cannot provoke.” 3

In fact, these “effects” can run a wider course than simply curiosity to horror. Reactions can range from intellectual admiration of and pleasure in the intensity of aesthetic effect, as, for example, in a work of Borges, to the enjoyable frisson of terror that the reader vicariously experiences through reading a Stephen King novel or a work by Poe. Underlying these obvious emotions,, however, are more subtle and complex ones, most importantly the sense of excitement stemming from the liberation of sublimated fears and taboos, a feeling that critics such as Terry Heller suggest is one of the major aspects of the “delights of terror.” 4

The dynamic between reader and fantastic text raises extratextual questions, since what may move or terrify a reader in the nineteenth + century is not necessarily the same as what affects a twentieth-century reader. Even the most purely literary of fantasies contains a sociocultural dimension as well: What does it mean to be “alien” in Meiji or Taishō Japan? And does the definition of “alien” change in the postwar period?

Furthermore, beyond the formal and interior fantasies, with their implicit interrelationship between text and society, there are other fantasies of the alien that are explicitly ideological. In these works, which I have dubbed the “ideological alien,” the alien is used for directly political purposes, to overtly satirize or parody the dominant political discourse. Both these forms of the alien have played an important role throughout the development of modern Japanese fiction. 5

Whether internal or ideological, the ultimate impact of the alien in modern Japanese fantasy is a profound one. Appearing within a society that prides itself on its homogeneity and stability, the disturbing and destabilizing function of the alien cuts across both textual and extratextual boundaries to trouble, provoke, and emancipate some hidden part of the reader’s sense of self and world. Even more than the fantastic female who, as we saw, can perform a compensatory function, the alien in Japanese literature is directly subversive.

Furthermore, in the literature of modern or modernizing Japan, the fantastic Other may be seen as an important means by which post-Restoration Japanese began to construct a Westernized sense of the self. While the shishōsetsu writers plumbed into a textualized ‘real life’ to find an individualized persona, writers of the fantastic took the other route, working out their explorations of the self against such textual elements as dreams, ghosts, monsters, and doppelgängers . 6

Thus, to discuss the alien in Japanese fantasy is to bring up issues of identity, desire and, also, ultimately of power. The alien is the Other in its most fundamental form, the outsider who simultaneously can be the insider, and it is this polysemic potential that is so enthralling and disturbing to the reader. The alien threatens the collectivity more than any other presence.

Moreover, the alien is also a fantastic Other. Unlike the generic Other which would include such “real” outsiders as women and foreigners, it is an outsider that clearly exists outside the bounds of consensus reality. It is this fantastic aspect that makes the alien intriguing in two ways, literarily and socioculturally.

From a formal literary point of view, the narrative function of the alien is notably fluid; unlike a more circumscribed representation of the Other, the alien can appear in a tremendous variety of forms and formats. In general, these forms can be classified under what Todorov calls, “the themes of the self,” which include most notably the importance of metamorphosis and pan-determinism. Pan-determinism suggests a world view in which “everything is charged with meaning” 7 and thus all occurrences, no matter how bizarre, are seen to be part of a master plan. As we will see, in modern fantasy the opposite increasingly becomes true, as fantastic events seem to occur without meaning, thus disturbing our conception of an established, knowable order.

This leads to the alien’s second intriguing function from the psychological or social point of view: the fact that the alien’s very existence constitutes a threat to consensus reality, suggesting that reality is never entirely knowable and can, in fact, be altered. It is in this insistent presentation of Otherness that the alien contains an insidious and perverse appeal, becoming finally a distorting but fascinating mirror in which is reflected the myriad faces of Japan and the Japanese.

Mention of faces brings me to a set of examples of the alien in Japanese literature which work as a kind of continuum, both historical and literary, through which one can examine some of the changing ways in which the alien has been presented in modern Japanese fantasy. Although very different from each other in style and message, the works contain two major elements in common: a horrifying face and a metamorphosis from the “normal” to the monstrous. I would like to begin with a traditional ghost story, collected in the 1930s by the folklorist Yanagita Kunio, in Nihon Mukashibanashi meii (1948):

A night school teacher was walking along a road by the edge of a rice field late one winter night and noticed a beautiful girl standing by the road with her face turned down at the book she was reading. He wondered if she was a ghost and spoke to her. She did not answer but raised her face. He took one look at the face and his hair stood on end. He threw his coat over his head and ran home. He sat down hurriedly at his kotatsu [leg warmer]. His wife seemed to think it strange and asked him over and over what had happened. When he told her about the frightful face of the woman his wife wanted to know what kind of face it was. He could not explain. She asked, “Was it this kind of face?” At that, she turned to her husband and there she was, the woman with the terrible face. He took one look and gave a shout. Then he fainted as he tried to hide in the kotatsu. When he awoke the next morning, the sun was shining brightly on him as he lay down by the dam in the middle of the field.

This delightfully spine-tingling (and very popular) tale illustrates a number of features of the classic ghost story. Looking first on the level of narrative structure and reader response, we find that the story’s format is the archetypal pattern of a supernatural event encased in what Grixti in describing classic horror films calls the “frame of reassurance.” 8 Unlike a genuinely “fantastic” story in Todorov’s sense of the word, the reader is initially given no opportunity to hesitate between the supernatural explanation (the woman is a ghost) and a realistic one (the man is mad/drunk/hallucinating). The story carries the reader directly into the supernatural realm, and he or she vicariously participates in the man’s fear of/attraction to the alien, participating even more intensely at the second revelation: that the alien does not appear only in a dark field but also can be sitting right beside you at your kotatsu .

Before the terror becomes too overwhelming, however, the frame of reassurance starts to function. At the story’s end, both the actant and the reader are allowed to escape from the horrors of the night, or the horrors of the tale, and awaken to a shining sun of the real world. The response of the reader or listener thus moves from a largely pleasurable fear of the alien that lurks close around one to a sense of relief that one can escape from it.

Another interesting and classic element of the story is its erotic subtext. The man is clearly moved to approach the woman because she is “beautiful” (even though he can’t see her face!). Appropriately, he is punished, first by her and then, even more appropriately, by his wife. Of course, once could also argue that he has been traduced by the ghostly female, a frequent theme in many premodern stories in which animals such as foxes, badgers, cats, and even snakes take on the form of a seductive female and either temporarily or permanently bewitch some unfortunate male. 9 The occurrence of mysterious and dangerous female monsters is notable not only in premodern Japanese culture, from setsuwa (traditional folk tales of animals that assume human forum) through kabuki, but it is also an important aspect of modern fantasy, as the works of Kurahashi Yumiko, such as her short story “Banpiru no kai” (The Vampire Club) (1985), or Uchida Hyakkens’s modern updates of traditional animal stories attest.

A number of explanations can be ventured for this frequency. The most obvious explanation is that the very strength and fearsomeness of the powers attributed to these monstrous women attests to the low status of women in real life. Anthropologists might suggest, however, that Japanese women historically and traditionally have been seen to possess inherently certain magic powers that men cannot encompass. Neither of these theories necessarily cancels the other out, of course, since the sphere of the sacred does not necessarily reflect the politics of the real. Or as Donald Richie puts it, “The Japanese ghost is constructed by males for males.” 10

I would like to suggest another explanation, however, that returns us to the theme of the alien. It is possible to read the erotic, seductive nature of woman as a metaphor for the intense attraction of the Other, of the outside, an Other that the collectivity seeks to shield its members from. Although she is formally a ghost, the woman in this story functions more as the monstrous outsider. Thus, the man is shocked to find something horrible and frightening in what he expected to be beautiful and appealing.

Even more frightening, of course, is the fact that, after having returned to the bosom of the collectivity, his own home, he finds the alien lurking within it. In a sense, he has been punished twice for his transgression, and the second punishment, the revelation that the alien can exist within the collectivity, is by far the most frightening.

The text, almost of necessity, ends on a falsely optimistic note of closure. As Grixti says of the stock monster characters of the horror genre, they can become a means by which society both confronts its fears and also “evade[s] the implications of unpleasant social and existential realities.” 11 Thus, the tale can ultimately be read as a warning that is both frightening and cathartic, whose threat is finally softened by the reassurance provided by the morning sunlight. Although not formally “fantastic” in the Todorovian sense of sustaining hesitation throughout, the tale does conform to Todorov’s framework of the themes of the self in the fantastic by including both metamorphosis and pan-determinism. The metamorphosis in this tale is “charged with meaning”, suggesting a world in which supernatural beings punish those who attempt to go outside the law.

Although Yanagita collected this tale in the 1930s and his intention was to show the survival of Japanese folk roots, the ideological framework of the tale is obviously that of a world before the Meiji Restoration. This is a world “charged with meaning” that can be understood and analyzed, even if it is full of supernatural complexities. In fact, the supernatural as a presence that can taken for granted and is ultimately understandable, is one fundamental aspect of premodern cultures.

Moving chronologically to our next example, Abe Kōbō’s The Face of Another, we come to a very different world, the world of Japan in the 1960s. This is a world in which paranoia reigns and where there is no comforting kotatsu to return to, and no way to awaken from a nightmare vision. It is a world in which technology takes over the instruments of the supernatural to create a nightmare vision even more terrifying than the one in the Yanagita tale.

Among modern Japanese writers, Abe is perhaps the master of conveying the alien, and his approach is, appropriately, far more psychologically complex than in the traditional tale. Like the story from the Yanagita collection, The Face of Another revolves around a horrifying face and a frightening metamorphosis of an intimate. In this case, however, it is not the wife who turns into an alien but the husband, and the psychology of the husband as monster and wife as unwilling participant in his monstrousness are intimately explored.

The narrator/protagonist of the novel is a scientist whose face has been turned into a mass of keloid scars owing to an explosion in his laboratory. Unlike the ghost woman, who appears to enjoy the frightening power of her face, the scientist fears and loathes his monstrousness and eventually devises a means to conceal it, a mask that perfectly reproduces human features. Not content with the passive perfection of the mask, however, the scientist begins to play with its possibilities, finally deciding to pretend to be a stranger and seduce his unsuspecting wife while wearing the mask.

The experiment is apparently a success, as the scientist records in the series of notebooks which constitute the actual text of the novel. The notebooks go on, however, to record a bitter letter from his wife. In this letter she states that she knew all along that it was her husband behind the mask but only went along with the game for his sake. The novel ends with the scientist, once again wearing his mask (which seems increasingly to be taking on a personality of its own), crouching in a ditch in the darkness, waiting to take revenge upon his wife.

Abe’s novel turns the classic horror elements embedded in Yanagita’s story into a complex meditation on male-female relations, identity, Otherness and, finally, society’s conception of what is “normal.” Although it uses the generic horror tropes of science gone amok and a monstrous face, it is much less dependent on any visceral reader response than on reader appreciation. The goal is not so much to horrify the readers as to make them think. To this end, the scientist’s terrifying visage is given two important functions within the narrative.

The first is as a confrontational device. By pointing out the similarity of the scientist’s scars with those of Hiroshima victims and by implicitly comparing the scientist’s fate with Japan’s Korean citizens who are habitually discriminated against, despite being physically indistinguishable from their Japanese co-residents, Abe forces the reader to re-examine his or her conception of what is alien. In a scene toward the end of the novel Yanagita’s tale, the scientist recalls a poignant film he had recently seen about a female Hiroshima survivor whose face is half horrifically scarred and half transcendently beautiful. Like the woman in Yanagita’s story, she first attracts men, although in this case unwittingly, and then terrifies them. Finally, in desperation to achieve some sort of human connection, she seduces her brother and then commits suicide.

This story within a story points up some of the important ways in which the modern Japanese conception of the monstrous has evolved from the traditional. In Abe’s reading, the woman is a victim and the lines that are being transgressed are arbitrary ones, imposed by an uncaring society. The alien is used not simply to shock readers but to shame them out of the smug comfort of the collectivity. A committed Marxist, Abe here seems to be suggesting the opposite message of Yanagita’s tale; that it is not the alien but society’s conception of the alien (perhaps especially industrial capitalist society’s conception) that is truly the frightening element at work here. This is what can be called “message” fiction, forcing the alien to work as an ideological pointer.

As in the best of Abe’s stories, however, the work can also be read on the psychological level, beyond the political dialectic. In the case of The Face of Another, it is the tortured character of the scientist that generates this welcome complexity. This brings us to the second function of the alien in The Face of Another, as a device for psychological introspection, the internal alien, in other words.

It is the scientist’s rational desire to control his fate, mixed with his own spontaneous squeamishness toward his monstrous face, that ultimately brings out the truly monstrous in his own personality. This monstrousness is paradoxically signified by the blandly handsome mask of normality that he creates and which goes on to take over the scientist’s personality or, perhaps, to release it.

Like the traditional tale in Yanagita’s collection, The Face of Another is a story of metamorphosis from normal to monstrous, but with a twist. In contrast to the Manichean Jekyll-and-Hyde view of an evil that is in direct opposition to the normal, Abe suggests that it is in the seemingly attractive and normal that the really alien lurks. Even more ominously, this alien is within oneself.

Abe’s novel is not totally unsympathetic toward the scientist, however. The text delineates in a surprisingly moving way the protagonist’s rage and humiliation when he finds that his wife has seen through him. The scientist’s final cry of despair reverberates more profoundly than most of his abstract theorizing: “My mask, which I had expected to be a shield of steel, was broken more easily than glass” (p. 227).

In the end the scientist is also a victim, not simply of society but of his own egotistical nature. As his wife says:

The wife in The Face of Another has put her finger on an essential point of modern identity, its isolation from others and finally from itself. Or, as Christopher Nash puts it,

Even worse, in modern industrial society there may be no self at all, only a “desert of mirrors.” Nash says of a Calvino hero, that “self now has nothing to do with any inward sense of identity. To be ‘identical’ only with what is outside is to submit to the instruments of… appearances.” 13 This is also true of the mask, and indeed is an increasingly universal aspect of modern capitalist society where one cannot escape the emphasis on appearance reflected in the critical mirrors of consumer culture.

Abe’s novels are unusual for seeing both the world of mirrors that the solitary individual creates and the world of mirrors erected by society. This attitude often verges into paranoia as the scientist reflects on society in the following manner:

No matter how much television dramas go on singing the cloying praises of the family, it is the outside world full of enemies and lechers, that passes on a man’s worth, pays his wages and guarantees him the right to live. The smell of poison and death clings to any stranger, and people have become allergic to outsiders without realizing it. Loneliness is terrible of course but being betrayed by the mask of one’s fellow man is much worse.

Abe looks beyond the mirrors that society builds for itself to distort the real and finds the “strangers” all around us and within us. In Abe’s fiction the stranger/alien is both terrifying and pitiable, a despairing comment on human nature. On a personal level this despair may be traceable to Abe’s own deracinated background. Given his birth and subsequent life in Manchuria it is not surprising that he is a brilliant conveyor of outsiders.

It is important to note, however, that Abe’s outsiders have struck a common note among the Japanese reading public. Although never bestsellers, Abe’s works have always been highly regarded in Japan. Part of this may be due to the fact that his works challenge on both an intellectual and a political level. In this regard it is also worth noting that The Face of Another is also a meditation on the power of fiction and the danger of believing that mimesis, be it fiction or a mask, is really possible. In Abe’s classic left-wing vision, one must finally go beyond the writing. As he puts it in the novel’s last lines, “So nothing will ever be written down again. Perhaps the act of writing is necessary only when nothing happens” (p. 237).

Abe’s politically involved sense may be viewed as linked inextricably with the political movements of the 1960s, a period when Japanese radicalism did go beyond “the act of writing.” It was a time when young Japanese people in particular were trying on new identities for themselves in direct confrontation with their elders. The hypocrisy that many young Japanese saw as characterizing those in authority may help place the work’s obsession with masks and strangers in a more universal light. Despite the decade’s extraordinary economic growth, an increasing sense of nihilism was capturing many students and intellectuals, as is evidenced not only in Abe’s works but throughout the writings of other young authors of the period such as those of Oe Kenzaburō and Nosaka Akiyuki.

In contrast, our last paradigmatic text to be examined, Tsutsui Yasutaka’s “Kaomen hōkai” (Collapsing Face) (1978), comes from the late 1970s, a period when Japanese politics had moved back to “business as usual” and young people were beginning to be more interested in conspicuous consumption than in radical politics. One element which they consumed with particular voraciousness was the image, whether it was in clothes, videos, or advertising. This “image culture” is also linked to the international movement of postmodernism, although it is entirely possible to find a fascination with the image in traditional Japanese culture as well.

Thus, “Kaomen hōkai” moves away from the explicit ideological comment of Abe’s novel and in certain ways is closer to Yanagita’s traditional tale in its emphasis on sheer effect. I have mentioned that Tsutsui, a noted science fiction and fantasy writer, has recently been moving toward acceptance by the literary establishment, although initially his works were considered too popular. One reason for their popularity has been the stunning verbal pyrotechnics in his fantasies which tend to overwhelm any particular “message.”

This does not mean that Tsutsui’s satire is without sociocultural relevance. Any ideological point is usually a subtle one, however, more often generated through his clever and imaginative satire than through any overt ideologizing. Unlike Abe, whose ideology springs from more doctrinaire sources, Tsutsui seems to be content to be a general iconoclast, skewering hypocrisy wherever he finds it.

Although it was written in 1978, less than 20 years after Abe’s The Face of Another, Tsutsui’s story clearly belongs to another generation of literature. The title “Collapsing Face” more or less sums up the narrative action, but a few quotations from it will help to give the story’s idiosyncratic and memorable flavor.

“Kaomen hōkai” begins, “I hear you’re going to the Sharaku Star system. You’d better be careful. Sometimes really strange things happen on that planet” (p. 60; my translation here and subsequently).

The narrator goes on to explain what the “really strange things” are, and it is this extremely detailed explanation of them which constitutes the greater part of the text. It turns out that on the Sharaku planet grows a kind of bean that explodes in one’s face under pressure. Not only does this leave the face pockmarked with huge pits and scars, which the narrator describes with great relish, but the larvae and worms that grow inside the holes create bigger holes which lead to the blood vessels. Or, as he explains:

For, as the narrator further explains, the real problem is when the larvae worm their way further and further into the blood vessels of the head and into the vein of the tongue, although the narrator adds that you’d be surprised how even that is really not all that painful. It does play havoc with the sense of taste, however, causing one to have taste hallucinations. Worst of all, though, eventually several dozen insects will congregate on your tongue and harden. The only way to get rid of them is to cut the tongue off. The story ends as follows:

Well, of course your tongue gets shorter. It’s a little harder to talk, but if you just discipline yourself, then you can get like me, to the point where other people can understand just fine. What’s that you say? Oh yes. You’re saying that my face doesn’t look like its’s been in such a disaster. That’s because I’m wearing an face. Shall I take it off for you? See? Recently the artificial ones have gotten so good they can even mimic facial changes. Your color doesn’t look so great. Are you feeling sick? Wait a minute. What’s wrong? Hey! Get a grip on yourself. For heaven sakes, get a grip on yourself!

Tsutsui’s tale steps over the complexities, both political and psychological, of Abe’s alien The Face of Another to return us to the nightmare supernatural world of Yanagita’s terrible face. Both of these texts’ primary aim is to arouse horror and fear in the reader and both works succeed most effectively. There are some important differences, however. One striking dissimilarity is the importance of description in Tsutsui. While the folk tale depended for its final effect on the indescribability of the face, leaving it to the reader’s/listener’s imagination, and Abe’s story too only hinted at the ugliness of the scientist’s keloid scars, 14 Tsutsui’s story revels in the disgusting and unforgettable details. This richness of description is unusual in Japanese literature, especially when the subject is the face, revealing some of the international, postmodern flavor of Tsutsui’s work.

This abundance of grotesque detail has an almost overwhelming effect on the reader, making him or her feel as if they were virtually present at the metamorphosis. In this emphasis on the process of transformation, rather than the psychological effect, Tsutsui’s work shows commonalities with contemporary Japanese manga, both comic book and film, and with the avant garde and science fiction in general. Indeed, the discomfiture one feels on reading “Kaomen hōkai” is very similar to what many viewers feel watching Tsukamoto Shinya’s 1990 avant-garde film Tetsuo, in which a man mutates into a machine. The Yanagita story is also uncomfortable in a pleasurably spine-tingling sort of way, but its disturbing aspect is also related to the fact that it, like Abe’s story, contains a message: Do not stray from the collectivity!

While the threat of alien metamorphosis was ultimately contained in the Yanagita story by the work’s fictional frame of reassurance, Tsutsui’s story breaks through any fictional frame through its provocative final lines. This development is foreshadowed in Abe’s novel, in which the scientist is writing his notes to “you,” his wife. The reader of The Face of Another, however, is still able to maintain some comforting fictional distance through the novel’s emphasis on writing. “You,” the reader or the wife, are only reading words. As Abe’s last line says, writing will not change things. Tsutsui’s work crosses over the boundary of insistent fictionality, first by overwhelming the reader with horrifying sensations and then by directly warning the reader that the same fate of monstrous metamorphosis may befall them as well.

Where the two previous works contain messages founded on the fear of alien metamorphosis, and appeal to our desire for stability, there would appear to be no such didactic element in Tsutsui’s work. This is not a metamorphosis “charged with meaning” as were the two previous ones. At the same time, this metamorphosis takes to the extreme another of Todorov’s themes of the self, “the effacement of the limit between subject and object.” 15

Indeed, the very Grand Guignol aspect of Tsutsui’s text, with its emphasis on collapse in front of one’s eyes, is virtually a celebration of metamorphosis and perhaps of monstrousness as well. Unlike the previous tales, where at least one of the actants kept a fixed identity (the man in Yanagita’s tale, the scientist’s wife in the Abe novel), in Tsutsui’s story the only certainty is fluidity. Difference is dissolved, and not just between genders but between writer and reader. For “you,” too, the implied listener/reader, will be going to the Sharaku Star system and the same grotesque fate may befall you. In “Kaomen hōkai” the alien confronts us, mocks us and glories in its fluidity and power.

I have suggested that these three stories form a paradigmatic continuum of the alien in Japanese literature from the traditional through the modern to the postmodern. Although there are obviously going to be exceptions in every period, I believe one can find a definite pattern of development in these works that relates to some of the cultural and social changes undergone in Japan since the Meiji period. In the traditional tale, collected by Yanagita in the 1930s but presented as an ancient story, the collectivity is threatened but still fundamentally secure, and the threat of the alien represented by the ghostly woman is ultimately contained. In The Face of Another, it is the collectivity itself, in terms of postwar capitalist society, which produces the alien.

If the Yanagita tale is traditional horror, The Face of Another, and much of Abe’s work in general, can be seen as belonging to the genre of paranoid horror. This genre, significantly coming to the fore in the socially conscious and politically activist 1960s, delineates a world in which the supposedly normal is actually threatening and sinister. As Andrew Tudor puts it, “Gone is the sense of an established social and moral order.” 16 It is a world where paranoia makes sense because the collectivity is the threat, not the protection .

Finally, Tsutsui’s work dismisses all notion of the collectivity, presenting a world in which identities collapse into each other and there is no secure point either to protect or to attack. “Kaomen hōkai”’s subtextual celebration of a boundaryless world is in some ways even more threatening than the overt message of Abe’s work. It seems to embody some of the most disturbing aspects of the postmodern subject, a subject which, as Douglas Kellner sums it up, “Has disintegrated into a flux of euphoric intensities, fragmented and disconnected [which] no longer possesses the depth, substantiality and coherence that was the ideal and occasional achievement of the modern self.” 17 Even the narrative format of “Kaomen hōkai,” with its pretense of being an oral tale, helps to undermine the power of the symbolic, while the story’s refusal of closure (except for the satirical invocation to “get a grip on yourself”) is also insidiously threatening.

Where Abe’s work ultimately cries out for action, Tsutsui’s text constitutes an attack on modern assumptions of stability and security in and of itself. In both cases the works break through any traditional frame of reassurance. The alien is no longer a nightmare from which one can awaken. 18

Despite their significant differences, the three texts discussed above do contain one important constant, and that is their reliance on the notion of metamorphosis. Metamorphosis is so indispensable to much of fantasy literature in general and to the imagination of the alien in particular, that it is sometimes taken for granted as a narrative tool. In fact, the theme of metamorphosis has both literary and sociological aspects as well, all of which interrelate with modern Japanese history and with modern history in general.

Thus, although the West has had a fascination with metamorphosis from at least the time of Ovid, Rosemary Jackson in her book on fantasy has found a resurgent obsession with metamorphosis in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Western literature. Jackson links this with Darwin’s discoveries and the public’s subsequent fascination with both evolution and, more threateningly, devolution. 19

It is also possible to link this interest in metamorphosis to a new concern with identity. W.R.Irwin suggests in The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy (1976) that the action of metamorphosis is so highly charged because of the “widespread assumption that form is a determinant of identity, even of being.” 20 If form is taken as a determinant of identity, then it is hardly surprising that a cultural preoccupation with metamorphosis should surface at times of deep social transition.

Certainly this is true, although in somewhat different ways, for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century West. It is in this period, after all, that Western nations at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution were attempting to define themselves in new forms, while the old traditions, religious, philosophical, and social, were collapsing around them. And, as the twentieth century continues, it is perhaps no coincidence that Jackson finds an increase in what might be called “transformations without meaning” 21 as the old ideological certainties of Christianity and general morality begin to collapse.

This sense of established identity under attack, and a concomitant fascination with new forms of self-definition is even truer for the citizens of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japan. But it is also true that the theme of metamorphosis has as deep roots in Japanese culture as it does in Western civilization. From the traditional setsuwa describing animals turning into humans, to the many depictions of the so-called transformer robots in contemporary science fiction comics and films, Japanese culture also shows a consistent fascination with transformation, in particular the crossing of boundaries between human and inhuman.

At first glance, this fascination with boundary crossing might appear surprising. The stratified nature of both traditional and contemporary Japanese society would seem to leave little room for fluidity. But, conversely, it is possible to argue that the very existence of consciously constructed social barriers may actually have stimulated an interest in transformation across them.

Traditional Japanese culture, while on the one hand hierarchical, is also marked by an extreme sense of the fluid relationships between human and natural. The Shinto religion posits the kami nature in humans, animals, and inanimate things such as rocks and waterfalls. Buddhism takes the idea of metamorphosis even further, with its notion of a karmic cycle suggesting potential bestiality in humans and potential humanity in animals. From this point of view, the notion of metamorphosis is a largely positive one, suggesting a philosophical acceptance of a universe where boundaries between the human and the natural are constantly fluctuating.

If metamorphosis is philosophically acceptable, it may be more problematic socially. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, whose book The Monkey as Mirror: Symbolic Transformations in Japanese History and Ritual (1987) chronicles the reflexive function of the monkey in Japanese culture, has suggested that, although the dualistic order on which Japanese culture is based lacks the Manichean dichotomies of Western culture, it still retains its own classificatory boundaries. She asserts that transgressions of these boundaries are encouraged so as to elicit meaningful interactions between categories, and to define the category even further. Ultimately the boundaries become well marked precisely because they are transgressed. 22

The most obvious example of this is the notion of gekokujō (the inferior overpowering the superior) in traditional Japanese culture, especially in kyōgen comedies, in which those conventionally considered inferiors (women or servants) outwit and overturn their masters. The humour, of course, results in the basic unlikelihood of such events occurring. But it is possible to argue that the actual notion of metamorphosis itself also exemplifies a similar boundary-marking function. In a society where social mobility was largely circumscribed, the “mobility” implied in metamorphosis must have seemed both tantalizing and subversive.

Boundary crossing and collapse can also be frightening, both in art and in reality. It is interesting to note that the proliferation of demonic and grotesque images in woodblock prints and on the kabuki stage really began at the end of the Bakumatsu period in Hokusai’s superb ghosts, and carried on into the beginnings of the Meiji period in the depictions of ghosts and monsters in the works of such masters as Yoshitoshi. Commenting on this, one Japanese writer has called the Bakumatsu period a time “when dreams appeared in the upper levels of consciousness,” 23 another form of boundary transgression appropriate to a time when boundaries were broken as never before in Japanese history. Not only did samurai lose their swords and merchants and farmers become (supposedly) empowered, but the entire nation attempted to don a new identity as a modernizing state under an enlightened emperor. This process of metamorphosis led inevitably to tremendous psychological and social dislocations.

Natsume Sōseki, perhaps the most important writer to arise out of this period, described Meiji Japan’s condition as a national nervous breakdown. It is appropriate that the next part of this chapter, an examination of the internal alien from Meiji to the contemporary period, should begin with a discussion of Sōseki’s version of the alien, since he was perhaps the most acute observer of modern Japan’s metamorphosis. Yet, despite his almost hypersensitivity to cultural dislocation, the alien in Sōseki remains largely an interior one. Although he was acutely aware of Japan versus the Western Other, and in Wagahai wa neku de am (1905) (trans. I Am a Cat (1986)) gives a brilliant example of an early form of the ideological alien, Sōseki’s best works describe human beings oppressed, not by some alien outside force but through some frightening power inside themselves—what I have termed the internal alien.

Among the three works previously discussed, the internal alien was represented in Abe’s The Face of Another in which the scientist’s mask took on a life of its own corresponding to a hitherto unsuspected side of the scientist’s personality. I have drawn a link between Abe’s work and the paranoia of the 1960s, but the notion of an internal alternative self is one that appears in both premodern and modern literature. For the purposes of this chapter it is interesting to see how this self is presented and how this presentation changes over the course of the century of Japan’s modernization.

The four writers principally dealt with, Sōseki, Akutagawa, Endō and Murakami, form a chronological continuum from the Meiji period (Sōseki) through the Taishō period (Akutagawa), through postwar Japan (Endō), to the Japan of the 1990s (Murakami), and they show some intriguing changes in their representation of the alien. These changes range from seeing the internal alien as a threatening, oppressive presence in Sōseki, and to some extent in Akutagawa and Endō, to the notion of the internal alien as a comforting, even empowering version of the self in Murakami’s works.

Important similarities of presentation also exist. All the works considered in this section are notably concerned with the same sets of dualities: escape versus entrapment, art versus the real, and, most importantly, the self (or selves) in confrontation with others. It is this notion of various forms of insider and outsider which is perhaps the most subversive aspect of the alien, inherently questioning the framework upon which society rests by allowing for an outside observer.

Thus, what might be called Sōseki’s first and most famous fantasy I Am a Cat creates one of the most famous outside aliens in modern Japanese literature. By focussing his narrative through the gaze of an intelligent and critical cat, Sōseki was able to bring humorous and accurate observations of contemporary Japanese society. While the cat is of course powerless to change society, its acute and often savage commentary makes for a brilliantly subversive satirical vision.

I Am a Cat emphasizes what I have called the ideological or “message” alien over the internal alien, but at the same time it also provides a vision of another self as an outside observer, a kind of alien superego. This outside observer self is one that is an important part of the fantasy of Sōseki and the other writers as well. This strong sense of self as outsider is of course typical to many writers, but in the case of these four it may also be related to their exposure to foreign influences.

Sōseki, Endō, and Murakami actually lived abroad, while Akutagawa studied English literature at university and remained a voracious reader of the Western classics throughout his life. Of course, not all their experiences abroad were positive ones. Sōseki’s two years in London, for example, apparently provoked extreme paranoia, if not an actual nervous breakdown. This experience too may have contributed to his sense of alienation.

It is also possible that the internal alien itself is a construction deeply rooted in modernity. Indeed, Sōseki and the other writers who use this are usually writers at the forefront of literary modernism. Modern psychology with its new awareness of the self obviously stimulated a consciousness of the psyche’s complexities. Stories revolving around the internal alien tend to be profoundly psychological. Often using the motif of the double, they delve into the protagonist’s inner states which are usually characterized by a sense of vulnerability and paralysis against another unknown power, be it guilt, heredity, sin, or simply one’s alter ego. 24

At times the inner alien can wear a more positive aspect, particularly in the myth of the artist and his genius, a turn-of-the-century phenomenon found in the West in writers such as Oscar Wilde and in Japan in the fiction of such writers as Akutagawa and Tanizaki. This internal alien can be both frightening and empowering. As such, it might be likened to the “muse” of classical Western literature.

Western influences undoubtedly had a powerful effect on the development of the Japanese internal alien, but it is also the case that the Meiji and Taishō periods were times of a distinctive Japanese exploration of the self. 25 With the entrance of the philosophies and religions of the West the notion of the self and identity in general became widely discussed. 26

On the other hand, it should also be mentioned that the inner alien is not exclusively a product of modern self-consciousness. The psychological linking of self and internalized alien Other is brilliantly encapsulated in the tenth-century Tale of Genji in the tormented figure of Genji’s lover, Lady Rokujo. Lady Rokujo’s jealousy is so powerful that her “spirit” possesses and murders another of Genji’s lovers and then his wife. Although the text plays up the more conventionally supernatural elements of the possession, it also includes some ambiguous passages where Lady Rokujo’s tormented and guilt-ridden state and her horror at this alien side of herself are movingly delineated.

Guilt and jealousy and a sense of intense vulnerability are emotions with which modern fantasy writers are also very familiar. This is certainly the case in the works of Sōseki who has long been known for his anguished explorations of the self in relation to both the outside world and to its own ego. He explored this problem in a series of brilliant mimetic novels, the most famous of which is Kokoro (1914) (trans. Kokoro (1992)).

But it is Sōseki’s hauntingly beautiful collection of dreams, Ten Nights of Dream (of which “Dream of the Sixth Night” was mentioned in the my Introduction and “Dream of the First Night” was discussed in Chapter 2 ), which remains one of his most memorable meditations on such issues as guilt, insecurity, and crises of faith. They also present a fascinating and varied range of creatures who can be characterized as “internal aliens.”

Although the motif of dreams in literature is a traditional one, Sōseki’s use of dream is archetypally “modern.” He presents the reader with dreams that are full of darkly evocative imagery, and leaves it to the reader to interpret them. As is appropriate to dreams, virtually all of the short fantasies assembled in Ten Nights of Dream are full of mysterious creatures, from the woman who turns into a flower in “Dream of the First Night” to a ship full of foreigners.

But what is most interesting in the dreams is the interaction between the strange dream creatures and the usually passive, dreaming “I.” This dreamer is ghostlike in many ways, a shadowy figure forced to take part in situations which he does not understand and wishes only to escape from. Indeed, in these dreams the “real” alien is the “I,” an “I” whose anguished self-consciousness and isolation reminds us of a famous line from Kokoro in which the protagonist sums up his condition in the following agonized manner: “loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born in the modern era, so full of freedom, independence and our own egotistical selves” (p. 29).

Given this problematic interaction between the “egotistical self” and others, it is not surprising that much of the narrative action in the dreams involves questions of identity. “Dream of the First Night,” as we remember, explored the relationship between the dreaming “I” and the object of his gaze, a dying woman. Although the dream can be interpreted straightforwardly as an example of male sexual unease vis-à-vis a fully sexual female, it is also possible to read the female figure as another part of the self. Thus, the natural world that the woman-as-flower represents can be seen as a kind of escape from the consciousness of the self, an idea explored more concretely in Sōseki’s mimetic Sore kara (1909) (trans. And Then (1978)). This notion of oblivion through transformation may relate as much to the “I”s own insecurities of identity as to any deep-seated fear of women. 27

While the female self in “The First Night” is able to transform herself into something more positive, at least from the “I”’s point of view, many of the protagonists in Ten Nights of Dream feel a need to change or escape that they cannot fulfill. In one of the most strongly sociocultural of the dreams, “Dream of the Seventh Night,” the “I” finds himself incapable of entering a new world, that of the West. Trapped on a giant ship that sails forever westward and surrounded by foreigners who ask him meaningless questions about God’s existence, the “I” grows increasingly “forlorn” and desperate. Like a lonely ghost, he moves endlessly around the ship finally determining to escape by jumping overboard. Even after jumping, however, he remains suspended in mid-air, in a liminal state between the Western ship and the death-promising sea until he finally goes down, “infinitely regretful, infinitely afraid…” (p. 52).

“Dream of the Seventh Night” shows two kinds of aliens, the incomprehensible (monstrous?) foreigner and the ghostlike “forlorn” Japanese, who does not belong on the ship but knows no way of getting off without self-annihilation. It is perhaps one of Sōseki’s most powerful fictional statements about his ambivalence toward Westernization and his own Japanese identity. 28

Interestingly, the emotions portrayed in “Dream of the Seventh Night” echo another one of Sōseki’s writings which, although supposedly autobiographical, is close to being a fantastic text as well. This is the famous story from Sōseki’s time in England when he saw what appeared to be a hideous yellow dwarf coming down a London street toward him. The dwarf turned out to be his own reflection in a shop window. Sōseki’s own “desert of mirrors” can thus be seen as beginning with his initial experience abroad, an experience which affected his self-conception in an entirely negative way, forcing him to see himself as something monstrous vis-à-vis the West.

The mirror in Sōseki occurs frequently, from his autobiographical fiction through his early fantasies, to his final unfinished novel Meian (1916) (trans. Light and Darkness (1971)). In this mimetic work the protagonist goes on what is essentially a journey of self-discovery to a country inn where, at one point, he is startled to find see his reflection in a mirror. In the scene that ensues it is clear that the protagonist is beginning to build a new, more positive identity. In this regard it is important to remember that the so-called mirror stage, as Lacan tells us, is the one in which the infant constructs his own identity for the first time.

In Sōseki’s fantastic fiction the mirror plays many roles. Thus, in “Dream of the Eighth Night” the “I” goes to a barber shop and watches a parade of passing humanity reflected in the shop mirror. When he looks through the shop’s window, however, he sees nothing. The mirror is merely a literally self-reflexive fantasy, one that ultimately rejects the outside world, leaving the “I,” as usual, passive and alone. Even his attempt to change his appearance through barbering seems to make no real difference.

The inability to transform either oneself or the world around one comes to the fore in the famous “Dream of the Sixth Night,” discussed in the Introduction to this book. Although there are no mirrors in this tale there is a kind of doppelgänger for the “I,” the famous Kamakura period sculptor, Unkei. We remember that the “I” tries to follow in Unkei’s steps, attempting to carve guardian gods out of logs in his garden, only to give up in frustration, concluding that “guardian gods were not, after all, buried in the trees of the present age” (p. 48).

As in “Dream of the Seventh Night,” which is set on the ship, there are again two aliens in this tale. Unlike that dream, however, although one of the aliens is familiar to us, in the person of the forlorn, passive “I,” the other alien is perhaps a surprise. This alien is the Japanese past, signified both in the ghost of Unkei and the magical guardian gods who can no longer exist in the “present age.” Unlike the strange Westerners, this is a longed-for alien but, as in “Dream of the Seventh Night,” it is just as unattainable.

“Dream of the Seventh Night” contains elements of both the ideological and the internal alien. The ideological alien is clearly the unattainable guardian gods, while the deracinated, helpless “I” is the alienated self. In the dream, the “I” tries to transform the contemporary trees, but is unable to do so. His attempt at metamorphosis blocked, the “I” is left back in his familiar liminal state, unable to return to the past but ill at ease in the present.

A past that is both alien and frightening at the same time as being appallingly intimate is the background to the extraordinary “Dream of the Third Night,” the most fascinating and enigmatic of all the dreams. In this dream a man (the “I”) is walking through a dark wood carrying a child on his back. He knows that the child is his and that the child is blind, but he does not know where he is going or why. The child jeers at him, telling his father that he will be “heavy soon.” As they go further into the forest depths, it grows darker and darker. But the child shines like a mirror, “like a mirror that revealed my past, my present, and my future” (p. 37). Eventually they reach a place beneath a cedar tree where the child tells him, “It was exactly one hundred years ago that you murdered me” (p. 38). The story concludes:

The third dream is such a brilliant and disturbing mélange of archetypal horror that it seems almost reductive to dismember it. From the point of view of this chapter, however, it is worth examining for its powerful depiction of an identity in serious conflict with itself. Indeed, with its combination of blindness, murder, and a search for origins, the story can easily be interpreted as a slightly displaced Oedipal fantasy, as Japanese critics have suggested.

The story contains many other layers as well, however. Like all good nightmares, it starts with the alien in both setting and character. The dark wood is a classic fantasy site, at the same time as the journey suggests a quest into a psychological “heart of darkness,” a journey toward recognition, not simply of the Oedipal conflict but of the self as well.

In fact, there are three selves in the dream: father, son, and murdered blind man. These three selves or, perhaps more correctly, alter egos, create a fascinating and disturbing triumvirate of identity, incorporating transgression, guilt, and vulnerability. Each reflects, distorts, and controls the other in a perfect realization of paranoid fantasy.

First let us examine the “I.” Like the “I” in most of the other dreams, this dreamer initially seems to have no control over his destiny. Driven by an alien compulsion upon his back, he tries to present himself as passive. Unlike the other “I”’s, however, we find that he has once acted, i.e., committed murder. Now his memory, itself an alien force beyond control, has come back to him in the form of the child.

But the blind child is not simply alienated memory but incorporates many other elements as well. The monstrous child that both is and is not of the self has become such a staple of horror fiction that at times the reader tends to take for granted the very elements that make it so monstrous: as the “I”’s child it is both an insider and an outsider, both threatening and vulnerable, and the child’s prescient blindness emphasizes both its outsiderhood and its vulnerability all the more.

Perhaps even more significant than its blindness is the child’s function as a mirror, echoing the Lacanian mirror stage even more obviously than in “Dream of the Eighth Night.” In Lacan’s thesis, the child looks in the mirror and sees a construction of itself, thus leading it for the first time to become aware of itself as an identity separate from its mother. In “Dream of the Third Night” ‘s far more fearsome version, however, the child is blind, it cannot see itself and cannot therefore create an identity. “Dream of the Third Night” thus plays on the theme of vision, one of the themes that Todorov identifies as a “theme of the self.” But in the “Third Night”’s case, vision is not part of the “road to the marvelous,” but rather reveals that the road is blocked.

Thus, the shining child supposedly acts as a mirror to its father, but this is a mirror that rejects the father. For, rather than showing the father his reflection, it shows him “his past, his present and his future.” The father now has neither identity nor control, since his history is being played out in front of him continuously, without any will on his part.

The murdered blind man is in some ways a more simple construction of the self. Apparently vulnerable, like the child, the blind man is also threatening, like a vengeful ghost, since he does not rest but comes back to haunt the “I”’s memories. The blind man, then, is another disappointing self that cannot be willed away.

Finally, there is a fourth self 29 that appears at the end of the story: the stone Jizo that the child metaphorically turns into. Not only does the buried self/selves return from the dead but other negative selves are always there. Jizo is known in a positive fashion as the god of children but, in this case, the sacredness of the deity only emphasizes the awesome burden of guilt and responsibility which the “I” must carry around with him.

The feeling of being overpowered, be it by outside events, other selves, or a past and a future over which one has no control, is an important aspect of Sōseki’s other writings, both fictional and autobiographical. But in no other work is this sense of psychic claustrophobia so effectively conveyed. It is interesting that Ten Nights of Dream was one of Sōseki’s earliest works and was also written soon after his return from England, a journey of self-discovery more fearsome and more frustrating than any dream.

The sense of the self as alienated from its past, present and future, forced into various manifestations, but all largely negative, runs through Ten Nights of Dream . More than dreams these are nightmares, nightmares of paranoid horror where the world is either frighteningly meaningless or, even worse, threateningly meaningful. 30 Terror fiction, Heller suggests, can offer the delight of the “unchosen self,” but this is a delight only offered the reader, and a reader who consciously chooses to participate in the “delights of terror.” It is perhaps not surprising that, compared to the funny and satiric I Am a Cat of 1905, Sōseki’s early works were not as well received.

This was not the case, however, for the next writer of the inner alien this chapter deals with, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927). Akutagawa’s entire oeuvre is far ‘weirder’ than any one story of Sōseki’s but, on the whole, his bizarre and grotesque fantasies were well received by critics and reading public alike. Perhaps this is because, with the exception of the posthumously published dark doppelgänger fantasy “Haguruma” (1927) (trans. “Cogwheels” (1965)), Akutagawa maintained, at least in his early works, a brilliantly controlled aesthetic and ironic distance from his fantastic creations. At the same time, Akutagawa’s fantasies of the alien explore very similar issues to those of Sōseki, particularly the problem of defining the self in relation to others. The way he treats these problems, however, shows some important generational changes.

Although Akutagawa revered Sōseki as a mentor, he was fifteen years younger than Sōseki and his sensibility is very much representative of the Taishō period (1912–1926). This was a time of intense urbanization and industrialization, when the initial unity of the Meiji period had been replaced by an increasing tendency toward conflict on the part of political and other pressure groups, and by a fascination with self-discovery and self-transformation on the part of the newly urbanized, newly consuming population. Thomas Rimer describes the Zeitgeist of this period as “a move inward,” when, the younger generation, troubled and moved by the power of

Thus, the problems of identity with which Akutagawa deals are different from those of Sōseki’s generation, which still had one foot in premodern Japan. The inner self may still be alien but it is in some ways a more attractive alien, hinting both at a new, more interesting self, and at new ways to understand the society around it.

Akutagawa does share with Sōseki a strong preoccupation with individuals entrapped by powerful forces beyond their control, be it their own genius or their egos. Also like Sōseki, his fantasy works show a consistent preoccupation with outsiderhood, either willed or enforced. But Akutagawa’s outsiders are usually more monstrous than ghostly, more determined to try and change themselves, often through the medium of art or artifice.

This fascination with both outsiderhood and change leads to a preoccupation with metamorphosis and boundary transgression as well, such as in “Hōkyōjin no shi” (1918) (trans. “The Martyr” (1952)), where a young Christian accused of fathering a child is revealed upon his death to be a woman. This story, with its transgression of gender boundaries and its exotic Christian framework, recalls the work of another writer contemporary to Akutagawa, Yumeno Kyūsaku, who wrote a number of stories depicting androgynous characters often in an international setting. Although Kyūsaku’s work has only recently begun to become well known again, the popularity of his writings at the time is such as to suggest that the Taishō fascination with identity ambivalence was a widespread one. As Donald Roden says, “[t]he sexual ambiguities in Taishō Japan reflect the transition from a civilization of character to a culture of personality.” 32 While Sōseki’s dreamers are constantly trying and failing to find their identities against a larger background of history or philosophy (such as the protagonist’s attempt in “Dream of the Sixth Night” to unearth guardian gods in the trees of the Meiji period), Akutagawa’s characters explore the alien on a more personal and direct level. Although his works, especially the dystopian satire Kappa (1927) (trans. Kappa (1974)), can indeed be highly critical of Japanese society, Akutagawa’s approach is usually more intimate than Sōseki’s carefully structured works.

A short-story writer rather than a novelist, Akutagawa’s genius was in creating memorable characters trapped in bizarre situations and trying to escape them. Often his works end with might be called the Akutagawan twist, a kind of epiphany experienced by either character or reader. This epiphany can be a positive one but often it is simply an awareness of the absurdity and uncertainty of life.

All the above features are on view in Akutagawa’s first important short story, “Hana” (1916) (trans. “The Nose” (1952)), a story which is both a brilliant dissection of how identity is formed and also an exploration of how the alien and the grotesque can be part of the self. In this case the alien takes the form of the monstrously large nose belonging to the protagonist, a prominent monk in medieval Japan.

In this narrative of what might be called counter-metamorphosis, the priest succeeds in neutralizing his alien member by shrinking it back to normal size. Only temporarily, however; embarrassed by the taunts and innuendo of his fellow acolytes, the priest wishes miserably for his grotesque appendage to return, and one morning, magically, it does. “Now, no one will laugh at me any more,” the priest whispers softly, his nose wafting in the breeze.

The notion of the alien in “The Nose” is a teasingly ironic one, suggesting that the monstrous is very much a product of one’s own perceptions. For, like Abe’s far darker The Face of Another, Akutagawa’s story is really a commentary on the desire to be “normal.” Unlike the protagonist of The Face of Another, however, the priest is finally willing to accept his deformity rather than withstand the ridicule of pretending to be something he is not.

If the nose is the sign of the self (traditionally Japanese people point to the nose in referring to themselves), then the priest’s acceptance of his nose can be seen as either healthy or resigned. By accepting his nose he acknowledges his essential estrangement from the main run of humanity, an acceptance which makes him, paradoxically, more human, and more accepted, than before.

The sense of unease with one’s own identity does not have to be read purely in personal terms, of course. It is even possible to read “The Nose” as Akutagawa’s ironic judgement on Japan’s attempt to Westernize itself, although the comparison is never explicitly stated. The priest’s torturous attempts to transform his nose, including boiling it and wrapping it, can be read as a subtle satire on the Taishō generation’s fascination with donning the trappings of the West.

A far more overt political statement that involves the notion of the alien and estrangement in relation to modern Japanese identity can be found in Akutagawa’s bleakly dystopian fantasy Kappa . I will discuss Kappa more fully in the chapter on dystopias, but certain aspects of it in relation to the treatment of the alien are pertinent here.

Kappa extends the implicit equation of the Japanese with their traditional gods and spirits that we saw in Sōseki’s “Dream of the Seventh Night” dream about “guardian gods” to a rather problematic fantastic creature, the Kappa or Japanese water sprite. A clever fantasy, it is also a troubling one. Its disturbing quality may lie in the fact that it amalgamates the notion of an internal alien with that of an ideological one through the use of a grotesque monster as a double, both for the protagonist and for the entire Japanese race.

The fact that the narrative begins in a mental asylum, where the first narrator goes to visit his friend who tells him his story of his adventures in Kappaland, suggests that Akutagawa is still playing with the problem of perception as to what is “normal.” This is even clearer in the second narrator’s description of his initial encounter with a Kappa: looking at his watch to find out the time, he sees reflected in it the face of a Kappa .

The monstrous Kappa is thus immediately equated with the protagonist himself, a distorted “mirror” image. Not only does the protagonist see a hideous double, but, since he can see neither the time nor his own face, he is about to be lost in a timeless “Other” world, which is potentially dangerous. The Kappa thus subverts both the protagonist’s sense of self and the reality of modern Japan.

The protagonist’s adventures in Kappaland will be described in greater detail in Chapter 6 , but for now I would like to examine the role of the Kappa as grotesque double. Ohnuki-Tierney has pointed out that the Kappa has traditionally been considered evil, the trickster version of the reflexive monkey figure previously mentioned. Actually, Akutagawa’s Kappa are no more evil than the average human, but they do perform the trickster function of giving a distorted reflection of contemporary Japanese society.

Akutagawa uses the Kappa’s pretensions, their avid capitalism, their artistic affectations, and their imperialist assertiveness against the Otters, to satirize many of the major movements of the Taishō period. This is dark satire, however. Perhaps the most shocking scene in the book is that of the birth of a baby Kappan who declares its unwillingness to be born. In explaining its intentions, the fetus says simply, “It makes me shudder to think of all the things I shall inherit from my father—the insanity alone is bad enough. And an additional factor is that I maintain that a Kappa’s existence is evil” (p. 62).

It is interesting to compare this scene with Sōseki’s “Dream of the Third Night.” As in Sōseki’s third dream, a monstrous child speaks of an inescapable past, in this case hereditary insanity, and a bleak future, although the child in Akutagawa’s story intends to repudiate it. In some ways this scene is highly personal, related to Akutagawa’s fear of inheriting his mother’s madness. It is important to remember, however, that a fascination with genetic inheritance is common to the literature of the Taishō period. Yumeno Kyūsaku’s 1935 novel Dogura magura, for example, interweaves notions of heredity with the story of a magic curse in an extraordinary fantasy narrated, it turns out, by the diseased fetus itself.

But, as Akutagawa’s work and the Sōseki story also suggest, the notion of a deformed coming generation is related to more than an interest in heredity. If existence is “evil,” and populated by alien creatures, then the future too must be “evil.” If there is no hope even in the future, then it appears that the only way out is through total alienation from the self through madness.

The alien in Kappa comes in many forms, from the most obvious representation of the Kappas themselves to the more subtle horror of madness which leaves the protagonist happily outside society. The novella’s “happy” ending, with the protagonist comfortably ensconced in an insane asylum, interweaves madness, art, and language; the protagonist inscribes himself into his own version of reality with help from props such as the telephone book and the flowers. With these he is able to make the alien intimate and the familiar alien. Through art, the telling of his tale, and the verbal transformation of homely objects into the exotic, the narrator is finally able to achieve his own escape.

This notion of the liberating and seductive power of art ties in with another, generally more positive aspect of the internal alien, the idea of the artistic force itself as an alien, potentially overwhelming power. This valorization of art is extremely important in Akutagawa’s work. His contention seems to be that if one cannot achieve metamorphosis in reality, as the priest discovers in “The Nose,” perhaps one can change the world through art.

This theme of the power of art and the imagination is given a lighthearted treatment in Akutagawa’s short story “Ryū” (1919) (trans. “The Dragon” (1952)), in which a monk invents a prophecy that a dragon will arise from a nearby pond at a certain date. On the date in question a crowd gathers excitedly waiting for the dragon to appear. Meanwhile a thunderstorm begins to brew. As the storm breaks, the crowd gasps in awe as what appears to be a huge black creature erupts out of the pond’s waters and rises to heaven. Even the monk is finally uncertain as to what he has seen, but everyone has enjoyed themselves greatly. The monk’s imagination has summoned forth an alien creature but this version of the monstrous is shown as something comfortably outside the collectivity and fundamentally unthreatening.

Akutagawa gives a similarly lighthearted treatment to the power of art in his lovely story “Shūzanzu” (1921) (trans. “Autumn Mountain” (1972)), in which the role of the phantom dragon is played by a landscape painting, which may or may not exist but whose presumed presence makes reality more easy to bear. 33 In both stories artifice and the alien are seen as basically pleasurable, even humorous.

This fascination with the transformative powers of art and the artist may also be related to several of the Taisho period’s fascinations. Of these, the most important are the period’s obsession with the self and its potential, which the artist seemed to most perfectly embody, and a related obsession with artifice and ambiguity in popular culture. This latter was expressed in the popular fascination with the Takarazuka review or the emerging culture of the cinema.

The potent combination of art and personality had its negative aspect as well. Akutagawa’s most memorable look at the dark side of art and the artist is his famous story “Jigokuhen” (1918) (trans. “The Hell Screen” (1961)). In this story a court painter, Yoshihide, rumoured to practice the black arts, is so consumed by his art that he paints a picture of a subject burning in hell, even though the dying model is in fact his only daughter. Yoshihide himself is clearly represented as a demonic figure, metonymically and metaphorically associated with owls and monkeys, but it is also emphasized that his art is of the highest. The price he pays for giving in to the internal alien is high, too, however. One week after finishing the painting, Yoshihide hangs himself.

In “The Hell Screen” Akutagawa portrays an artist who transgresses moral boundaries to become essentially a demon. The artistic presence in him has overpowered the human to the detriment of all around him. The fact that the painting is his greatest masterpiece only adds to the irony.

The darkest vision of the artist and his internal demons appears in Akutagawa’s posthumous story the surreal “Haguruma” (1927) (trans. “Cogwheels” (1965)). Less a coherent fantasy than a surreal tour de force, “Cogwheels” explores the mind of its narrator, a writer, as he wanders through the Tokyo night, attempting, essentially, to escape himself. He externalizes this alien self into a variety of visions, especially a vision of cogwheels turning in front of his eyes and, even more sinisterly, a ghost in a raincoat. Returning home, the narrator discovers that his brother-in-law has committed suicide wearing a raincoat. The discovery fills him with further foreboding.

Eventually, everything he sees, from crows on a swing to a passing cyclist, serves to remind him of death. Even language, especially certain foreign words, seems to take on an alien power. The protagonist finally returns home to hide. Even at home, however, he cannot escape as, in the last scene, his wife comes running upstairs telling him “I felt that you were dying.”

“Cogwheels” deserves to be ranked with Sōseki’s “Dream of the Third Night” in its claustrophobic vision of a self lost in a nightmare world, and what it loses in formal structure in comparison to the Sōseki work it gains in its frightening intensity. The ghost in the raincoat is obviously not merely the past in the form of the narrator’s suicidal dead brother-in-law but a double of the narrator himself, a potential future that came true for Akutagawa—he committed suicide soon after he wrote “Cogwheels.” As Donald Keene says of the story, “After reading ‘Cogwheels’ we can only marvel that Akutagawa did not kill himself sooner.” 34

We can trace a kind of trajectory of the self and the alien in Akutagawa’s work from “The Nose” to “Cogwheels.” This is a movement from a distanced ironic perspective on the grotesqueness of the self in his early years through an attempt to escape the self or create a new self, the self as artist/superman in works such as “The Hell Screen” or “The Dragon,” or even “Autumn Mountain,” whose dualities between “the real” and “art” inherently privilege art. In his last years Akutagawa is known for turning away from his earlier fascination with the fantastic and the grotesque toward a more overtly autobiographical mode, as is evident in the personal elements in “Cogwheels.” It is important to note, however, that Kappa, in its own way as anguished an inquiry into the soul as “Cogwheels,” was written in 1926, the year he committed suicide. But while the ghost in “Cogwheels” haunts the protagonist like both a reminder of the personal past and a grim harbinger of the future, the Kappa’s monstrousness mocks humanity on a more general level.

Although of different generations, Sōseki and Akutagawa do share certain important aspects in their general conception of the internal alien. With only a few exceptions (the phantom picture in Akutagawa’s “Autumn Mountain,” the flower-woman in Sōseki’s “Dream of the First Night”), the internal alien is inherently frightening. It is a part of the self which the protagonist usually does not wish to accept. Whether it is the blind child of “The Dream of the Third Night” growing heavier and heavier upon the dreamer’s back, the Kappan double reflected in a wristwatch, or the raincoated ghost haunting the narrator of “Cogwheels,” the alien invades the soul of the protagonist and refuses to leave. In the case of Kappa’s protagonist this refusal is finally welcomed with relief, since he clearly does not wish to live in the “real” world of the sane. Sōseki’s protagonists usually struggle for a while but eventually resign themselves to their fate, even though “infinitely regretful” and “infinitely afraid.”

Sōseki’s and Akutagawa’s aliens are subversive in that they bring to the surface many of the unconscious conflicts of identity occurring in the prewar Japanese soul. The notion of the self as mutable or monstrous suggests an enormous degree of insecurity lurking just below the surface of Japan’s military and economic successes. Even the importance of the androgynous self at this time can be read as either a celebration of uncertainty, as may be the case in Yumeno Kyūsaku’s works, or an expression of the dangers inherent in the lack of a fixed sexual identity, as was the story in Akutagawa’s “The Martyr.”

The association of the self with ghosts is also important. Many of Sōseki’s dreamers are essentially ghostly, passively watching others in action. These ghosts are forlorn rather than sinister, suggesting a tragic inability to fit into a new, Other world. The ghost that appears to the writer in “Cogwheels” is more sinister, bringing both a dismal personal past and a tragic personal future with it.

The only major prewar writer that I know of who depicts the alien positively is Kawabata Yasunari, and two of his short stories are worth mentioning as a bridge to the postwar aliens of Murakami. These stories “Yuki” (1964) (trans. “Snow” (1988)) and “Fushi” (1963) (trans. “Immortality” (1988)) privilege what are essentially ghosts of the past as liberating forces, rescuing the protagonists from living in the real.

Unlike Akutagawa’s protagonists, who are still creating their identities, Kawabata’s male characters are usually fixed in a lonely outsiderhood where art and fantasy help them mediate between their inner and outer worlds. There are few doubles in Kawabata. Rather, as we saw in Chapter 3 , his male protagonists tend to see themselves in relation to women.

Thus, in his exquisite short story “Snow,” a man retreats to a hotel room each New Year where he lies in bed and watches the walls dissolve into his private fantasies, a childhood walk with his father in the snow, or a group of winged women who turn out to be all the women he ever loved, flying toward him in a cloud of silver wings. Unlike almost all the writers mentioned so far, these ghosts of past erotic involvements or generational differences are positively presented, metamorphosed through the transforming and distancing power of fantasy into dreams. Here the alien is presented as wish-fulfillment of the most appealing kind.

The alien in the form of a ghost is directly liberating in one of Kawabata’s most explicitly fantastic works, “Immortality.” This work, whose structure resembles a Nō play, begins in the quotidian surroundings of a golf course through which an old man and a young girl are walking. Gradually, we learn that the girl is a ghost, having thrown herself into the sea for love of a youth who is now an old man walking by her side. As they walk, the old man relives the torments and humiliations of his youth, reaching a Nō-like climax when he acts out his memories of being pelted with golf balls while performing his job. It is only at the end of the story, through the girl’s surprised recognition that the man, too, is dead, that we learn that he is now a ghost as well. On this note of recognition of their mutual alienness, the couple walks into a tree and disappears.

The strangling, overwhelming power of the past that is evident in Sōseki’s Ten Nights of Dream is obvious here as well as the old man relives his humiliations. Unlike in Sō seki’s works, however, death allows the protagonist to escape by affording him the metamorphosis into a ghost. Unlike Sōseki’s ghostly protagonists, this is a ghost who can walk away from his old, humiliated self, forever. Typically for Kawabata, it is a combination of woman and nature in the form of the tree that welcomes the duo at the story’s end that allows him finally to escape.

The notion of the alien within continues in the postwar period, in works such as Abe Kōbō’s many stories of bizarre metamorphoses. These works, however, also tend to have a strong ideological component, as was obvious in The Face of Another, so I will discuss them under that section. Perhaps the most negative portrayal of the alien within in the postwar period is in Endō Shūsaku’s 1986 novel, Sukyandaru (trans. Scandal (1988)).

This work revolves around a respected Christian writer’s discovery that he has a double who roams the Tokyo red-light district participating in what, to the novelist, appear to be depraved sexual activities. He is also persistently bothered by phone calls from a source who remains silent when he answers the phone. The writer, Suguro, decides to search for his double and through the search begins to realize that the black and white verities of truth and evil no longer seem applicable. He is particularly drawn to a beautiful widow, Madame Naruse who, despite her many good works in a children’s hospital, has a darker side based on sado-masochism. Eventually, in a classic example of Todorovian hesitation, Suguro confronts his double only to find that the double is probably himself, although the text remains suitably ambiguous on this point. confrontation, hoping that at least the nightmare is over, he awakens in the middle of the night to the sinister sound of the telephone jangling.

Scandal ends with the ring of the phone suggesting that there is finally no escape from the other self within us. Unlike Sōseki’s other selves, which are often ghosts of the past, Suguro’s doppelgänger is clearly a monstrous other, a more obvious manifestation of the mask in The Face of Another. The combination of Endō’s own Christian faith with a Todorovian acknowledgement of uncertainty, however, makes it a memorable work in its own right.

Both Abe and Endō, although writing into the 1980s, were born in 1926, long before the war, and their negative sense of the inner alien may well be a generational one. Murakami Haruki, the last writer of the inner alien to be discussed, was born in 1949. Probably due to the fact that he grew up in a culture more comfortable with ideas of the Western self, Murakami depicts his other selves in a largely positive fashion, as gateways to a deeper understanding of the self as a whole. Murakami uses the fantastic perhaps more than any other writer discussed in this chapter, but he uses it with remarkable effectiveness, exploring the problem of self vis-à-vis others in a number of imaginative ways.

His novel Sekai no owari to hΏdoboirudo wandΏrando (1985) (trans. Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991)) can be read as both an apolitical dystopia and a brilliant satire on technology, at the same time as it can be analyzed as a meditation on the self in contemporary culture. Since I discuss Hard Boiled Wonderland at greater length in the chapter on dystopias, I will simply mention here the fascination with the doppelädnger that is the thematic basis of the book. For the final and most important duality in Hard Boiled Wonderland is the existence of two protagonists, “Boku” and “Watashi,” who are actually two parts of the same person. “Watashi” lives in the future “real world” of technological dystopia, while “Boku,” who is further divided between himself and his shadow, exists inside a fantasy world inside “Watashi”’s head. This fantasy world is called appropriately “the End of the World,” for “Watashi” eventually loses consciousness in the “real world” and escapes or is reborn into the fantasy of the End of the World, where everything is “perfect” and nothing changes.

Murakami’s fantasy has been harshly criticized by the more political members of the Japanese literary establishment for being “escapist,” and indeed it is hard to avoid being somewhat troubled by the novel’s ending. 35 The self in Murakami seems finally to be rejecting “others” in toto. Furthermore, like Akutagawa and Kawabata, Murakami seems to be privileging art at the expense of life by creating not only a fantastic Other self in the form of “Boku,” but also a fantastic other world to put him into.

There are some important differences, however. While Akutagawa’s valorization of the fantastic Other clearly came out of despair, and even Kawabata’s retreat into fantasy can be seen as stemming at least from profound disappointment, Hard Boiled Wonderland’s depiction of the construction of a fantasy double seems strangely positive. As mentioned in the Introduction, the last scene of the “End of the World” section of the novel shows “Boku” consciously choosing to stay inside his mental fantasy world because it is his “responsibility.” Far from the madness and despair of Kappa, Hard Boiled Wonderland seems to exult in the mind’s ability to create a haven for itself.

Murakami’s works are also redolent of both ghosts and monsters, but these aliens are usually positive, even humorous creations. In his short story “The Little Green Monster,” for example, a housewife who clearly has no identity problems whatsoever, calmly confronts a little green monster who climbs out of her garden one day and declares itself in love with her. Like the monstrous child in Sōseki’s “Dream of the Third Night,” the monster can read all her thoughts, but even this does not faze her. Instead, she turns this ability against him and destroys him by “thinking at the creature increasingly terrible thoughts” until the monster shrivels away, leaving only his mournful eyes:

Unlike the “Dream of the Third Night,” the housewife has no trouble getting rid of the monstrous presence. Far from being burdened by guilt or other painful emotions, she is able to turn her thoughts outward into weapons. In this interaction between self and alien the self is barely affected.

Murakami’s ghosts can be more disturbing than his monsters, but they are usually well intentioned. Thus, the ghost of the protagonist’s friend Rat in Hitsuji o meguru bōken (1982) (trans. A Wild Sheep Chase (1989)) helps destroy the real monster, the all too human henchman of a sinister right-wing politician. In Dansu dansu dansu (1988) (trans. Dance, Dance, Dance (1988)) the protagonist’s murdered girlfriend Kiki returns as a sobbing presence, crying for the protagonist who is too frozen in cool emotionlessness to be able to shed tears for himself.

Murakami’s ghosts are internal ones in that they have a strong personal relationship to the protagonists in his works. Thus, in Dance, Dance, Dance, the narrator asks the ghost of Kiki, “But you did call me, didn’t you? It was you who guided me along, wasn’t it?” She answers, “It was you who called yourself, guided yourself, through me. I’m your phantom dance partner. I’m your shadow. I’m not anything more” (p. 371).

These ghosts are thus related to Murakami’s conception of the doppelgänger developed in the “End of the World” side of Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a shadow self who takes care of the other self. But the protagonist responds to Kiki’s answer by putting himself in the mind of Kiki’s murderer (another potential doppelgänger of the protagonist). “But I wasn’t strangling her, I was strangling my shadow. If only I could choke off my shadow, I’d get some health” (p. 371) .

Paradoxically, it is the shadows/ghosts who are the “healthiest” entities in Dance, Dance, Dance . It is they who mourn and sob for the protagonist’s emptiness. And it is they who are willing to try and help him.

Murakami’s ghosts are hardly subversive. Indeed, a case might be made that they act as palliatives for the difficulties of reality. At the same time, however, their existence suggests alternatives or at least emendations to that reality.

In this next section we turn to a group of works in which the alien is blatantly subversive. In these works the alien is there to disrupt consensus reality as much as possible, to forcibly place alternatives to it in the reader’s vision. Unlike the works previously discussed, which were intensely personal, inner-directed, and sometimes escapist, the direction of these works is outward, toward the “real” world. Where the alien in the works of the previous section was usually seen as something to be concealed if at all possible, these aliens are highly public, glorying in their exposure.

Power is also an explicit issue in works dealing with the ideological alien, in quite different ways than works treating the internal alien. While the strategies of texts dealing with the internal alien also often revolved around issues of power and control, these were of a personal kind. Sōseki’s dreamers are almost all passive, unable to do more than observe or at best engage in futile struggle with the complexities of modern life. Akutagawa’s artists long for power but are ultimately unable to control it when it is granted to them.

In contrast, while the ideological alien often seems powerless vis-à-vis society this alien is usually intent on changing the equation. Thus, Kyōka’s demons bring floods down on disbelieving villagers and cut off the heads of ignorant men trespassing in their castle. Oe’s dispossessed marginals in Dōjidai gēmu (The Game of Contemporaneity) (1979) engage in an elaborate series of games with the central government in an attempt to deceive the authorities.

Aggressive and extreme, the ideological alien is usually a monster rather than a ghost. It forces readers to confront not so much their own inadequacies and fears as those of society around them. At its most extreme, this type of alien is used to construct a wide variety of revenge fantasies, often within an overtly political framework that ranges from the reactionary to the liberal. Rather than escape reality, the ideological alien directly subverts reality through a celebration of the monstrous, the marginal, and the outsider .

This subversive function of the alien initially seems quite modern but, if anything, the ideological alien has as long a tradition in Japan as the internal one. The twelfth-century animal scrolls caricaturing priests as frogs and monkeys are a pictorial forerunner of this sort of imaginative subversion. The entire Zen tradition, both pictorial and literary, may be seen as an attempt to look at the world from the outside. But the most obvious use of the alien as satire occurs in the literature of the Edo period, especially in the works of Hiraga Gennai, whose fantastic worlds included a good share of bizarre and grotesque creatures. The Edo period is also the time when the first Japanese robots, the mechanical dolls known as karakirijin were invented, and they too were used for comic satire on society.

It is perhaps not surprising therefore, that Izumi Kyōka (1873– 1939), the first modern writer of the ideological alien I will be discussing, was a thoroughgoing conservative who was far better versed in traditional literature, particularly that of the Edo period, than in contemporary Chapter 2 , Kyōka’s personal or perhaps professional misfortune was to be a traditional writer doomed to forge his career at the height of the Meiji fascination with the West. In literary terms this fascination was particularly allied to the Naturalist movement, a movement which Kyōka regarded as anathema. Paradoxically, however, this professional misfortune may have had good effects on Kyōka’s writing. Although his traditional romantic style led to his vilification by the Naturalists and to a certain amount of critical disregard for many years following his death, the tension between modernity and tradition may actually have empowered Kyōka’s literature. The exquisite yet passionate intensity with which Kyōka evokes his monstrous ghosts makes him perhaps the greatest fantasist of the writers to be considered here.

Kyōka’s fantastic landscape and characters (ghosts, demons, talking animals, and enchantresses figure prominently in his fiction) are both alien in the eyes of modern Japan at the same time as they are as intimately familiar, rising from the woodblock prints, kabuki drama, and legends of the late Edo period. They are thus what might be called the “familiar alien,” similar to the guardian gods which Sōseki’s dreamer tried so fervently to discover in the trees of the Meiji period. The difference is, however, that Kyōka’s protagonists can and do discover the alien in the present age, often through the motif of a physical journey that is also a journey in time and psyche as well. Furthermore, although Kyōka presents these demons and ghosts at times as simply a refuge from modernity, more often he shows them attacking and triumphing against the modern, symbolized often in the figure of disbelieving materialistic males. 36 In these revenge fantasies it is finally the modern characters who become, often literally, dehumanized, turned into beasts or else destroyed by the powers of old Japan.

Like his longtime friend Yanagita Kunio, Kyōka found and presented a traditional Japan which, although filled with the grotesque and the bizarre, ultimately offered a more attractive alterity, one that was warm and familiar in comparison to the new and alien collectivity symbolized by the ideals of “Civilization and Enlightenment.” At first glance this alternative collectivity is a frightening one, alien in its own way. It is a world of literally bloodthirsty ghosts, gigantic talking crabs and enchantresses who turn men into beasts.

But this grotesque world is actually attractive in many ways. Like a late Edo print, it is both highly colored and exciting. Also like a woodblock print, it is a known quantity. Audiences and readers could relax in a literary world that they remembered from childhood, full of striking transformations and bizarre manifestations that were, withal, more understandable than the real transformations going on around them.

Thus, Kyōka’s metamorphoses are seldom “meaningless” in a Kafka-esque sense. Like the frightening woman who teaches the man a lesson in the Yanagita tale quoted at the beginning of this chapter, these are metamorphoses with a message. An interesting example of the two different kinds of metamorphoses, modern versus traditional, occurs in Kyōka’s masterpiece Kōya hijiri, where a Darwinian/ apocalyptic vision of devolution into leeches is contrasted to a very traditional form of what might be called “revenge metamorphosis,” the transformation of evil/lustful men into animals.

Another revenge fantasy which also includes metamorphosis is Kyōka’s extraordinary play Yashaga ike (Demon Pond) written in 1913. In this work a young writer from the city finds happiness in the depths of the mountains with a beautiful wife and a strange duty, that of tolling the village bell every night at midnight. If he fails, legend goes, the village will be destroyed by a flood unleashed by the demon princess who lives at the bottom of the pond. Kyōka’s work effectively counterposes the normal life of the young writer and the villagers with the highly colored dramatics of the monstrous denizens of Demon Pond.

Ultimately, however, the two worlds meet in tragedy. The writer, visited by a long-lost friend from the city, is unable to return to toll the bell and his wife is prevented from doing so by the oafish, disbelieving villagers. The demon princess finally escapes and the villagers receive their appropriate punishment of death by drowning. As for the young writer and his wife, there is at least a suggestion that they are granted a transformation into the new king and queen of Demon Pond, a metamorphosis for the better, apparently.

Kyōka’s demons are fascinating in their many manifestations. Some, especially his female ghosts, are genuinely frightening, but even at their most bloodthirsty they remain far less threatening and three-dimensional than the internal aliens conjured by Sōseki or Akutagawa. Even a story with some psychological suspense, such as “Sannin no mekura no hanashi” (1912) (trans. “A Tale of Three Who Were Blind” (1956)), suggests a strong division between the spirit world and the world of the real in Kyōka’s work.

This is also true in the architectural and landscape features of Kyōka’s tales. His demons tend to be in hidden valleys or enclosed in black towers, or pent up in ponds. They are a hidden menace that might leap out at one in the dark, but they do not come from inside the psyche.

Ultimately, of course, Kyōka’s demons cannot venture much further beyond the haunted inner valley, and they remain powerful but safely removed from modern life. Other writers besides Kyōka, however, have seen traditional Japan as a fantasy world that offers an alternative to the modern world. Of these, Kawabata is the most famous, but most of his “worlds,” although imbued with a fairytale quality, are not strictly fantasy. Furthermore, his magical Japan is offered more as a refuge than as a gauntlet to the modern world.

Surprisingly, one writer who followed in Kyōka’s footsteps to use the myth of an alien old Japan was Akutagawa, whom we dealt with in the section on the internal alien. The story that most effectively exemplifies his use of the ideological alien is his surprisingly poignant “Kamigami no bisho” (The Faint Smiles of the Gods) (1921). In this short, provocative tale the alien is initially seen in the form of a Westerner, one Padre Organtino, a Christian missionary in Nagasaki during the Edo period.

In contrast to Sōseki’s dream of the Western ship where the Westerners are viewed as outsiders, however, Akutagawa focuses the story sympathetically through the Westerner’s eyes. He thus forces his reader to “identify” with the missionary vis-à-vis the foreign land of Japan. In this story it is Japan which is the alien rather than the Westerners.

Japan becomes even more alien when the priest is treated to a vision straight out of the Kojiki . In this vision a group of ancient Japanese gods appear in front of him in a re-enactment of the scene in which Ameterasu, the sun goddess, is lured out of hiding by the lewd tricks and noisy dancing of the other gods.

Akutagawa presents this scene as a frighteningly pagan vision of almost orgiastic intensity, thus heightening the priest/reader’s sense of difference. Stunned and discouraged, the priest goes on to encounter another Japanese god, in the guise of an old man who delivers the story’s final warning:

Perhaps even the Christian God will become a native of this country. China and Japan changed. The West must also change. We are among the trees, in the current of shallow water, in the evening light that falls on the temple walls, in the wind that blows through the rose bushes. Everywhere and at all times. Watch out for us!

Akutagawa’s text offers an overtly ideological message but one that is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the way “Kamigami no bisho” uses difference to inscribe the message. Rather than encoding the Westerner as alien, the text clearly shows the Japanese as exotic, frightening deities, and finally celebrates this very exoticism, even monstrousness, suggesting that it is the West rather than Japan which must transform itself.

This celebration of monstrousness becomes an increasingly important trend in postwar fiction, although in this case the ideological framework is radical rather than conservative. The most obvious and fervent exponent of this form of linking the political with the alien is Abe Kōbō, whose The Face of Another we have previously discussed. The Face of Another demonstrates Abe’s ability to blend the inner with the ideological alien, but other texts are far more explicitly political. Thus, in “Shinda musume no uta” (1954) (trans. “Song of a Dead Girl” (1986)) Abe shows the variety of downward transformations of a young farm girl, from factory worker, to prostitute, to corpse, to finally a ghost. Unlike the vengeful female ghosts of Tokugawa fiction, this girl’s power is of a quieter, more passive kind: her dead self functions as an eternal comment on an oppressive and exploitative system.

As should be clear from the examples already given, Abe’s fiction often turns on metamorphosis. Sometimes it can be a subtle one as in his 1967 play Tomodachi (trans. Friends (1977)), when the smiling normal family “turns into” a demonic form of thought police. In other works Abe pulls out all the fantastic stops to depict a society in which metamorphosis is pushed from outside by some evil, or at least overwhelming, force which the victim is powerless to counter.

Abe’s famous early story “Bō” (1955) (trans. “Stick” (1966)) is one such example of a metamorphosis that is both internal and ideological in that the character, a typical salaryman father who just happens to turn into a stick one day, clearly represents the passive everyman of the modern condition. Less sinister than the pathetic scientist in The Face of Another, he is still no hero. The story ends with the stick being examined and tossed away, found wanting for having led a boring useless life.

The combination of inner alienation and outer conspiracy leading to metamorphosis occurs in innumerable other Abe stories from his 1949 story “Dendorokakaria” (trans. “Dendracacalia” (1991)) to “S.Karumashi no hanzai” (1951) (trans. “The Crime of S.Karma” (1991)) to Mikai (1991) (trans. Secret Rendezvous (1980)) in which virtually all the characters have turned into the demonic. As was evident in the works discussed in Chapter 3 , Abe’s later work seems increasingly nihilistic. Where “Song of a Dead Girl” gave some dignity and meaning to her transformation, much of Abe’s late work seems more and more to revel in transformation for the sake of itself. But this is not transformation for narrative excitement as in the postmodern terms of Tsutsui’s “Kaomen hōkai” (Collapsing Face) (1978). Instead it may be seen as a nihilistic comment on the absurdity and horror of modern life.

Perhaps his most complete comment upon the alien is in his early novel Dai yonkampyō-ki (1958) (trans. Inter Ice Age 4 (1970)). In this work a man is first alienated from himself by having his personality “doubled” by being fed into a computer. He is then alienated from his son and indeed from the next generation of human beings by having his embryonic child transformed into an Aquan, a creature with gills developed to survive an anticipated ice age.

Inter Ice Age 4 is another brilliant meditation on the doppelgänger motif and it contains certain features reminiscent of Sōseki’s “Dream of the Third Night” and of Endō’s Sukyandaru (1986) (trans. Scandal (1988)). As in Sōseki’s story, there is an all-knowing other self, this time the computer, and a monstrous baby. Also like the Sōseki story, and like the child in Akutagawa’s Kappa, this baby is related to past, present and future. In the case of the Sōseki work, the tale ends with man and child welded together forever in mutual guilt and self-loathing. The Kappan child, we remember, rejects the future because of the past (heredity), and refuses to be born. In the case of Abe’s Aquans, they already are the future, and their very existence is a rejection of their parent’s past. Not only are people alien from each other but the future itself is alien.

The theme of father and grotesque child is given another twist in the fiction of Abe’s near contemporary Oe Kenzaburō. In this case the son is a brain-damaged child who, with his father, appears in various guises throughout Oe’s oeuvre. In “Sora no kaibutsu Aguii” (1964) (trans. “Aghwee the Sky Monster” (1977)), for example, the handicapped infant is explicitly identified with the liberating power of the imagination: a young musician, who allowed his brain-damaged infant son to die, finds himself followed constantly by a gigantic baby in the sky. His father hires a young student to look after the musician, and the two men plus the phantom baby go on a number of amusing expeditions. In the end, however, the composer dies, walking in front of a truck in an apparent attempt to save his baby.

The young student is not so sure. He confronts the dying composer suggesting that “Aghwee” was just an excuse for the composer to commit suicide. The composer says nothing as the student shouts, “I was about to believe in Aghwee!” (p. 433). In the long run, however, Aghwee’s existence or absence proves immaterial, for the student himself finds that he can now see a group of aliens, lost parts of himself, in the sky.

The delightful “Aghwee” harks back to some of Akutagawa’s early fantasies about the transforming power of art and the imagination. In other of Oe’s works, however, the brain-damaged child becomes a heavily charged symbol of the marginalized and disenfranchised Others of modern society. Furthermore, these marginals are often aggressively aligned against society.

In PinchirannΏ chōshō (1976) (trans. The Pinchrunner Memorandum (1994)) a fascinating variation on the father and monstrous child theme occurs. A thirty-eight-year-old father and his brain-damaged son literally change places, the father becoming a teenager, the son becoming his thirty-eight-year-old protector. Here the bond between the two is as intense as in “Aghwee,” but it is also liberating, with both generations encompassing the future and the past. Their mutual identification with the monstrous now complete, the two join a drear group of bizarre comrades, including ghosts. The dead and the transmogrified go on a long march that hopes to rescue the world from the prospects of nuclear annihilation.

In a world of grotesques, Oe’s angry satire forces the reader to choose among the varieties of monstrousness. Language also becomes part of Oe’s weaponry, since the idiot child, unlike the preternaturally articulate babes of Sōseki and Akutagawa, speaks only nonsense, lost in a prelinguistic world of the imaginary where the loneliness of the self has not been recognized.

Oe also brings up to date the notion of an alternative collectivity of the alien introduced in Kyōka. His most complete version of this is in his 1979 tour de force, Dōjidai gēmu (The Game of Contemporaneity). Like Kyōka’s Kōya hijiri, Dōjidai gēmu revolves around a hidden valley full of aliens, in this case a group of villagers who are equated both with rebels against the shogunate and with Oe’s notion of the rebel deities who were forced out of heaven by the gods of the Japanese imperial family.

Not content with being exiled, however, the outcasts are actually willing to wage war against the central power symbolized by the Japanese imperial army. Even though they inevitably lose the war, the marginals win in another fashion, through staging two disappearing tricks, once through a maze constructed by the village children, and once from the records of Japanese history and from the census book through the non-registration of twins. These are aliens, then, whose powers lie in the “normal” person’s inadequate perceptions of all that reality can encompass, as “Aghwee” also suggested.

The aliens are led by The Destroyer, a figure who, like the idiot child in Oe’s other works, mixes both past and future, and infantile and adult. At the novel’s end The Destroyer is reported to have been reborn and is perhaps ready to lead his people into confrontation once more.

Oe’s marginals use different, more sophisticated weapons than the demons of Kyōka, yet, surprisingly, the two writers ultimately share a common perception; that the best of Japan lies hidden in the dark spaces of Japanese culture. Oe, Abe and Kyōka also share an anger against society and an unwillingness to subdue that anger. In their privileging of the marginal they recall the section from Secret Rendezvous quoted at the beginning of this chapter, “Hooray for Monsters! Monsters are the embodiment of the weak” (p. 172).

It is interesting to pose the question as to whether the ideological alien is entirely ascendant in modern Japanese fiction. We remember that our continuum of alien faces ended with Tsutsui’s postmodern celebration of change for the sake of change. In a still hierarchical Japan, such a highlighting of change may perhaps be read as anti-authoritarian. 37

The emphasis in “Kaomen hōkai” (Collapsing Face) on agonized metamorphosis is echoed in other contemporary media as well. Perhaps the best-known example is Otomo Katsuhiro’s bestselling comic and animated movie Akira . Although Akira will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6 , it should be mentioned that both film and comic book contain some extraordinary scenes of mutation on the part of the work’s teenaged anti-hero Tetsuo. As with Tsutsui’s “Kaomen hōkai,” the effect of these transformations on reader/viewer is less ideological than visceral. The dissolution of boundaries expressed in Tetsuo’s mutations is both shocking and exhilarating, even disgusting.

Tetsuo’s metamorphoses, with their privileging of a fluid subject, seem a long way from the variety of fixed and lonely selves described in Sōseki’s Ten Nights of Dream . In that respect they are perhaps fundamentally more subversive than Sōseki’s characters, who accepted the fact of a fixed identity. Tetsuo’s awesome transformative powers as well as those of the other mutants in Akira suggest a subverting of all boundaries, especially the hierarchical ones that still characterize contemporary Japanese society.

Otōmo’s monstrous characters confront and even directly attack the Japanese establishment. In some ways they may be seen as the comic book versions of the monstrous new generation that Sōseki, Akutagawa and Abe depict so fearsomely. In Tetsuo’s case, his new powers come very close to destroying the world, although, in Akira’s dystopian view, this is a world which will not lose much by its own destruction.

If Akira’s new generation seem bent on asserting their alienness in order to destroy, the characters of his bestselling contemporary Murakami initially seem bent on using their alien associations only to escape. This difference may be due to the fact that Murakami’s protagonists are almost always of the “everyman” type. It is usually not they who suffer metamorphoses but those around them, most frequently turning into ghosts. Yet, Murakami’s use of ghosts hints that, even for an everyman, it is, finally, impossible to escape either oneself or the past (unless, like Boku in Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, we build our own fantasy world inside our heads).

Thus, in Dance, Dance, Dance, the protagonist tries to find the hotel where he and his girlfriend Kiki had previously stayed on their journey to Hokkaido depicted in A Wild Sheep Chase . He finally finds the hotel, but it has been transformed, knocked down and rebuilt into a glittering symbol of what the protagonist sourly calls “the elephant’s graveyard of advanced capitalism” (p. 123); it seems that only the name remains the same. The protagonist discovers, however, that there is a phantom sixteenth floor, onto which he steps one night. There he finds a familiar ghost, The Sheep Man, who talks to him about “thethingsyoulost” and “thethingsyou’regoingtolose [sic]” (p. 83).

Loss and memories pervade Dance, Dance, Dance, from the obliterated hotel sacrificed to rapacious real estate developers, to the many obliterated relationships in the protagonist’s life. In some ways the protagonist prefers this. For example, he says of a potential new relationship, that it would be just “another thing to lose. ”

At the same time, however, the protagonist longs for connection. The Sheep Man knows this and tells him, “We’ll do what we can to-connect you with what you want,” but he adds, “…even if we succeed, no-promises you’ll be happy” (p. 85).

Ultimately, the protagonist realizes that identity is indeed the aggregation of experiences mentioned in Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, a collection from the past which he cannot escape. Thus, toward the novel’s end, still searching for Kiki, he finds himself once again in a place of phantoms, a living room with six skeletons on the sofa, five of whom he identifies as dead friends or lovers. As for the sixth skeleton, could it be the protagonist himself?

In Murakami’s world the self rather than society is the final adjudicator. But he acknowledges a multiplicity of selves, of projections, some of which are more positive than others. Murakami’s protagonists may also end up in a desert of mirrors, but at least in those mirrors they see different potentials of the self. While Otomo’s transformations go outward to the monstrous, Murakami’s go inward to help his protagonist find unexplored parts of the self.

It is still arguable that Murakami’s vision is less subversive than compensatory, but his insistent use of ghosts can also be read as having ideological implications. As Lois Zamora says, “ghosts are liminal, metamorphic, intermediary, existing in/between/on modernity’s boundaries of physical and spiritual, magical and real, and challenge the lines of demarcation.” 38

Murakami’s ghosts are not only personal ones. The phantom Dolphin Hotel carries “the burden of traditional and collective memory,” 39 as Zamora puts it, existing in stark contrast to the anonymous new hotel which replaces it. By insisting on the Dolphin’s absence, the Dolphin remains present. And in a Japan where the self is increasingly seen as images, the protagonist’s final acknowledgement of the importance of memory and experience can be seen as a gauntlet thrown down against an impersonal desert of mirrors.

1 . The literature on the Japanese self is enormous and varied. Two works that usefully compare the Japanese sense of self with that of the West are G.DeVos, 1985, and N.Rosenberger, 1992.

2 . Ghosts are an extremely popular subject in Japanese folkloric and literary critical studies. One particularly interesting discussion between Matsuda and Yura asserts that the Japanese word for turning into a ghost (bakeru) actually means to turn into one’s real self (Matsuda, 1974, p. 17). This would suggest that even premodern Japanese understood that the ghost was not necessarily something outside the self but rather a manifestation of a hidden aspect of the soul.

3 . T.Todorov, 1975, p. 92.

4 . T.Heller, 1987, pp. 46–8.

5 . The ideological alien also plays an important part in Japanese film and popular culture as well, as the anti-nuclear message of Godzilla attests.

6 . The importance of the alien is not confined only to Japanese fantasy, of course. Christopher Nash discusses the increased fascination with “Otherness” and metamorphosis in twentieth-century anti-realist fiction, noting the existence of many characters who are “perpetually in flight from the unstable external identities of which they’re composed and cry for escape into the artificial act of private creation or into death itself” (C.Nash, 1987, p. 181).

7 . Todorov, 1975, p. 112.

8 . J.Grixti, 1989, p. 17.

9 . Animal possessions can sometimes be male as well but the overwhelming preponderance is by the female. Interestingly, even in contemporary Japan one can find instances of fox possession among the so-called “new religions”. Winston Davis records some cases, “undeniably sexual in nature” (Davis, 1980, p. 178; see also p. 90).

10 . D.Richie, 1983, p. 9.

11 . Grixti, 1989, p. 172.

12 . Nash, 1987, p. 181.

13 . Nash, 1987, p. 185.

14 . This subtlety is in interesting contradistinction to Japanese graphic art, which throughout the nineteenth century depicted the monstrous in extraordinary and grotesque detail. From that point of view, Tsutsui’s vivid descriptions, although arguably postmodern, do contain an aspect of the traditional as well.

15 . Todorov, 1975, p. 116.

16 . A.Tudor, 1989, p. 222.

17 . D.Kellner, 1992, p. 144.

18 . Tatsumi Takayuki has suggested that Tsutsui’s story actually revolves around the threatening power of language and the act of reading itself. Just as the hypothetical face is penetrated to the point of experiencing hallucinatory sensations, so is the reader invaded and forced into experiencing the unreal (Tatsumi, 1988, pp. 79–80; my translation).

19 . R.Jackson, 1981, pp. 116–18 passim.

20 . W.R.Irwin, 1976, p. 101.

21 . The most paradigmatic of these “meaningless transformations” can be found in Kafka. See Jackson, 1981, p. 160.

22 . E.Ohnuki-Tieraey, 1987, pp. 158–59.

23 . Oka Yasuo, Kasahara Nobuo and Soya Shinpei, 1979, p. 2.

24 . What Nash says of the doppelgänger in Western anti-realism is even more pertinent to modern Japanese fantasy: In the single image of the doppelganger a double anguish may now be invoked. The Realistic struggle for objectivity, even about oneself—and the struggle to get out of, to be free of oneself…meets the thwarted yearning for oneness which for some is the very motive impulse behind traditional fantasy. Nash, 1987, p. 183 .

25 . See, for example, the essays collected in J.T.Rimer, 1990b.

26 . For what is perhaps the classic discussion of the Meiji-Taisho period’s interest in the new individual see Sōseki’s famous essay “My Individualism” in Sōseki, 1992, pp. 285–315.

27 . Regarding “Dream of the First Night,” Atsumi Koko suggests that the woman in that dream represents transcendent lyricism in contrast to the “reality” of the woman with pigs in “Dream of the Tenth Night.” K.Atsumi, 1989, p. 135.

28 . It is also possible to interpret this dream as symptomatic of sexual unease. In this case the ship which thrusts endlessly forward to the sinking red sun can easily be read as a phallic symbol. The “I”’s decision to leave the ship can therefore be interpreted as a desire to escape the sexual through death, a theme already played out in “Dream of the First Night.” I am indebted to my student Jane Britting for pointing out this interpretation to me.

29 . Actually there is still another buried self in the forest, and that is the female one. Formally and significantly absent from a story that has clear Oedipal implications, the female presence can still be found in the brooding womblike presence of the forest itself.

30 . It is interesting to compare this doppelgänger drama with Henry James’s famous double story “The Jolly Corner.” Although very different in style and content, both works may be seen to have been written by men of letters attempting to work through their mixed feelings about their native country and their own past. In the case of James’s story, it is an alternative past that “might have been” and he is able to excoriate the double, “haunt the ghost,” as he puts it. In Sōseki’s story it is a past event which cannot be escaped, because the burden of self-consciousness is too heavy to be ever fully lifted. Commenting on James’s story, Karl Miller points out how often what he calls “dualistic writers” have “suffered the excitements and uncertainties of dual nationality” (K.Miller, 1987, p. 239). Sōseki also wrote mimetic fiction involving the double as well, the most famous example being Kokoro .

31 . Rimer, 1990, p. 4.

32 . D.Roden, 1990, p. 55.

33 . Another vision of the fantastic power of art, this time a gently ironic one, is Nakajima Ton’s “Sangetsuki” (1942) (trans. “Tiger Poet”) (1962). In this funny but poignant story a would-be poet is so consumed by his artistic arrogance that he turns into a tiger, but a tiger who, pitifully, still insists on repeating his less than inspired verses.

34 . D.Keene, 1984, p. 584.

35 . The critical literature on what Murakami “represents” in terms of the new generation of writers is already so vast as to constitute a scholarly cottage industry in itself! One of the most interesting of the many books on him, however, is Kuroko Kazuo’s Murakami Haruki to dōjidai no bungaku (Murakami Haruki and Contemporary Literature) (1990). In this work Kuroko discusses the notion of “reality” in contemporary literature. He also sets Murakami and Oe Kenzaburō at opposite ideological poles in the current Japanese literary world and extensively quotes Oe’s thoughtful assessment of Murakami. Oe sees Murakami’s protagonists not so much as “escapist” but rather as passive consumers of a materially abundant but spiritually empty society (p. 33) .