part0013

In our discussions of the alien and women in modern Japanese fantasy we have seen a variety of different and sometimes contradictory impulses at work. On the one hand, we have seen the fantastic used as a wish-fulfillment strategy. In the prewar period, for example, fantasy women were often seen as saviors, rescuing the male from the complexities of modernity. More rarely, the alien has also fulfilled that function, particularly in the form of Kawabata’s ghosts, who transport his protagonists into a better world or compensate them for the disappointments of the real world.

We have also seen the fantastic used as a form of revenge or attack. Izumi Kyōka’s supernatural women and demons are examples of prewar resistance, maintaining premodern beliefs and traditions in the face of modernity’s onslaught. In the postwar period the grotesques of Oe Kenzaburō and Abe Kōbō confront and horrify established society.

Both of these impulses are implicitly or explicitly involved in another strategy of the fantastic, its use as a form of ‘message,” highlighting the problems of modernity through defamiliarizing them in the most extreme fashion possible. Thus, Oba Minako’s “Yamauba no bisho” (1976) (trans. “The Smile of the Mountain Witch” (1982)), in which an ordinary woman sees herself as a mountain witch, alone in the wilderness, is both a wish-fulfillment fantasy and a message concerning the inadequacies and frustrations of women’s lives.

All the above impulses, wish-fulfillment, confrontation, and expressing a message are important subtexts to the subjects of the next two chapters, the fantastic worlds of Utopia and dystopia. More than any of the fiction thus far explored, the fantasies examined in these two chapters are “message fiction.” Using the fundamental Utopian/ dystopian tropes of a journey to an alternative world, the writers in these two chapters consciously confront the disappointing consensus reality of twentieth-century Japan .

These worlds are clearly meant to subvert the status quo. Far from being isolated wish-fulfillment fantasies (although they can function in that way as well), the Utopias described here are presented as urgent possible alternatives, blueprints for a better Japan. The dystopias described here, on the other hand, are warnings, fantastic extrapolations of alarming trends that are meant to disturb, shock, and ultimately move the reader to action.

This chapter will concentrate on Utopias, examining the Utopian novels of Miyazawa Kenji, Inoue Hisashi, Ishikawa Jun and Oe Kenzaburō. It will also include a discussion of Kurahashi Yumiko’s fascinating but problematic deconstruction of Utopia, Amanonkoku ōkanki (Record of a Voyage to the Country of Amanon) (1987) to serve as a bridge to our next chapter on the dystopian imagination. All these novels differ significantly from each other in terms of style and content but they also contain enough important similarities to develop a general paradigm of the twentieth-century Japanese Utopia: In fascinating contrast to the general stereotype of the monolithic Japan Incorporated, these are worlds that are fluid, heterogeneous, and united only in their opposition to hierarchy and the central establishment. Even at their most moderate, as in Miyazawa Kenji’s work, they are notably progressive, even radical Utopias, highlighting movement over stasis, anarchy over control.

Where do these radical Utopias come from? Are they part of an indigenous Japanese tradition or do they stem largely from Western influences? In fact, these Utopias are a largely modern phenomenon, although they do maintain some important connections with the past, notably the privileging of the pastoral over the urban on the part of Miyazawa, Inoue and Oe. It is useful, therefore, to examine the Utopian impulse in relation to Japanese culture as a whole.

Utopias, one of the most central images in all fantastic literature, have an interesting relationship to modern Japanese history. Based on the definition of a Utopia as a “place of ideal perfection, especially in law, government, and social conditions,” 1 it might be said that modern Japanese culture has been founded upon consciously Utopian longings. More than any other non-communist country, Japan in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been animated and directed by a clear-cut ideology that looked forward to a Utopian form of progress .

Obviously, other non-communist nations, most notably the United States, have been guided by ideological principles as well. What makes Japan unique is the remarkable involvement at every level, on the part of the government, private citizenry, business, and educational institutions, in a highly conscious ideology of progress. The fact that this ideology was clearly promoted in relation to the ideal of catching up with and surpassing the West does not make it any less Utopian, but it may be one of the major reasons why it was so successful.

What Gluck calls “the ideological momentum” ebbed and flowed throughout the prewar years and changed from a politically based pattern to one based more on economic attainments in the postwar period. Even so, an arguably Utopian belief in progress seems a fundamental part of both periods. In the prewar period, until the rise of the militarists in the late 1920s and early 1930s, this notion of progress consisted of modernization and Westernization, advanced through slogans such as the idealistic “Civilization and Enlightenment” and the more pragmatic “Rich Country, Strong Army”.

In the postwar years, after the Occupation, the program shifted to economic advancement and democratization. The postwar ideal was a more personal one, based on a vision of a materially comfortable and homogeneous middle-class culture supported by double-digit economic growth. Appropriately, its slogans were expressed in the material imagery of the “three c’s” (car, cooler, color) in the 1960s or the “three v’s” (villa, vacance, video) of the 1980s.

While modern Japanese society seems to be built on genuinely Utopian aspirations, the premodern period is more problematic. Certainly, a number of Western scholars of Utopianism such as Frank and Fritzi Manuel (1979) or Krishan Kumar (1987) flatly state that true Utopias are impossible to find outside the Western tradition. 4 Kumar and the Manuels base their assertion on a rather narrow definition of Utopia, derived from their analysis of the influences behind Thomas More’s original Utopia .

In their version, there are two traditional Utopian paradigms: the first is the city-state based on the writings of the ancient Greeks, above all of Plato’s Republic, combined with the post-apocalypse heavenly city of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It is this combination which produced the carefully planned, even static, ideal city-states of More’s Utopia and Campanella’s City of the Sun . The second paradigm is that of the pastoral Utopia, the Arcadia of the Greeks combined with the pre-Lapsarian Eden of the Bible, modernized in the nineteenth century into the agrarian-socialist visions of such writers as William Morris.

Even if we agree that these two paradigms are the fundamental models of Utopia, and they do appear to be the most universal, 5 there seems little difficulty in finding their functional equivalents in premodern East Asian culture, although perhaps not the detailed blueprints for a perfect society that the Manuels assert are essential to Utopia. For the static worlds of Utopia and The City of the Sun, one could easily substitute the whole Confucian tradition, with its emphasis on using order and hierarchy to create the perfect man, and, more specifically, we could mention the Confucian doctrine of a golden age under the Duke of Chou. For the Arcadian paradise, the obvious candidate would be found in the Taoist ideal of simplicity, in particular T’ao Ch’ien’s essay-poem, “Tōgenkyō” (The Peach Blossom Spring), a tale of a lost village which has inspired countless generations of East Asian writers and philosophers up to the present, where the Chinese Communists have paid it the ultimate compliment of finding the roots of a primitive socialist society inscribed in the poem.

The Japanese enthusiastically took up both of these Chinese Utopian paradigms. As mentioned above, Confucianism became the basis of the Tokugawa state, while Tōkengyō has passed into common parlance in Japanese to mean the equivalent of the Western Shangri La. Like Shangri La, the term “Tōgenkyō” not only connotes an ideal world but also one that can be reached only through fantasy.

Perhaps the Chinese archetypes were particularly popular, because the early, indigenous, Japanese tradition does not seem to contain a Utopian ideal that approaches anywhere near the complexities of the Utopian archetypes found in either the West or China. The heavens where the gods dwell in the Kojiki, the earliest Shinto writings, is neither morally nor politically superior to life on earth. Although such premodern fantasies as the legend of Urashima Taro posit a world of material abundance, in this case the palace of the Dragon King beneath the sea, this refuge has no pretensions to any spiritual or moral higher ground. Nor is there much evidence of a deliberately constructed society with superior institutions that the philosophies of both China and the West contain .

Yura Kimyoshi, a scholar of English literature, and the writer Nakamura Shinichiro put forth a number of possible reasons for the absence of Utopian vision in Japanese culture. One cause is simply the overwhelming dominance of China as an intellectual and cultural model in premodern Japan. Not only were such stories as “Urashima Taro” or the popular fantasy “Taketori Monogatari” (Tale of the Bamboo Cutter) probably Chinese in origin but, generally, all visions of ideal societies were based on Chinese models, thus making a specifically Japanese Utopia almost impossible. Yura and Nakamura also put forth more culturally based reasons. Perhaps the most interesting one is that the Japanese people did not see themselves as taking government and politics into their own hands, and thus were less likely to be either politically discontented or to envision political change as a remedy for problems around them. 6

Nakamura and Yura find in the tradition of shukke (the forsaking of the world on the part of a Buddhist priest) a possible Utopian model. But this form of ideal life, as they admit, is in many ways the opposite of the Utopian ideal, which has at its base the belief that society, rather than the individual, should change. Shukke can consequently be seen as the recognition that Utopia is fundamentally impossible to realize on a society-wide level. Intriguingly, Nakamura suggests that the shukke tradition lives on in Japanese fiction in the form of the resolutely apolitical shishōsetsu (autobiographical novel), where the writer consciously turns his back on society. 7 This “world-rejecting tradition” can also be found in postwar women’s fantasy, as was seen in Chapter 3 .

To return to the premodern tradition, however, we can discover a specifically Japanese yearning for a kind of aesthetic Utopia, as in The Tale of Genji, which speaks nostalgically of a vanished world of an elite in possession of aesthetically, if not morally, superior accomplishments. It is this ideal that Hino finds in his book Edojin to yūtopia (1977), where he suggests that upper-class interest in ancient poetic form proceeded from an aesthetic escapism that sought a better, i.e., artistically superior, world in which people were valued for their artistic accomplishments rather than their power or learning. 8 Hino also mentions the development of Kokugaku (National Learning), in particular Motōri Norinaga’s conception of the Way of the Gods, as evidence of an interest in a native, Utopian tradition. But it must be said that the Kokugaku scholar’s ideal of mono no aware (the sadness of things) is a long way from the complex and rigorous moral thought posited by Western or Chinese Utopianists or even by the Japanese Confucianists of the Edo period .

A more politically confrontational philosophy which also upholds a better world can be found in the writings of Andō Shōeki, a “forgotten thinker” of the Tokugawa period, who has been rediscovered by Japanese and Western scholars. Andō created a dystopian critique of contemporary Japan through the use of satirical animal legends. He also posited a Taoist style “Natural World,” which he placed in Hokkaido, the then remote northernmost part of Japan. In Andō’s fictional world, class and hierarchy, the cornerstones of Tokugawa institutions, were abolished. This “Natural World” has clearly Utopian elements, quite radical for the time, but Andō’s works were never widely read; in fact, he was not even published during his lifetime. Furthermore, although Andō professed to despise Chinese culture, his Utopian ideals can still be seen as having clearly Chinese influences.

If we cannot find an indigenous political Utopia in the Edo period, we can find the beginnings of the literary format that Utopian writing would eventually take: the travel narrative. In it a person from the real world voyages to various fantastic countries. Saikaku’s amorous hero’s setting sail for the Isle of Women at the end of Kōshoku ichidai otoko (1682) (trans. The Life of an Amorous Man (1963)) is one example, but the most carefully worked of these fantastic voyages is Hiraga Gennai’s mid-eighteenth-century gesaku (light or playful literature) work Fūryū shidōkenden (The Tale of the Free and Easy Asanoshin). This imaginative narrative follows its hero Asanoshin’s adventures on a magic fan to such places as the Land of Giants and the Land of Pygmies, the Land of Play and the Land of Blockheads (this last being a satire on Confucian scholars).

Fūryū shidōkenden’s fantastic countries do not approach the Utopian ideal, but their existence allows the narrative to perform one other important Utopian function—that of a highly conscious form of estrangement. The contrast of Utopian idealism with a defective reality is always implicitly in the background of any Utopian or fantastic work. Thus, as Adriana Delprat points out, Fūryū shidōkenden’s elaborate celebration of magical eroticism is in many ways an imaginative satire on the hypocrisies and repressions of the Tokugawa period. 9

Utopias, then, are more than the dictionary definition of “an ideal state,” they are alternative states. As such, they perform an important extra-literary role: to hold up an ideal as a challenge to their audience, thereby attacking either implicitly or explicitly the consensus reality. Or, as Yura Kimiyoshi in a discussion of Inoue Hisashi’s Kirikirijin (The People of Kirikiri) (1980) puts it ,

It is this inversion of reality that I would like to focus on for the rest of this chapter. To do so, we must be aware of the reality that is being inverted in order to understand the marked difference between the Utopias of the twentieth century and those of the Meiji period, for it is in the Meiji period that the first overtly Utopian novels were written. These novels were the well-known political novels (seiji shōsetsu) of the period and are little read today because of their didactic nature and simplistically allegorical narrative structure. Yet the Meiji political novel performed a vital function: it inverted the reality of post-shogunate, “backward,” agricultural Japan and presented its readers with an alternative vision of a different world that was clearly better on many fronts, at least according to the Meiji government.

Just as premodern thought had privileged China or the remote past as ideal places, Meiji Utopias were set either in the West, or (typical of the so-called “euchronic” or “ideal-time” form of Utopia) in a future, better Japan. One of the most overtly Utopian of these works is the 1886 novel Setchūbai (1966) (Plum Blossoms in the Snow) by Suehiro Tetchō, whose prologue posits a Japan of 2040 stocked with modern technology, including warships and factories, where political rule is evenly administered between the emperor and a freely elected Diet. This combination, or perhaps conflation, of modern weaponry and technology with democracy is one that the Japan of the post-war era has learned to be wary of. Indeed, the evils of technology have become a key element in most twentieth-century anti-Utopian fiction, but it is very much a positive element of Meiji ideology and therefore of the Meiji political novel as well.

Given the importance of clearly Western elements as a basis for Utopia, it is not surprising that the West looms large in the political novels of this period. The Utopias depicted in these novels naturally belong to the city-state paradigm since, in a world where Confucian values had shattered, the relatively urbanized and rationalized West offered the only other paradigm of this sort. As is clear from a cursory look at Japanese history, the West itself has been a kind of Utopia for many of the enthusiastic young writers, intellectuals, and politicians of the Meiji period. Or, if not the West per se, then the vocabulary of Westernization, its technology, its ideologies, and its literature all suggested Utopian possibilities .

Turning now to our major examples of twentieth-century Utopian novels, we find the notion of the Western Other to be an important element in virtually all of them, although the attitude toward the West changes markedly by the late twentieth century. The early Meiji faith in the West becomes ever more attenuated as we move from the prewar Miyazawa and even Inoue’s works of the 1960s, where the West is still seen as the site of exploration and Utopian possibilities, to the late 1970s and 1980s where Inoue, Oe and Kurahashi regard Western hegemony with an increasingly jaundiced eye.

This change in attitude to the West is no doubt due at least partly to Japan’s new prosperity and concomitant changing role in world politics. Given Japan’s increased independence from Western aid and Western role models, it is not surprising that we find fewer and fewer cases of the West as an ideal. In fact, Kurahashi’s Amanonkoku ōkanki (Record of a Voyage to the Country of Amanon) (1986) savagely satirizes Western theological, philosophical, and intellectual imperialism in the form of her main character, the aggressive missionary P from the aptly named Monokamikuni (One God Country). Oe and Inoue are somewhat more tolerant. Although they also give short shrift to the Western establishment, their Utopian visions do allow for the possibility of a union of marginals from all countries.

As we examine twentieth-century Utopian novels more closely, we will see other important changes in the Japanese Utopian imagination that are clearly related to alterations in Japan’s historical and global position. In general, the works discussed in this chapter move from an open-ended belief in progress and scientific enlightenment in the 1920s, i.e. Miyazawa’s short children’s novel Ginga tetsudō no yoru (Night Train to the Stars (1986)), to an increasingly narrow and less optimistic belief in change and subversion simply for their own sake, with less and less hope of a saving ideological framework. Finally, in Kurahashi’s 1986 work, the whole notion of Utopianism is called into question. Utopian visions are an important part of Japanese fantasy, as we shall see, but by the end of the twentieth century they seem increasingly difficult to implement.

We begin our explorations of Utopias with a largely positive vision, however, Ginga tetsudō no yoru (Night Train to the Stars) by Miyazawa Kenji (1896–1933). Miyazawa, a poet, essayist, and writer of children’s stories, is the most consistently optimistic of the five writers I will be discussing. This is surprising, considering that Miyazawa spent most of his short life in poverty as an agronomist in northern Japan. What sustained him was his devout belief in the Hokke sect of Buddhism, combined with a perhaps naive faith in Western-style progress. This ardent optimism marks him as an obvious descendant of the Meiji ideology of “Civilization and Enlightenment,” although the Taishō period during which he lived was, as we have seen in Chapter 5 , a more complex and ambivalent time.

Miyazawa’s writings themselves are a sometimes surreal but effective blend of his rather disparate beliefs. His works casually mix vocabulary from Buddhist doctrine with Marxist or revolutionary rhetoric, and often juxtapose this mixture against theoretical science. Thus, in one of his final poems, he challenges his readers to “try to form a new nature” and goes on to call for a “Marx of the new age” to:

Although strikingly unusual and almost verging on pastiche, these surreal combinations are held together by Miyazawa’s basic philosophy, his delight in the beauty and mystery of the cosmos and his belief in the need to understand the world through a continuing process of education. For the universe, as he says, is “ceaselessly changed by us.” Miyazawa’s “beautiful new system” is an open-ended one, a philosophy that significantly contrasts with the static Utopia traditional to both the West and to East Asia.

Nowhere is that philosophy more evident than in his famous children’s fantasy Ginga tetsudō no yoru (Night Train to the Stars). Written, and continuously revised throughout the 1920s, it was finally published posthumously in 1934 to immediate popular and critical acclaim. One of Miyazawa’s American translators even proclaims that “[n]ever before had a Japanese writer attempted a fantasy of such sustained intensity.” 12 While we may suggest Sōseki’s Ten Nights of Dream or Akutagawa’s Kappa as other possible candidates for such a description, it is certainly true that Miyazawa’s story is remarkable for its originality and sheer imaginative scope.

Ginga tetsudō no yoru is not a description of Utopia per se, but rather a narrative dealing with ways to achieve Utopia on earth. It also differs from the other Utopian works to be discussed in that its geography is overtly fantastic. But, in the long run it remains true to the Utopian ideal of inverting and ultimately improving upon the real.

Miyazawa’s tale begins with its young protagonist, Giovanni, being asked the question: “This vague white thing that some call a river, some call the Milky Way, do you know what it really is?” (p. 172) Giovanni is unable to give the technically correct reply of “stars,” but the rest of the story is really an open-ended narrative answer to that question. In Miyazawa’s vision, fantasy and science work together, so that when Giovanni finds himself aboard a train to the stars he finds that the stars are not merely balls of gas, but rather a variety of other worlds. These worlds range from the so-called “Pliocene Beach,” where a scholarly man digs up dinosaur bones, to the “Southern Cross,” a way station saturated with such Christian symbols as crowds singing “Ave Maria.”

These worlds are stops on the Galactic Railroad, which Giovanni unwittingly finds himself riding along with his best friend Campanella. Although this device of placing a representative from the “real world” on a journey to the fantastic one is typical of Utopian fiction and of fantasy in general, Giovanni’s “real world” hometown in Ginga tetsudō no yoru is a little more exotic than most. Apparently a small rural village, the hamlet contains almost no specifically Japanese elements: Giovanni searches for milk for his sick mother rather than Japanese-style gruel; he works in a small factory, rather than traditional rice planting; and his name and that of his best friend are of course Italian. Campanella, the name of Giovanni’s friend, is the same as that of one of the earliest of European Utopianists, the author of City of the Sun! Whether this exoticism is meant to deepen the fantastic quality of the story or to make it more universal (or both) there is no question that the disappointments, humiliations, and poverty that afflict Giovanni are typical of the real world and of the early stages of a children’s fantasy novel.

The train itself, the central symbol of the narrative, is also appropriate to both Utopian and children’s fantasy. As a Western import, something new and exotic, it is a more appropriate vehicle for a modern journey to new worlds than was Asanoshin’s magic fan. It is also a potentially dangerous piece of machinery, something implicitly highlighted by Giovanni’s discovery that all the people on the train except for him are dead. His friend Campanella has drowned in the village river, and the two children across from them are victims of a shipwreck. This is, indeed, as Kurihara points out, a “journey of the dead,” casting Miyazawa’s fantasy in a somewhat grimmer light. 13

The train also has an important narrative function. It is a continuously moving vehicle for which Giovanni is given a ticket that will “take him anywhere,” as one character explains. The train’s journey is an endless one, cutting across both space and time, in contrast to the closed, cyclical world of Giovanni’s life in the village.

Makoto Ueda has pointed to the Buddhist influences underlying Ginga tetsudō no yoru, in particular the doctrine of samsara, 14 repeated birth and death, as is seen when the train is delivering its load of passengers to their respective forms of heavenly rebirth. But, although the passengers on the train seem happily resigned to their fate, Giovanni’s “go anywhere” ticket suggests that he, at least, is expected to break out of the cycle, as he does, by being returned to his village and told to continue his education.

In keeping with the technological and Western implications of the train, the ticket itself suggests a Western-style valorization of progress. At the end of the journey, Giovanni is told to “hold on to your ticket …you’ve got to stride through the fire and the fierce waves of the real world. You must never lose that ticket. It’s the only real one in the Milky Way” (p. 240).

Despite its otherworldly setting, Ginga tetsudō no yoru is a Utopian fantasy that inverts reality only to insist ultimately that Utopias can and should be constructed on earth. Although the stops on the railway have a fairytale appeal, and the idea of a heavenly life after death may have initially assuaged Miyazawa’s anguish over the death of a much loved younger sister, there is no suggestion that seeking life after death is a genuine solution to problems on earth. Thus, when Giovanni meets the two victims of the shipwreck who are about to get off at the Southern Cross and go to the Christian heaven, he asks them indignantly, “Why do you have to go to Heaven? My teacher said we should build a better place than Heaven, right here” (p. 232).

Ginga tetsudō no yoru hints at the actual parameters of this “better place,” giving certain outlines of Miyazawa’s ideal of Utopia. Education is clearly important; at the end of the story a mysterious man, holding a big book, exhorts him to “study for all you’re worth” (p. 238). Miyazawa also valorized work as an art in itself, in a way reminiscent of William Morris, to whom he has been compared by Japanese scholars, and there is a short scene at the beginning of the story describing Giovanni cheerfully at work in a small factory.

But Ginga tetsudō no yoru is more than simplistic exhortations to work and study hard. Through its own narrative structure it conveys a sense of intellectual excitement and discovery. At its best, the story is a self-reflexive example of the joy of knowledge itself, leaping from the Pliocene epoch to the Christian heaven and evoking the mystery and grandeur of the universe along the way.

From the point of view of its sociohistorical context, however, Miyazawa’s apparently boundless optimism may seem a trifle disturbing, leading to a potentially one-note encomium to modernization and progress at all costs. In the world of the train, science is positively presented and authority figures are never questioned. The characters passively accept their fates.

The final message of Ginga tetsudō no yoru is more complex than a simple exhortation to acceptance, however. The subtext of the novel is based on both open-endedness and fluidity that were not a part of the rigidly authoritarian framework of the Meiji state. Not only is the train in constant movement, but the text is replete with images of fluidity, including the watery deaths of several protagonists, the seafaring work of Giovanni’s father, the Milky Way itself, and the milk that Giovanni goes in search of. All these images emphasize a world in constant flux.

Furthermore, although not overtly confrontational, Giovanni and his mother are clearly marginals, outsiders who are humiliated by the other villagers. For Giovanni to avoid the fate of his father, a seasonal worker on a fishing fleet who has possibly been imprisoned, his only way out is through education. Giovanni’s ticket is a ticket of change. Although hardly revolutionary, the story suggests that the established order must be altered. Either one escapes through death, hence the underlying grimness of the train’s basic function, or through “building a better world,” as Giovanni is advised.

Miyazawa’s fantasy is not a sophisticated vision of Utopia but it is worth examining because it provides a stepping stone between the Meiji political novel and the postwar radical Utopias to be dealt with later in this chapter. On the one hand, Miyazawa retains a conservative belief in authority and a naive faith in the potential for an earthly Utopia brought about through progress. At the same time, however, he undermines this message through various subtextual and intertextual hints.

In the works of the three writers I am about to discuss, belief in “progress” has completely disappeared, to be replaced by an anarchistic belief in “movement” or change as a value in itself. Technology and the urban world are evil, while authority figures are dangerous. There are no central beliefs to which one can adhere.

Much of this change has to do with the realities of the postwar era. The Japan of the 1950s and early 1960s was a country bereft of any overarching ideology, thanks to the wholesale discrediting of emperorcentered militarism brought about by the country’s crushing defeat in 1945. As we have seen in our previous chapters, the loss of belief in traditions was replaced by a national faith in an all-out economic drive. This faith, while it brought about an excellent educational system, an impressive corporate culture, great technological progress, and an extraordinary economic record, did little for the individual on a personal level. Male and female lives became increasingly separated as women ruled the household in their small nuclear families while men worked long days in industry and management. Children too, once they were of school age, were channelled into a demanding and hierarchical educational system that left little room for creativity or freedom.

It is not surprising that a variety of new religions appeared promising wealth and success. Perhaps most importantly, these religions offered in their very structure a sense of community which was fast disappearing in the increasingly fragmented urban landscape which makes up most of Japanese society. For those who did not embrace these new religions there seemed little else of psychic or emotional sustenance. It is also not surprising, therefore, that the postwar fantasies discussed in the previous chapters should chronicle a world in which men and women are alien beings to each other and wish-fulfillment becomes solipsistic.

What is perhaps unexpected is that during this increasingly alienating period a number of genuinely Utopian works were written, offering richly drawn alternatives to the unfulfilling material prosperity of postwar Japan. These Utopias are far more radical than the gradualist exhortations of Miyazawa’s authority figures in Ginga tetsudō no yoru (Night Train to the Stars), however. In these works Utopia is now deemed no longer possible without violent change in society as a whole. Indeed, lurking at the heart of these postwar Utopian novelists is the insistent fear that Utopia is both desperately necessary and increasingly impossible.

The allure, and the impossibility, of Utopia is fascinatingly explored in the works of Ishikawa Jun (1899–1987). Ishikawa follows Miyazawa chronologically, but his visions are far more radical and all-encompassing, including both modern Japanese society and Japanese history in their range. He is also a far more sophisticated writer than Miyazawa, with a unique and powerful vision.

Ishikawa is perhaps the least well known in the West of the writers discussed here, regrettably, because he is one of the most exciting and unusual of modern Japanese authors. Writing in a consciously anti-Naturalist style, he began creating in the 1930s what he called the “jikken shōsetsu” (experimental novel). This metafiction blended surrealism and self-reflexivity with something rare in that period, an intense and overt concern for the political problems of the time. Although never a purely Marxist writer, Ishikawa consistently wrote what has been called “resistance literature,” even during the politically repressive decade of the 1930s. Until his death he possessed a sharp eye for the problems of contemporary Japan, which he satirized savagely, while presenting fictional visions of a very different world, what his American translator has called his “lifelong dream of an unfettered existence in an anarchial millennium.” 15

To this end, Ishikawa produced a number of works highlighting what he termed “seishin no undō” (the energy of the spirit). In these works, often fantastic in nature, the characters, narrative structure, and language exist in a rapidly changing continuum where anything can happen and frequently does. Ishikawa’s writings are particularly concerned with groups and individuals who turn their energy toward revolutions.

A number of his works involve schemes to achieve Utopia on earth. These include the tawdry plot by a sinister business consortium to build a paradise in his 1961 play Omae no teki wa omae da (Your Enemy Is You), his dystopian vision of underground revolutionaries in his novella Taka (The Hawk) (1953), and his 1965 tour de force Shifuku sennen (The Millennium) (1980). In The Shifuku sennen he offers a fresh vision of the bakumatsu (end of the shogunate) years through his depiction of an alternative Edo period in which hidden Christian groups attempt to take over Edo as the shogunate crumbles.

Shifuku sennen is a dense and fascinating work, but for the purposes of this chapter I will only mention a few of the most relevant features of the novel. As in Miyazawa’s story, the protagonists who are given hope of a better world are outcasts, in this case the truly wretched of the earth, beggars, street entertainers, and those belonging to the so-called “inhuman” caste. The outcast groups are inflamed by a vision of “paradise on earth” presented to them by Kaga Naiki, the unscrupulous leader of one of the Christian factions. The beggars come close to rioting after magically Naiki heals their wounds and poverty during a sermon, only to release them back into misery when he finishes preaching.

Unlike Miyazawa, Ishikawa explicitly undermines the promise of a better world, not only by the transitoriness of the magic but also by the extreme unsavoriness of the supposed authority figures in the novel. Naiki, although mesmerizing, is also heartless and dangerous, even Satanic, as his mastery of magic suggests. Another leader is a bourgeois merchant using Christianity to further his own interests in trade with the West. The only truly Christian figure in the novel, a master dyer who follows in the steps of Saint Francis, perishes pathetically alone, pursuing an hallucinatory figure. Even the most disinterested observer, a haikai poet and perhaps the author’s representative, ends up seeking a passage aboard ship to the West.

Ishikawa’s privileging of the West as both escape and inspiration may recall Miyazawa’s use of Western imagery and vocabulary to inspire his readers, but a key difference between them lies in Ishikawa’s more tempered view of the West as an Other that cannot be re-created in Japan. Miyazawa’s heroes are expected to return and make use of their acquired knowledge, while Ishikawa’s become self-determined exiles. In both writers’ works, however, Western symbols suggest a dizzying world of freedom and excitement.

Miyazawa’s Ginga tetsudō no yoru (Night Train to the Stars) begins and ends with the fluid image of voyaging the Milky Way. Shifuku sennen (The Millennium) also has a subtext of fluidity. The novel’s first words are “mazu mizu” (first of all, water), and several important scenes take place on the rivers of Edo. But the novel’s end hearkens far beyond Edo to a vision of the greater waters of the Pacific as the crowds of Edo, no longer controlled by either the shogunate or the hidden Christians, burst forth, shouting “the ships, the Black Ships.” Shifuku sennen thus ends with a glimpse of the tidal wave of the West that is about to engulf old Japan.

Miyazawa and Ishikawa concentrate more on the potential for Utopia than on its actual realization, but one short story of Ishikawa’s, “Tora no kuni” (The Country of the Tiger) (1980), should be mentioned here as an example of one of his few visions of a successful Utopia. Although set in his favorite Edo period, “The Country of the Tiger” is a long way from the urban excitements of the capital. Instead it belongs to the pastoral paradigm, being a hidden mountain community tucked away on the borders of the far provinces of Echizen and Kaga.

A young samurai, Muriemon, lost on a hunting expedition, discovers the community, and acts as the reader’s “this-world representative” to the Utopian settlement. He discovers that the Country of the Tiger is a refuge for the outcasts of the rigidly hierarchical Edo system. Criminals, actors, masterless samurai, and prostitutes have all escaped there, but not to re-create the rigid Tokugawa polity. Rather, as one of them explains to Muriemon, “Outside they were called samurai, townsmen, tradesmen, or farmers, but here there is no such foolish name division. No one asks you your name or history. Here everyone is the same” (p. 319; my translation here and subsequently).

Even women, it seems, are treated more equitably, so that many of the prostitutes from surrounding areas come to settle there freely. There are no marriage laws. People mate with whom they please and, according to the same spokesman, “The men are happy and the women also enjoy. This is the basis of human harmony” (p. 320).

Other aspects of the community are less obviously Utopian by present-day standards. The inhabitants are much concerned with martial arts and comparing the righting styles of different fiefs. Perhaps because of this martial emphasis, the young samurai is greatly impressed, and maintains his ties with The Country of the Tiger even after his departure from it. As the narrator sums up, “The rumour of The Tiger Country’ became widely known among gamblers, thieves and outcasts…and there were those who thought of it as a kind of Tōgenkyo ” (p. 325).

Compared to the monumental Shifuku sennen (The Millennium), “Tora no kuni” is a slight work, but it prefigures some of the most important themes in the two postwar Utopias I would like to examine. First, it is about a pastoral community which, although symbolically lost on the border of two provinces, defines itself through conscious opposition to the center in its laws and customs. It does carry on the Tokugawa tradition of martial arts, but the story’s violence is never aggressive. Finally, despite being basically realistic, “Tora no kuni” has a fantastic flavor to it, as evidenced through the narrator’s linking of it to the pastoral Tōgenkyo tradition. 16

Oe Kenzaburō (1935–) has spent much of his career reworking the pastoral tradition in his own unique fashion. Many of his early works were set in a fantasy version of his own Shikoku village. These celebrations of nature and primitivism stood in contrast to the soiled and violent adult world. Frequently, his most sympathetic characters are victims of this outside world. These range from children, Koreans, and deserters to, in “Shiiku” (1958) (trans. “Prize Stock” (1977)), perhaps his most beautiful work, a captured black American soldier. A consistently anti-establishment writer, whose many causes include the mistreatment of the Korean minority and Hiroshima victims and the destruction of the environment, Oe’s basic vision might be called “anarchic humanism.”

His pastoral settings have a dark side that initially comes from the outside world of military and centrist authority. Later on, as his vision grows more complex, Oe introduces the reader to the dark side of the pastoral world itself, although he sees the violence it contains as potentially salvific. Another salvific power is the environment, in particular the invigorating and purifying effects of water, which is often seen as an avenue back to the self.

Oe’s 1979 novel Dōjidai gēmu (The Game of Contemporaneity), comments on the possibility of achieving Utopia in reality. This work takes all the previous elements of Oe’s pastorals—the uninhibited sexuality, the redemptive potential of violence, and the celebration of the outsider and the marginal—and overlays them with a complex theoretical framework derived from such critical theories as Bhaktin’s (1968) emphasis on grotesque realism and Victor Turner’s (1969) theory of liminality. The result is a dense textual forest where myth and allegory mix with deconstructionism to force the reader to play the game that Oe has constructed.

The way into the forest is through water, for Dōjidai gēmu is the story of a group of outcasts who make their way upriver into the heart of the Shikoku wilderness where they found a “village= nation=microcosmos.” Village legend has it that they are descendants of the “dark gods” who were expelled from heaven when the Sun Goddess Amaterasu (and by extension the Japanese imperial family whom Oe condemns) ascended to power. Forced to assume earthly guise in the form of outcasts of the shogunate, the villagers create a community that defines itself through confrontation with the central Japanese authority.

The leader in these conflicts is a magical figure known as “kowasu hito” (The Destroyer), so called because he destroyed a large clump of rock that blocked the way of the escapees as they travelled up-river. His redemptive destructiveness and hostility to central authority reveal his nature as a trickster figure, an outsider who leads others to attack the establishment, as Michiko Wilson points out. 17 As was the case with Ishikawa’s authority figures, however, The Destroyer is a very problematic savior. At times he seems to abandon his people completely, as at the opening of the book, where it is uncertain whether he is dead or alive.

Another problematic authority figure is the narrator, an enigmatic character who has been forced by his father, the village priest, to become the official historian of the village. He is thus the reader’s representative in this other world and also the main commentator and interpreter of the village and its meaning. This is a meaning which at times can be quite obvious, as in the explicit equation of the village with the universe, forcing the reader to be consciously aware that the novel is expressing a message.

What is Dōjidai gēmu’s message? There is of course no single one, but the text, in true Utopian tradition, places the hidden village in a positive light in comparison with the damaged real world outside. This contrast becomes a direct confrontation in the “Fifty Days War” against what the narrator calls “the Great Empire of Japan.” Although the village loses the war, it puts up a brave defense through various tricks and stratagems that humiliate the Japanese soldiers without causing too many losses on their own side. The soldiers defeat the rebels by threatening to burn down their forest, a sacrifice of the environment that the villagers cannot make.

The village’s conduct of the war contains many elements that are in Utopian contrast to that of the central authorities. The village army is an aggressively egalitarian one that includes old people, women, and children. They humiliate the Japanese army rather than kill them. Although hardly pacifists, their violence is shown to be anarchic and cleansing, not imperialistic and oppressive. Their defeat is a noble one, based on their sacralization of the environment.

The villagers’ refreshing iconoclasm, especially in relation to what Oe sees as the typically Japanese attitude of unthinking acquiescence, is evident in their willingness to lampoon authority even after their defeat. In one scene, for example, the narrator’s father, forced to lead the worship at the state-sponsored Mishima shrine, dresses up in a bizarre costume and leads the crowd in derisive laughter at the imperial ritual.

As the above scene suggests, Dōjidai gēmu parodies a number of contemporary events in Japanese history. The Mishima shrine incident is certainly an attack on the writer Mishima Yukio and his emperorcentered nationalism. The villagers, with their redemptive laughter and japery suggest the correctly cynical attitude to take toward what Oe considers to be obscurantist chauvinism.

By defining itself so clearly in opposition to the center, however, the village contains violent aspects that make it a very radical form of Utopia. This is most apparent in a sequence in which the novel fantastically parodies the upheavals of the 1960s, through the tale of the “Great Upheaval:” Driven by a strange sound, the young people force the elders to leave their own houses and move into the homes of other villagers until the entire village is topsy turvy. This generational boundary crossing and transgressing of established hierarchies echoes the youth movements that occurred throughout both the West and East Asia in the 1960s.

The Great Upheaval’s inversion of society has aspects that are both repressive and refreshing. Through being coerced into leaving their homes, families lose their traditional bonds and even marriage vows are broken. Somewhat as in “Tora no kuni” (The Country of the Tiger), people mate with whom they please after the upheaval. Indeed, one older woman, The Destroyer’s wife, keeps many of the village young men in sexual thrall, adding to the omnipresent sense of chaos.

Although The Destroyer’s wife is reminiscent of Mao’s wife and the Gang of Four’s depredations during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Great Upheaval also suggests the student-establishment clashes that disordered Japan in the 1960s. This period of near-anarchy (at least in the educational system) was a time which could be looked upon as either liberating or alarming depending on one’s position in the political spectrum. In the case of Dōjidai gēmu such chaos is clearly viewed as a positive form of empowerment on the part of the formerly powerless.

Cutting back and forth between myth, history, and contemporary Japan, Dōjidai gēmu ultimately becomes an inverted history of modern Japan as seen from the periphery, and it is this valorization of the margins which is perhaps the most Utopian aspect of the novel. Oe is not presenting this village as a perfect society in a rigidly Utopian sense. As Kurihara Akira says, “It is no more than a place deep in the mountains with trees and a bubbling stream summoning forth a community.” 18 It is also violent, primitive, and anarchic but, in Oe’s vision, the disorder of nature and social anarchy are infinitely preferable to the monolithic, repressive world of modern Japan.

Oe’s notion of an alternative marginal community in violent antagonism to the central Japanese authority and by extension, the consensus reality of modern Japan is echoed and amplified in Inoue Hisashi’s long comic novel Kirikirijin (The People of Kirikiri) (1986). Less ambitious in intellectual scope than Dōjidai gēmu, Kirikirijin comments on Japanese history in its own humorous and colorful way. This richly detailed fantasy of a rural village that declares its independence from Japan shows, perhaps even more clearly than Oe’s novel, what modern Japan has lost.

This loss is most obviously expressed in terms of rural versus urban values and institutions. Inoue shares with Oe a desire to validate the pastoral and the communal over the urban, fragmented worlds of contemporary Japan. He is also keenly aware of the loss of history and the folk tradition, although, again like Oe, Inoue is not interested in official histories. Instead, he looks in history for the lost voices of the common people. Inoue, a comic writer and playwright, resembles Oe and Miyazawa in that he comes from a rural background (in fact, both he and Oe have written on Miyazawa), 19 and he shares Oe’s and Ishikawa’s left-wing political attitudes.

Although Inoue’s works lack Oe’s intellectual depth and complexity, they contain other narrative riches, one of them being a brilliant use of language. Kirikirijin is written almost entirely in rural Tohoku dialect and tells its story largely through dialogue, thus giving the novel an unusual freshness and immediacy. The language used encapsulates the difference between Inoue’s Utopian village characters and the representatives of the “real world” who speak standard Japanese. 20

The accomplished use of dialogue also allows the characters to seem strikingly and memorably three-dimensional. Inoue’s most notable accomplishment, however, may well be his seamless blending of the fantastic and the quotidian, rendering the village of Kirikiri utterly believable and at the same time unarguably Utopian. It is not surprising that Kirikirijin won both the Yomiuri award and an award for best science fiction the year it was published.

As Ishikawa does in Shifuku sennen (The Millennium) Inoue posits a fictional “what would happen if…” situation. In this case the scenario involves what would happen if a small village in the northern Tohoku area of Japan decided to declare its independence. The novel begins on the borders of the little village named Kirikiri as hijackers stop a Tohoku-bound train carrying, among others, a middle-aged writer named Furuhashi who is in search of rumored buried treasure in the district.

The train is boarded by a group of people, including a small boy holding a rifle. They explain that the train has entered the independent country of Kirikiri and demand that the passengers present their passports. Since he, along with most of the passengers, is not carrying his passport, Furuhashi is led off to the Kirikiri National Jail and becomes a spectator and then a participant in the drama of Kirikiri independence.

Through his eyes we learn that Kirikiri is indeed an independent country with a president, a National Theater (formerly the strip show), various national treasures and even the Kirikiri National Anthem which is sung for the benefit of Japanese audiences in an NHK television interview. The singers include a number of civic leaders, including the hijackers of Furuhashi’s train, who are led by Miss Abe Maria, the chief dancer of the Kirikiri National Nude Theater. The actual anthem comes as a surprise to their audience since it includes such lyrics as:

As should be clear by now, Kirikirijin is a clever satire on many of the conventions that modern Japan holds most dear. Through the mock seriousness of the National this and National that, not to mention the whole notion of cultural offerings controlled by a national establishment, Inoue pokes fun at the kind of pomposity involved in so many of the rituals of the modern Japanese state. But Kirikirijin is more than just satire, it also offers a genuine alternative to the society it parodies.

The most fundamental aspect of this way of life is what might be called agrarianism, a concept of salvation through working and living with nature, that Inoue shares with Oe and Miyazawa. Inoue’s attitude is closer to Miyazawa’s than Oe’s, since his valorization of rural labor is reminiscent of Miyazawa’s agricultural-cooperative-based view of the world, not the surreal primitivism espoused by Oe.

Other aspects of Kirikiri society are both more imaginative and more unusual than in the other Utopian works discussed. Both men and women seem to participate fairly equally in society and politics. There is even an amusing sequence involving a male strip show, in which Furuhashi unwittingly and embarrassingly participates, that suggests not only equality of the sexes but sexual equality as well.

Another intriguing element of Kirikiri’s new order is the parliament which consists of an old bus called the kokkai gijidōsha (a pun combining the Japanese word for parliament and vehicle). The kokkai gijidōsha moves throughout the village picking up whoever would like to participate in politics. Its core members consist of such personages as a woman poet, who later becomes Furuhashi’s fiancée, the young boy who helped hijack the train, and a number of elderly farmers. Combining women, children, and the elderly, the kokkai gijidōsha is reminiscent of Oe’s ragtag army, with the added aspect of continuous motion. The bus thus becomes the quintessential symbol of an inverted society where outcasts are empowered and where there is no established center.

The rather dim-witted but ultimately tragicomic Furuhashi is the perfect representative from our real world to introduce the reader to Kirikiri. From a rural background himself, Furuhashi went to the city at an early age and became, almost accidentally, what the narrator terms a “hack writer.” As the novel progresses Furuhashi becomes increasingly pleased to have broken his urban exile and to have found, in the congenial inhabitants of Kirikiri, the family that he never had possessed. It is no doubt significant that Furuhashi’s only successful book is called In Search of a Lost Memory. The lost memory he finally discovers is his appreciation for the rural traditions of Kirikiri.

Furuhashi does more than observe. He is, in fact, forced to become an important part of the entire independence process. In quick succession he is given the Kirikiri National Poetry Prize, the Kirikiri National Fiction Prize and the Kirikiri National Essay Prize. Along with this metamorphosis into a national treasure, the end of the novel finds Furuhashi transformed by the advanced medical techniques of Kirikiri National Hospital into a female terrorist, who then becomes the president. As president, the unfortunate Furuhashi brings about the destruction of Kirikiri at the hands of the Japanese Self Defence Force through a typical slip of the tongue.

In some ways, the destruction of Kirikiri is thematically necessary. Inoue himself has said of the community he created that Kirikiri could not have continued without losing the very momentum and dynamism on which it was based, thereby necessitating another Kirikiri independence movement and then another and another. 21 Furthermore, even though the villagers are by and large positively portrayed—the authority figures are probably the most positive and least intimidating of any of the postwar works discussed here—the novel contains hints of a darker side to the society. The hospital where Furuhashi is transformed into a woman, for example, performs experiments on human beings of a bizarre and unpleasant nature.

Furuhashi’s final transformation into a woman is also problematic. Although the notion of boundary and gender crossing can be seen as liberating, as we saw in our discussion of the alien in Chapter 4 , it also suggests a dizzying and ultimately disturbing pace of change that hints at a world potentially out of control. Furthermore, although, on the whole, women come across quite sympathetically in Inoue’s work, the notion of a woman as terrorist evokes the fundamental lack of sympathy or connection between male and female that, as we have seen, has become an important theme in postwar fantasy.

Kirikirijin also deals with capitalism in a somewhat ambivalent fashion. The very money that built the hospital and financed Kirikiri’s independence movement is problematic. Although this money is actually the buried treasure that Furuhashi came to Tohoku to look for, and thus has an appealingly fairytale aspect to it, it plays a potentially subversive role in the agrarian economy on which the original Kirikiri is proudly based. And it is surely not an unconscious Freudian slip on the part of Inoue that he has the villagers hide the money in the sewers of the hospital, thus implicitly equating money with waste, something to be gotten rid of rather than treasured.

Despite these occasional shadows, however, Kirikirijin is perhaps the most effective Utopian novel to be written in modern Japan, for two reasons. The first reason is that, of all the works discussed in this chapter, it possesses a carefully worked out political philosophy at its heart, what might be called progressive agrarianism. This stands in important contrast to the works of Miyazawa, Ishikawa and Oe, who are less concerned with the quotidian details of political institutions than they are with delineating the empowering or at least confrontational aspects of their respective philosophies. Moreover, Inoue’s agrarian philosophy is one that is vividly realized in the speech, actions, and vehicles (e.g. the kokkai gijidōsha) of his characters.

The second reason behind the success of Inoue’s Utopian vision is that it leaves the reader yearning to visit the Utopian community realized on its pages. This is partly due to the extraordinary appeal and vividness of its remarkably three-dimensional characters. It is also due to its literally down-to-earth setting, as opposed to the classic Utopian novel which tends to dwell on the elite layers of society. In fact, both Kirikirijin and Dōjidai gēmu have been called examples of the “new” political novel, a novel which, according to Kurihara Akira, inverts the traditional political novel of the Meiji period, with its emphasis on the kokka or national polity, by turning it upside down, “submerging the state within daily life.” 22 It is this daily life, albeit a rather unusual daily life in an alternative world, that Inoue presents so seamlessly.

Mentioning the genre of political novels has brought us full circle from the urban, technologically advanced, and politically centralized Utopias of the Meiji period to the pastoral, narratively open-ended fantasies of anarchistic outcasts that characterize the postwar period. Setchūbai’s prologue opened with the cannon’s booming announcement of the 200th year of the Meiji state. To see how much the postwar idea of Utopia as changed, we might consider the parodic dance around the shrine by the priest in Dōjidai gēmu or the subversively funny Kirikiri national song. On a more agrarian note, one could consider Furuhashi’s summing up of what Kirikiri is:

These postwar Utopias subvert the consensus reality of modern Japan on a variety of levels. They largely reject the ideal of urban living and warn of the dangers of reliance on technology. They question the solemnity and rigidity of established institutions and undermine the notion of patriarchal authority. Most importantly, they offer sites of free play for the imagination and the soul, through humor, creativity, and psychic energy.

Of these, one of the more surprising is that all of these works, despite their celebration of an older pastoral Japan and the generally suspicious attitude toward Western hegemony mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, delineate societies strongly open to international influences. 23 Miyazawa accepts these influences most uncritically in his joyous welding of Darwinism, Marxism, scientific theory, and the celebration of the natural world. But even Ishikawa, a confirmed lover of Edo culture and tradition, ultimately suggests that his protagonists in Shifuku sennen must seek their Utopias beyond the Tokugawa barrier in the promise of the Western Black Ships. Oe and Inoue are even more explicitly international. Oe begins Dōjidai gēmu in Mexico with his narrator mulling over the role of peripheral nations such as Mexico and Japan vis-à-vis the center.

Inoue goes furthest in this international alignment of non-central nations. Kirikiri hosts the Kirikiri International Table Tennis World Cup to which representatives of all the alternative communities around the world are invited, from members of the Quebec Liberation Front and the American Indian Movement to the founders of the “Republic of Frestonia,” a squatter’s town in London, and the leaders of the Scottish independence movement. Naturally, this “internationalization” is of a very different kind from what the Meiji leaders might have dreamed of, or what post-war Japan’s political leaders are calling for today. Rather, it might be called an “alternative internationalization,” a gathering together with foreign groups who also oppose the technological authoritarianism that Westernization and modernization have wrought.

In their celebration of liminality, marginality, and anti-technological attitudes, the postwar Japanese works have a good deal in common with other contemporary Western Utopianists, such as Ursula K.Le Guin. In particular, the valorization of liminality is a notion common to almost all contemporary Western Utopian literature in which “narrative stasis is overcome by ambiguity, contradiction and fragmentation.” 24 Where once the state could promise Utopia, now only the antagonists to the state can hope to bring it about, and their Utopias inevitably exist in dynamic opposition to the central authority.

What is perhaps unusual about this emphasis is that it should be Japan, a notably homogenous country, which hosts writers who so, consistently emphasize the marginal. This in itself may be a reaction against the very homogeneity that politicians such as former Prime Minister Nakasone are wont to celebrate. It also may be an implicit admission of Japan’s own peculiar status in the contemporary world, a modern nation that is ultimately neither East nor West .

The anti-technological stance and the concomitant concern for the environment expressed in both Oe’s and Inoue’s work are also common to contemporary Western Utopian writers. In the case of Japan, however, this message may have more urgency than elsewhere, because of the small size of Japan and the breadth of environmental disruption that has already occurred there.

Another similarity with contemporary Western writers is narrative technique, especially the use of fantasy or surrealism. Both Japanese and Western authors are increasingly willing to use the fantastic to make their Utopian points, unlike many authors of mainstream fiction. Again, this is most notable in Japan, which has less of a Utopian tradition and must also contend with the still powerful influence of the shishōsetsu .

Finally, unlike the traditional static Utopias, contemporary Utopias in both Japanese and Western fiction invariably revolve around process rather than goal. This is reflected not only in the aforementioned notion of constantly evolving Utopias that have become a staple of postwar literature, but also within the texts themselves by their consistent emphasis on movement and fluidity. Miyazawa’s fantasy highlights the train and the fluidity of time and space. Ishikawa emphasizes flowing water, from the rivers of Edo to the Black Ships which symbolize both change and escape. Oe privileges movement itself in the anarchic momentum of the Great Upheaval which forces villagers into different houses and positions in life, and in the continued pattern of The Destroyer’s death and rebirth.

Inoue privileges movement within the community through the image of the constantly circulating kokkai gijidōsha, a genuine example of bringing politics to the people. He also highlights movement in general, most importantly through the use of the hijacked train that brings Furuhashi to Kirikiri. An inverted echo of Miyazawa’s train that cuts across space and time, Inoue’s train goes backwards into Japan’s past, the agrarian village, and forward to the future, the newly independent, technically advanced Kirikiri.

It should be noted that Miyazawa’s train brings his protagonist not only a vision of a better world but also the tools to build that world through education. Giovanni’s “go-anywhere” ticket leads to a better future, as long as he is willing to work for it. By contrast, Inoue’s train is finally more of a train to the past. Despite the high-tech aspects of the new hospital and the village’s international visitors, Inoue is essentially celebrating the lost world of agrarian Japan. As Yamada Yuji says, “this tale is a scathing indictment of modern Japan’s progress through abandonment of agriculture and it is also a call for a return to the original Japan.” 2 5

The impossibility of this return highlights a problem in the Utopian longings of both Oe and Inoue. They cannot help but find Utopian aspects in a simpler past, but is such a yearning ultimately regressive rather than radical? In fact, Oe and Inoue constantly and explicitly wrestle with the pervasive influence of natsukashisa (nostalgia). Oe has tried to depersonalize and deconstruct natsukashisa through theoretical constructs which help him universalize his village=microcosmos.

But this attempted theoreticization also lessens the literary impact of Dōjidai gēmu, making it seem at times more like a political treatise than a novel. Interestingly, in 1986 Oe published his mimetic Natsukashi toshi e no tegami (Letters to the Nostalgic Years), a work which deals with the attempt to build a Utopian community in a small Shikoku village. In this work Oe accepts and even celebrates his own nostalgia, at the same time acknowledging its impossibility as a working method for society’s salvation, thus, by extension, acknowledging the impossibility of creating a genuine Utopia.

Inoue accepts natsukashisa (nostalgia) and even plays on it. The title of his hero Furuhashi’s only successful book refers not only to the protagonist’s lost memory but to the lost memory of the Japanese people. Poignantly, the mysterious narrator of Kirikirijin turns out to be the ghost of a former peasant leader who rebelled against the Meiji polity. Like Oe’s Shikoku village, then, Inoue’s community is ultimately constituted both through the positives of the rural Japanese community and the negatives of existing as an anti-establishment, anti-centrality, and anti-emperor community, a recovery of non-elite history. The inevitable destruction of this dynamic amalgamation of positives and negatives that constituted Kirikiri only underlines both its nostalgic quality and its unattainability.

The narrative movement and fluidity that these works share with other contemporary Utopian texts may be a product of the writers’ implicit awareness of the dizzying rate of change in the modern world, especially Japan. In Miyazawa’s writing change is positive. The swiftly moving galactic railroad brings about only improvement.

While the necessity for change is accepted in the works of the three other writers, their attitude toward change is sometimes ambivalent. Ishikawa’s protagonists attempt to flee the immense changes that they themselves have helped to bring about. Oe believes in process over progress, as shown in the voyage upriver and in the Great Upheaval. Inoue gives positive value to the people’s movement, represented by the kokkai gijidōsha, but his symbol of technological progress, the hospital, is an ominous one. Even more problematic are the changes that Furuhashi, the everyman, is subjected to, from hack writer, to national treasure, to woman terrorist president. These dizzying but in some ways meaningless changes suggest a postmodern vision of a world with no center and no base.

The center is what the postwar Japanese Utopianists profess to despise, because the center and the establishment are not only repressive in themselves but are ultimately aligned with the emperor system. In fact, one of the commentators on Shifuku sennen suggests that Inoue’s highlighting of water and fluidity is connected to the lack of anything besides the emperor as a center for Japanese culture. 26 Finding Japanese high culture empty, Utopian writers must turn to the people. Inverting the emperor system, they seek to find a new hope in the energy below. Whether they do or not remains unclear.

All these Utopias are surrounded by imagery of death. Miyazawa’s train carries dead passengers, while Kirikirijin’s narrator is a ghost. Ishikawa’s one truly “Christian” protagonist dies alone. Oe’s village is shaped like a gigantic coffin, one reason why the superstitious Great Japanese Empire left it alone for so long. Characteristically, Oe inverts this notion of death into a positive one and has his narrator suggest that the powers of darkness are not only morally superior but will conquer the myth of the imperial center, just as The Destroyer will return once again. The dead being reborn is a truly Utopian notion, testifying both to the despair with which these writers view modern Japan and to the faith that they somehow manage to retain in the prospect of its rebirth.

Ishikawa’s most overtly Utopian works were published in the 1950s and 1960s while the two novels discussed by Oe and Inoue appeared in the late 1970s. Oe’s vision of a pastoral refuge continued through the 1980s in such mimetic works as the previously mentioned Natsukashi toshi e no tegami (Letters to the Nostalgic Years) (1986) and in his venture into science fiction Chiryōto (Tower of Healing) (1990). In general, however, the paradigm of a pastoral Utopia seems to have lost some of its appeal by the end of the 1980s as younger writers such as Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana increasingly turned toward dealing with the complexities of city life. Murakami, as we will see in the next chapter, does engage with the problems of Utopia and dystopia but his vision is far less revolutionary or all-encompassing than those of the older writers, and it is questionable whether they actually constitute a Utopia at all.

One writer in the 1980s who does present a form of Utopia, albeit with tongue in cheek perhaps, is Kurahashi Yumiko. I would like to end this chapter with a discussion of her unique Utopian novel Amanonkoku ōkanki (Record of a Voyage to the Country of Amanon). Kurahashi’s work may be considered more a deconstruction of Utopia than a vision of an actual ideal place in itself, and as such is a particularly useful bridge to our next chapter, an examination of the anti-Utopia or dystopia in modern Japanese fiction.

Kurahashi’s Utopian world differs from the others described above in a number of important ways: first, it is clearly an “Other” world, one reached by spaceship; second, it is highly urban and largely static, a throwback to the traditional Utopia; finally and most importantly, it is a world in which women are dominant. Amanonkoku ōkanki has in common with the other three post-war works a problematizing of the very notion of Utopia, but in this case the impossibility of Utopia is based almost solely on the problem of sexual difference.

The reasons for the lack of commonalities between Kurahashi’s work and that of the other writers discussed in this chapter are worth speculating about. Her interest in female-dominated Utopia relations may have something to do with the fact that Kurahashi is the only female writer discussed in this chapter, although, as we have seen, male-female relationships have been a fruitful subject for virtually all the male writers examined in this book. At least as likely a reason for Kurahashi’s uniqueness may also be due to her relative lack of ideological commitment in comparison to the other writers.

Although Kurahashi was considered at her debut to be indebted to Oe, she is in fact far less overtly ideological than her presumed mentor and has always maintained a more jaundiced eye with regard to political action. She is a female writer who deals with politics, religion, and society, but she can be labelled neither Marxist nor feminist, choosing instead to play the astringent outside observer. In certain ways she is a metapolitical writer, concerned with politics and ideology but refusing to promote any particular program.

The complexity of Kurahashi’s thought and attitudes is on full display in Amanonkoku ōkanki . This work creates what at first glance seems to be a feminist Utopia privileging a separatist female state in which women dominate and men are virtually invisible. As it turns out, the Utopian aspects of her fictional country of Amanon are highly suspect, and the reader is made to realize the impossibility of such simplistic Utopian gender reversal. In doing so the reader is forced to question a number of his or her assumptions, not only about sex roles, but about the possibility of Utopia in general.

Kurahashi leads the reader to these questions through her male protagonist P. This choice of protagonist is an intriguing one, for it is through P’s highly chauvinistic gaze that the reader encounters Amanon. P is so chauvinistic, in fact, that for a long time he is incapable of recognizing that the leaders of Amanon are all female.

Blessed with a generous inheritance upon his father’s early death, P was allowed sufficient leisure to enjoy himself. After spending a lengthy time at university in the departments of medicine and engineering where he obtained the general expertise and medical knowledge required for adventuring overseas, he entered the Monokami Sect Collegio, as the training school for missionaries was called, expecting in the near future to become a member of a missionary expedition bound for the country of Amanon.

This slightly pompous opening situates the novel squarely within the Utopian paradigm of a journey to another country that will turn out to be spiritually and technologically superior to the voyager’s own. Indeed, upon his arrival, P is favorably impressed by almost all aspects of Amanon. Compared to the vast barrenness of his own country of Monokamikuni, Amanon is a beautiful, peaceful, and humane land.

Even the food is better, as P learns through the countless banquets (described in detail) that punctuate his visit, for his hosts are a very hospitable people. Although Amanon has been closed off from other countries for hundreds of years, the elite of Amanon are tolerant of P’s new religion and are also excited about the possibilities of what they intaka, which is short for intakōsu (presumably a pun on the English “intercourse”) and is used in relation to internationalization.

The only aspect of Amanon that gives P pause is its most important one. He discovers about mid-way through the novel that virtually everyone he encounters, from the so-called peepu, the elite, and their sekure, or secretaries, down to the lowly fisherfolk who discover him on arrival in Amanon, is female. Women have achieved this dominance through careful breeding techniques in which girl babies predominate and male babies are relegated to either an underclass or to a eunuch caste.

Judging only by this summary, Amanon seems to fit comfortably into the paradigm of Western feminist Utopias from Herland to Woman on the Edge of Time; small, separate communities based on principles of harmony and non-aggression in which women are either dominant or demonstrably equal. 27 Although Amanon is larger than most feminist Utopias, it can still be seen as a separatist state constituted in opposition to the center, if we take the center to be P’s vast country of Monokamikuni. Furthermore, as is typical with feminist Utopias, sexual relationships (exclusively between women, in this case) are gentle and tender, as opposed to the implied brutality and danger of male-female relationships.

As it turns out, P is indeed dangerous, although in a more subtle and complex way than the Manichean dichotomies of purer feminist dystopias would dictate, and it is with P’s increasingly active function within the narrative that Amanonkoku ōkanki begins to reverse the typical dynamics of a Utopian work. For P, unlike the traditionally passive Utopian protagonist, brings his own agenda to Amanon. This agenda consists of the promotion of what he calls “osu kakumei” (male revolution) in the name of Monokamiism. P promotes this revolution through a surprisingly open series of moves: he sets himself up in Tokio, the capitol of Amanon, with a eunuch adviser and a beautiful sekure named Himeko, and begins a campaign to go to bed with as many women as possible.

The campaign is outrageously successful. Far from being disgusted by his advances, as one might expect the inhabitants of a feminist Utopia to be, the peepu actually go out of their way to solicit sexual contact with P. In a short time, P ends up as master of ceremonies on a live television sex show called “Monopara” (short for “Monokami Paradise”) complete with hired believers, a shamaness, and a special guest with whom he engages in sex in front of a live audience. Both audience and partner are invariably delighted by this display and “Monopara” becomes the most highly rated show in Amanon.

Its success is short-lived, however. The country of Amanon starts to undergo a series of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and other cataclysms, leading scientists to predict the country’s ultimate destruction. P decides to flee back to Monokamikuni, taking with him his sekure Himeko and a select group of peepu. The last textual description of him places him asleep in his flying saucer, apparently heedless of the destruction around him.

In the novel’s epilogue we finally learn the real secret of Amanon and its destruction. It is P himself, it turns out, who has brought about the catastrophe, but he has done it with the willing compliance of the country’s own elite. For Amanon is not actually a place, but a body, a female body belonging to a certain “Mrs. Amanon,” as the novel’s epilogue makes clear. Its final scene consists of the birth of a baby to “Mrs. Amanon,” the product, presumably, of P’s efforts inside her body. Amanonkoku ōkanki is thus the portrait of a Utopia which self-destructs, and the reasons for this self-destruction revolve around the issue of sexual difference.

From the beginning the text gives some very overt hints concerning Amanon’s true nature. P’s voyage to the country is described in the following memorable (and in retrospect, obvious) manner: In a wrenching departure, P is shot into space along with hundreds of his comrades, each encased in small saucer-shaped vessels, that go bursting into air. Arriving in the vicinity of Amanon, P’s vessel penetrates with great speed and force a gelatinous barrier, and enters a long tubelike passageway in which P loses consciousness, just as he senses that he is approaching a large central cavity.

Anyone familiar with Woody Alien’s film Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask, in which Woody Alien plays a sperm, can probably understand the full implications of P’s journey. But P is not only sperm he is also “penis,” and it is the introduction of this sexual difference into Amanon that inexorably brings about the country’s demise. This is obvious from P’s very first encounter with the inhabitants of Amanon, a group of fisherwomen who find him washed up unconscious on the beach.

P awakens in a mood of quiet contentment surrounded by caressing images, a warm breeze, the gentle regularity of the ocean, evocative of existence in the womb. This comforting imagery changes abruptly when P finds himself surrounded by a dozen naked female legs. He knows that they are female because, even though he cannot see the owners’ faces, his peculiar vantage point (on his back looking up) allows him to focus on their most “feminine part.” Stimulated by this view, P’s body reacts automatically, causing the owners of the legs, the fisherwomen, to scream in consternation, probably because the sight is a totally unfamiliar one.

Not only is P’s anatomy unfamiliar to them but his language is as well. When P tries to speak to them, using polite, old-fashioned Amanon dialect, they don’t understand. Giving up in disgust, one of the women says, “This person must be mad,” whereupon another disagrees: “Person, this is not a person. This is a man!” (p. 16).

Of even more importance is the shift from the gentle womblike quality of P’s awakening to his immediate metamorphosis into mature sexual awareness upon seeing the women’s genitals. If Moylan is correct, and all Utopias are quests for home, then P awakens into “home,” literally the womb, the place of the imaginary before the constitution of difference, according to Lacan. But he is unable to accept this return to the womb and his sexuality rends the imaginary by forcing difference in three significant areas: first, through the signifying power of P’s genitals, which frightens and confuses the women; second, through his male gaze, which morselizes the women into “their most feminine part,” and finally, through language, which both he and the women fight to control.

Throughout the novel P uses all three methods to forward his “male revolution.” His sexual organ is the most obvious and most immediately successful of his weapons, for, with the crucial exception of his sekure, Himeko, the women of Amanon all enjoy their initiation into heterosexual activity. Although much of this activity is described in a lighthearted fashion, the underlying theme is deadly serious. As Foucalt points out, “[Sex] is an especially dense transfer point for relations of power,” 28 and the power struggle that P and the women engage in is one that ultimately destroys Amanon.

But P’s destructive power is not only of the genital variety. His gaze is also an important factor, a particularly intrusive one in a world that supposedly constitutes a feminist Utopia. The fact that the novel is constructed only through P’s perspective allows the reader to vicariously participate in his consistent morselization of the female body. Kurahashi plays on the reader’s normal desire to identify with the main character, a temptation that was easy to give in to with such works as Ginga tetsudō no yoru (Night Train to the Stars) or Kirikirijin . But, P’s inability to see women as a whole can be fundamentally disturbing to the reader who sees through his eyes. Furthermore, it aligns with the third strategy of control in P’s agenda, the contest for domination of the language.

What P brings to Amanon is the word of the father, Monokamiism, which literally means “One Godism” but is obviously phallogocentrism. This is made clear both through P’s aggressive and invasive actions and through his explanation of how writing is considered the highest value in Monokamiism. It is the phallus as pen which controls the word, the realm of language which all humans are eventually forced to enter, away from the realm of the imaginary, the Utopian union with the mother.

But if the phallus controls the word in Monokamikuni, the situation is more fluid in the country of Amanon. For example, although the women do not write histories, they do produce romances. And at the climax of Amanonkoku ōkanki a woman takes it upon herself to control the phallus. This woman is Himeko, P’s young sekure and the only woman who has spurned his advances. Seemingly changing her mind, Himeko agrees to appear with P on his television show as a sex partner but, when the actual moment comes, she attempts to castrate him with a knife. In a Lacanian sense, Himeko has decided to write her own story, refusing to accept P’s domination over her. 29

And yet, P and Himeko’s fundamental inability to connect encapsulates the problem of difference which Amanonkoku ōkanki deconstructs. Unlike the other works discussed here (with the possible exception of Kirikirijin ), Amanonkoku ōkanki is essentially a tragedy. Its bleak message seems to be that male and female together can create only problems, ruining any hope of a genuine Utopia.

Although the Utopia limned in Amanonkoku ōkanki has serious limitations, and in many ways could be considered more a satire on modern-day Japan than a genuine idealized state, it is still a peaceful and harmonious society, clearly superior to the fierce, brutal land of Monokami (which has obvious echoes of the West, especially America) 30 from which P comes.

The tragedy of Amanon is not entirely P’s fault. In a final grotesque twist, the creature that “Mrs. Amanon” gives birth to is so horrific that the doctors cannot bear to look at it, and the text makes it clear that it is a product of both P and Mrs. Amanon. In fact, some of the most surprising scenes in the novel show the wholehearted enthusiasm with which the women of Amanon greet P’s sexual overtures.

In the long run, however, all the characters in Amanonkoku ōkanki, both male and female, are fighting for power, since the elite hope to manipulate P as much as he plans to use them. It is this struggle, endemic to humanity in general, which also characterizes the impossibility of Amanon’s continuation. In this regard it is important that the ultimate site for this fight for power is the womb. As Patricia Waugh says, “the female body is an area where the struggle for control is likely to be enacted because it has come to signify the threat of incorporation and the loss of identity.” 31

This “threat” may be the real reason why P insists on his male revolution despite his genuine admiration for Amanon and his initial enjoyment of his womblike state. P’s insistence on departing the womb is an interesting contrast to Inoue’s and Oe’s two postwar Utopias which are clearly searches for Heimat, albeit a different form of home than that with which the establishment has presented them. Inoue and Oe also valorize history, as long as it is from the margins, while Kurahashi implicitly problematizes it as something exclusive to men, in comparison with the romances which women write. And yet Kurahashi, Inoue, and Oe all share a certain pessimism as to the possibility of achieving an actual Utopia for any real length of time. Oe and Inoue at least show their characters working for its achievement while Kurahashi suggests that human nature is such that Utopias will always be an impossibility.

Just as the thing which emerges from Mrs. Amanon’s body is a product of both male and female, so is the often grotesque world of reality which Kurahashi brilliantly defamiliarizes in the novel. Through her writing, Kurahashi is able temporarily to take over the language of the father to create for a brief fictional space the Utopian world of Amanon. That she destroys it, is, like Inoue’s destruction of Kirikiri, a tribute to her willingness to go beyond Utopian day-dreams and squarely confront dystopian reality.

The works examined in this chapter have described alternative worlds which, if not perfect, are at least potentially better places. Although differing widely from one another, these “better places” have a number of key elements in common: First and foremost they provide a sense of community, even, in the case of P in Amanonkoku ōkanki, a literal “womb” to which to return. As an alternative to the real Japan’s increasing urbanization and attendant alienation, Inoue and Oe suggest a nostalgic rural “hometown” which offers comfort, connection, and escape. Ishikawa’s “Tora no kuni,” although set in the Edo period, envisions a mountain refuge safe from the central hierarchy. The ending of the prewar Ginga tetsudō no yoru (Night Train to the Stars) offers hope that Giovanni’s father will return and that the family will be happily reconstituted.

The reconstitution of the family and the community is related to another important aspect of contemporary Japanese Utopias, their valorization of history as a means to increase community connections and to develop a sense of identity. This history is rarely state-inspired, however. Indeed, it could be called an “alternative history,” one that privileges the margins and rural roots over the dominant contemporary Japanese ideology which offers a rhetoric of economic growth based on continuous urbanization and technological advancement. At the same time, however, although the Utopias are usually based on indigenous folk values, they are remarkably open to international influences, with the key exception, in the later works, of Western technology

This changing attitude toward technology brings me to some of the important changes in the development of the Utopian imagination in twentieth-century Japan. This chapter has traced what might be called a downward trajectory of Utopia in twentieth-century Japanese fantasy, from the limitless spaces of Miyazawa’s Milky Way to Kurahashi’s pseudo galaxy in Amanonkoku ōkanki, which is actually the claustrophobic interior of a diseased womb. Along this trajectory a number of important changes can be discerned. The optimism about the potential for Utopia on earth in Ginga tetsudō no yoru has turned to skepticism and doubt in Ishikawa’s and Oe’s works and to a pervasive sense of tragicomedy in Kirikirijin and Amanonkoku ōkanki, as the novels’ respective authors create Utopias only to destroy them.

The role of the West has also undergone similar alterations. From being a site of Utopian inspiration in the Meiji period and in Miyazawa’s works it becomes another example of the regressive center which must be escaped in Oe’s and Inoue’s novels. Most negative of all is the vision of the West in Kurahashi’s Amanonkoku ōkanki, where it is seen as an enforcer of hegemonic domination on every front, from the intellectual to the sexual.

Finally, the attitude toward technology has changed drastically from being almost entirely positive in Miyazawa’s work to becoming largely negative in the works of Oe and Inoue. While Miyazawa’s train brought visions of movement and progress, Inoue and Oe concentrate on the destructive powers of technology. In one explicitly anti-technological (and anti-Western) scene in Kirikirijin, for example, the villagers discover that their lake has been poisoned by chemicals manufactured by Dupont—the first attack by the established powers which are massing against them. Far from being empowering, technology, in these later Utopian works, is seen as both dehumanizing and despoiling.

The Utopian imagination still exists in the Japan of the 1990s, as is evidenced in the frequent use of the word “yutopia” in everything from novel titles to advertisements, but it is a tempered vision. Compared to the limitless possibilities that the Meiji period seemed to promise, the idea of Utopia is a more constrained one in a contemporary Japan, increasingly aware of its limits. It is not surprising that Utopian visions in the 1980s and 1990s are fewer and less all-encompassing. Furthermore, as we shall see in the next chapter, it is the dark side of Utopia, the dystopian imagination, which is increasingly coming to the fore .

1 . Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, 1987, p. 978.

2 . C.Gluck, 1985, p. 18.

3 . Gluck, 1985, p. 21.

4 . F.Manual and F.Manuel, 1979, p. 1; and K.Kumar, 1987, p. 19. See also D.Plath, 1971, Introduction.

5 . Two other common Utopian forms which the Manuels mention and which are also present in Japanese culture are the “Euchronia” (the good time), usually a golden age, and the “Eupsychia” (the good mind), referring to an ideal spiritual state. The Euchronic impulse is, if anything, more common in East Asia than in Western thought since, from the time of Confucius, Chinese philosophy has looked back to a better time. The Japanese continued this Euchronic vision up until the Meiji Restoration, justifying all attempts at reform under the rubric of returning things to a previous, better condition. The Restoration itself, of course, was justified under the fundamentally Euchronic assertion of restoring the Japanese Emperor to his proper place. In contemporary literature, not surprisingly, the conservative backward-looking Euchronia is virtually absent (with the possible exception of Mishima’s privileging of prewar militarism). What is perhaps more surprising, given the fascination with modernity and progress on the part of Japanese society, is that neither can I find many examples of any future Euchronias. The Eupsychia is also an important aspect of East Asian thought, appearing in the Buddhist notion of Nirvana or nothingness. It is also arguable that the aesthetic Utopia, based on an individual’s artistic accomplishments, is an example of Eupsychia. In contemporary Japanese fantasy Murakami’s novel Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, with its vision of a “perfect” world inside the protagonist’s brain, may be seen as a problematic example of a Eupsychia.

6 . Y.Kimyoshi 1984, pp. 24–25. Obviously, Japanese history contains its share of rebellions and wars, but it is true that, compared to many countries, it also had a remarkably long period of peace—the 250-year stretch of the Tokugawa period. Unlike China, where the Mandate of Heaven theory implicitly allowed for change of government or the post-Enlightenment West with its doctrine of individual rights, Japan seems to have had less of an explicit tradition of radical change from outside the established order. Indeed, when radical change was finally brought about in the Meiji Restoration it was justified by a tortuous combination of conservative philosophies, both neo-Confucianism and the nativist Kokugaku or national learning school, neither of which, with the possible exception of the neo-Confucianist, Chu Hsi, showed more than tangential concern with anti-authoritarian sentiment. For discussion of premodern Japanese political philosophy see Maruyama Masao, 1974. The Kokugaku philosophers and neo-Confucians were of course all from the elite samurai class. For a discussion of a possible merchant-class movement towards a more egalitarian system during this period see T.Najita, 1987.

7 . Nakamura Shinichiro, 1984, p. 25.

8 . Hino Tatsuo, 1977, pp. 4–9.

9 . A.Delprat, 1985 .

10 . Yura Kimyoshi, 1982, p. 17; my translation.

11 . Miyazawa Kenji, quoted in Ueda Makoto, 1983, p. 209.

12 . S.Strong, 1991, p. 121. This quote is taken from the introduction to Strong’s translation (Miyazawa, 1991), which she has entitled Night of the Milky Way Railway . Elsewhere, quoted material is my own translation of the Japan edition (Miyazawa, 1986).

13 . Kurihara Akira, 1987, p. 53.

14 . Ueda, 1983, pp. 186–187. For another discussion of Buddhist influences on Night Train to the Stars see Strong, 1991, pp. 130–131.

15 . W.J.Tyler, 1990, p. xiv.

16 . A more overtly fantastic story by Ishikawa which also contains references to a pastoral Utopia is his novella Shion monogatari (1956) (trans. Asters (1961)). In this densely textured historical work Ishikawa describes a community “on the other side of the mountains” in which “there are only good things…people drink, sing, dance and enjoy themselves after a long day of hard work” (Donald Keene’s translation, p. 141). Although this community is less idealogically realized than “Tora no Kuni” it is clearly related to the myth of the Tōgenkyo in its pastoral simplicity, peace, and isolation.

17 . M.Wilson, 1986, pp. 116–117.

18 . Kurihara, 1987, p. 53.

19 . Oe has an interesting discussion in English on Miyazawa’s relation to “people’s literature” (Oe, 1989, pp. 212–213).

20 . Miyoshi comments on this distinctive dialogic style as follows: What is important is the work’s rejection of standard bureaucratic Japanese that serves merely as a transmitter of messages. The marginal and deformational zu-zu-drawl [Tohoku dialect] deflects the reader from the neutral flow of communication to the language of writing itself. (M.Miyoshi, 1991, p. 27)

21 . Inoue Hisashi in “Umi,” March 1982, quoted T.Imamura, 1982, p. 126.

22 . Kurihara, 1983, p. 52.

23 . In this regard they make an interesting contrast to what one might call the aesthetic Utopias of such (mainly) prewar writers as Kawabata and Tanizaki who, in such works as Snow Country or Bridge of Dreams, created private aesthetic and erotic worlds that were highly traditional, even self-consciously “Japanese,” and untainted by any foreign influence whatsoever.

24 . M.Cummings and N.Smith, 1989, p. 161.

25 . Yamada Yusaku, 1988, p. 90.

26 . Kawamura Minato, 1988, pp. 220–221.

27 . Feminist Utopias have existed for over a century in the West but it is only since the 1970s that they have become a major part of contemporary Utopian writings. Indeed, many scholars credit the feminist movement of the early 1970s with bringing about a resurgence in Utopian writing in general. For more information on specifically feminine Utopias see, N.Albinski, 1988; L.Armitt, 1991; and S.Lefanu, 1988.

28 . M.Foucault, 1984, p. 103.

29 . In many ways the relationship of P and Himeko is reminiscent of the hero of The Tale of Genji and his young ward Tamakazura. In fact, Amanonkoku ōkanki as a whole contains many similarities to The Tale of Genji, a work with which Kurahashi is intimately familiar. Both works privilege what are essentially Utopian worlds of women in which aesthetics, material enjoyment, and erotic play are foregrounded while the savage struggles for power to maintain this attractive life make up the subtext, as Norma Fields and Haruo Shirane (1987) have pointed out. Also like The Tale of Genji, Kurahashi’s work revolves around a male protagonist’s obsessive pursuit of a variety of women, although in this regard there is a crucial difference. In the Japan of Genji, difference was at least as much based on class as on sex. The high-class Genji was therefore not an intruder into this Utopian world. In contrast, P is and must remain an outsider. Genji, in fact, ends up contributing to the Utopian quality of the novel by gathering all his female partners around him in one more or less happy family, thus establishing for himself the Heimat that had eluded him since the death of his mother. P’s narrative journey, on the other hand, begins in the womb and ends in his self-induced expulsion from it, another reason why I consider Amanonkoku ōkanki an essentially tragic novel.

30 . In fact, on a superficial level, Amanonkoku ōkanki could be read as a satire on present-day Japanese relations with the West. Western imperialism and exploitation are clearly associated with Monokamikuni while the feminine, materially prosperous, and peaceful Amanon is equated with Japan in a number of obvious ways. Amanonkoku ōkanki can therefore also be interpreted as a satire on the West’s failure to understand Japan, but I believe its deconstruction of male-female relationships is more central to the novel. For a more obvious and truly savage critique of western imperialism see Kurahashi’s short story “Ogurukokutokōki” (An Account of a Voyage to the Country of the Ogres) (1985).