Fragrant Spaces between Words: Prolonging Shōjo Liminality into Adulthood in the Poetry of Yonezawa Nobuko

United States License. This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Japanese Language and Literature Journal of the American Association of Teachers of Japanese jll.pitt.edu | Vol. 53 | Number 2 | October 2019 | DOI: 10.5195/jll.2019.77 ISSN 1536-7827 (print) 2326-4586 (online)

the Naturalists supposedly did, the Symbolists created meaning through suggestion and sensory disorientation, disrupting the relationship between language and signification.Their work would influence subsequent avantgarde movements such as Japanese Surrealism and Futurism. 7s a global phenomenon including poets like Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) and Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), Symbolism also occupies a foundational place in the lineage of avant-garde literary, theoretical, and political movements.Julia Kristeva calls the Symbolist Poets "a second over-turning of the Hegelian dialectic" that brought the unconscious and the body into language the way that Marx brought production into history.Kristeva uses a psychoanalytic framework to politicize the Symbolists.She uses the term "chora" to describe the subconscious, non-signifying elements of language, a sublingual space of movement, possibility, and becoming that the Symbolists mobilize in their poetry.In Kristeva's work, according to scholars Johanne Prud'homme and Lyne Légaré, "[t]he 'unitary' subject is replaced by a subject in process (understood as movement) whose representation is a space of mobility: the semiotic chora." 8he Symbolists create a space of radical potential to critique modern notions of the self and subjectivity.According to Earl Jackson Jr., the Japanese Symbolists had an ambivalent relationship to the notion of a self. 9Using the poems and prose of Kanbara Ariake, Jackson shows how the first-person subject vacillates from a cohesive lens for viewing reality to an entity whose borders are submerged or overwhelmed by sensory experience. 10Jackson quotes Ariake in 1909 as stating: The parameters of the "self" and the universe are both unstable.That they both undulate, gleam, and cloud over obscurely is due to the fact that the "self" is neither a private possession nor a still life…Here is the realm of true freedom; here is where Symbolism is engendered. 11iake's concept of an "unstable" self that is "neither a private possession nor a still life" resonates with the volatile and unclosed subjectivity found in Kristeva's work.Through intense sensory experience, the Symbolists destabilized the unitary subject and sought to replace it with a provisional, always-in-process self.Kristeva asks at the end of Revolution in Poetic Language: Is it possible to keep open the heterogeneous and contradictory moment, which is unbearable for the subject, within a text that represents, through this moment, the diversity and multiplicity of social practices which disregard that moment in their own realization? 12e poems in this article tread the line between poetry and commerce, blurring the border between high art objects and commodity goods, keeping open "the heterogeneous and contradictory moment" of their composition and the "diversity and multiplicity of social practices" in which they are embedded.
How does the sense of smell help bring about a potentially radical language of the body?In the West, the sense of smell has often been perceived as the overlooked or least important sense, especially in comparison to vision and hearing.Scholars have shown how the modern era in the West ushered in "a general devaluation of, and inattention to, olfactory power and meaning." 13Brian Moeran says the sense of smell is the sense most people are willing to give up. 14Immanuel Kant classified taste and smell as the two "lower senses." 15or Symbolist poetry, the sense of smell plays a key role in imagining and subverting the relationship of bodies to the world and to each other.Mary Fleischer argues that "smell is the Symbolist sense par excellence…used to dissolve barriers between subject and object, between individual and environment." 16Fleischer describes how scent in the form of perfume and incense was used as a subversive technique in Symbolist performances in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century: [T]he quest to sanitize modern life made the artistic evocation of all kinds of smells, foul or fragrant, a means of rebellion against sterile bourgeois conventions (Classen 1994:87).And the inherent formlessness of smell, its transgressive ability to permeate the atmosphere and dissolve boundaries made it a suggestive medium and metaphor for overrunning conventional concepts of subject matter and form. 17eischer shows how a concern for the sense of smell amongst the Symbolists and other avant-garde writers thus aligned with attempts to reverse the hierarchy of the senses, where vision and hearing reside at the top, and other more supposedly primitive senses at the bottom. 18he Japanese Symbolist use of scent differed from their European counterparts.In Japan, the sense of smell, far from being the most forgotten or undervalued sense, has a long aesthetic and literary lineage.
In Heian period court culture (794-1185), incense (takimono)was used in two realms: Buddhist religious use in ritual, and aristocrats' use for pleasure.People had their own unique individual scent formulated from incense.Aristocrats held competitions to craft seasonal scents, in which, Aileen Gatten states, "incense, like the other arts practiced by aristocracy at the time, is a reflection of personality." 19t the end of the Kamakura period (1185-1333), the use of incense was systematized into an aesthetic practice.This was the beginning of kōdō, the way of scent, a ceremony in which participants identify key ingredients in a scent made from fragrant woods.The scented wood the speaker burns in Yonezawa's poem "Night and Fragrance," which I will discuss in more detail later, recalls this ceremony.
In the Tokugawa Period (1600-1868), incense in the form of joss sticks became available to the growing commercial class outside of the aristocracy. 20The sense of smell, nioi, became theorized as a poetic and artistic principle.Haruo Shirane describes the "poetics of scent" in the work of haikai poet Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) as a principle of associative linking between verses in a sequence based on mood, atmosphere, and tone, rather than on content.Shirane writes as follows: "Modern Japanese scholars define nioi as a manner of linking in which the mood, atmosphere, or emotion of the previous verse is carried over to the added verse or made to move back and forth between the two." 21Rather than writing poems that feature scent as a sensory image, Bashō and other haikai writers used the associative quality of scent to describe certain kinds of linked verse.Shirane compares Bashō's use of scent as an associative linking device to "the montage in modern cinema in which a succession of seemingly unrelated shots are closely linked by connotation or overtone." 22Smell thus operates as a kind of poetic, associative logic in Tokugawa linked verse, one that operates in contrast to more direct links by content, canonical literary allusion, or social class.
Yonezawa and the other Japanese Symbolist poets were drawing on this long tradition of smell and Japanese aesthetics in their work: on Heian notions of scent as a creative mode of self-expression, on medieval practices of a systematized way of incense (kōdō), and on Tokugawa-era imaginings of an associative poetics of scent.More than just write about smell, Yonezawa lets her work be permeated by the semiotics or the logic of smell, its tendency to dissolve and transgress barriers and its tendency to create associative, montage-like emotional leaps.
As we saw in the opening passage, Ōte Takuji uses perfume to elicit a sensory experience of the Symbolist dissolution of the self and to awaken socially unsanctioned same-sex desires.Ōte's practice exists in what Moeran calls the "olfactory culture" in Taishō period (1912-1926) Japan.In this culture, incense, perfume, and other commercially available scents were enjoyed as a leisure product by ordinary people. 23They were both diffused in interior spaces for decorative purposes, as well as worn on the body and clothing.From his letters and from the essay quoted earlier, it appears that Ōte composed poetry while enjoying these leisure products, using perfume and incense as inspiration.
The sense of smell thus played a dual role, as an agent of sensory disorientation and the dissolution of the self in Symbolist poetry, and as a key element of rhetoric in commercial writing in the cosmetics industry.Interestingly, these two roles are not really in conflict with each other.Instead, poets and fashion writers of the Taishō period use the sense of smell in parallel, overlapping ways, as we have already seen in Ōte Takuji's essay on perfume, which blurs the line between poetry and commercial writing.
In the early 1900s, Japanese poets and fashion writers linked the sense of smell to a critique of modernity and a search for alternative worlds.For example, beauty and fashion writer Misu Yutaka had the following to say in 1912, the last year of the Meiji era (1868-1912), in a pamphlet on making your own perfume from flowers, in which she linked the use of scented products to a critique of "civilization" (bunmei): Either contemporary people's sense of smell is strongly, completely numbed, or this is simply what we call civilization (bunmei).If it is said that civilization as such is to be distant from nature, then it is something to be grateful for that most of today's scented products are filled with civilized articles, of course even with the cause that expensive ones are common, the scented products we smell today-in a word, they don't smell of anything particular at all whatsoever, and thus they do not make one think of anything from nature.Instead, they stimulate people's sense of smell, disorientate their spirits, so much so that the extent of their excessiveness leads people's lives into error.Therefore, amongst perfumes made with this kind of scented ingredients, and even amongst other cosmetics, it goes without saying that in many cases, the unnaturalness of their scent just toys with and suppresses people's sense of smell. 24r Misu, smell is a sense that connects people to nature, while civilization (bunmei), a common Meiji-era term connoting modernity and progress, distances them from nature and numbs them.Yet this is not to set up a simplistic binary between natural and unnatural: the author is "grateful" for artificial scents that remove one from nature to a certain extent.It is only when they get excessive that she objects, saying they disorient and stimulate people's senses, rather than bringing them closer to nature.
The fluid relationship between poetry and commerce becomes apparent in Yonezawa Nobuko's appearances in the mass media.For example, she is mentioned in a 1937 advertising circular for the Nagoya Fig. 1.Two schoolgirls browsing in a bookstore department store Matsuzakaya, in the blurb next to a heart-shaped picture of two schoolgirls browsing in the book section (Fig. 1).The blurb cites Yonezawa Nobuko's poetry as a popular favorite amongst fans of shōjo culture: Young ladies at this age are extremely sentimental.Spilling tears of joy on the front covers of the Takabatake Kashō kind of stationery, generally perusing Wakakusa and Reijokai [popular shōjo magazines from the 1920s and '30s], leaving Yonezawa Nobuko's poetry collection idle in her handbag, where it lives with the other texts.Ah! Now with a deep sigh, she has taken another poetry book into her hand…Ooh, sentimentale! 25itten a few years after her death, this quote suggests her work might have been taken up by shōjo culture retrospectively.The "sentimental" quality of her work is lauded here through the eyes of her young female fans, highlighting its emotionalism and femininity.
The olfactory culture of Taishō Japan bridged both avant-garde writing and commerce, which shared the desire for alternative worlds as posited by the sense of smell.The sense of smell figures prominently in the work of Symbolist poet Yonezawa Nobuko, the first woman to publish a full-length collection of free verse in Japanese, a book of poetry called Holy Fount (Seisuiban, 1919).Like Ōte Takuji, she too might have used incense and other scented products to help her compose poetry.
In her poem that I mentioned earlier, titled "Night and Fragrance" (Yoru to kunkō, 1919, Seisuiban), she describes a first-person speaker's experience of reclining half-asleep and half-awake in a kind of trance on a Western-style sofa for an entire night as she enjoys the smell of aloe wood incense.The smell brings her deeply into her body, where she feels her own blood in her heart, and ultimately produces in her a creative act of song.This song, however, is silent (oto mo naku), a song of bodily experience rather than linguistic, oral, or audio expression.The poem describes the "olfactory culture" of Taishō Japan as practiced by this particular poet, in which solitary bodily experience of scent gives rise to an act of poetic creativity.

Night and Fragrance Every night Crossing the pale blue glass door With no sound
There is a thing that comes to me in a corner of my sofa It shines, and yet, It is talkative, and yet-From the mouth of the deep bronze vessel The scent of young aloe profoundly rises When everything is silently suppressed, Color sinks, I take a deep hidden breath.

My heart wakes up slightly, Resembling blood
The end of night is dipped in dye Shining things at last talkative, In loud voice Sing laughingly a small song. 26e first stanza sets the scene in a Westernized Taishō interior, complete with a glass door and sofa.In this setting, the incense appears to be part of the Taishō leisure market.The burning of chips of incense wood, especially those in the aloe family, brings a kōdō-inflected classical whiff to this modern setting.Kōdō, however, is usually practiced in groups, and the speaker apparently seems to enjoy her scented products in solitude, for herself rather than as part of a ceremonial, ritualized framework.
At the end of the stanza, the poem's language splits apart, ending in a dash.While classical Japanese poetry often features fragmented language, the use of punctuation marks the poem as modern free verse.Notably, there is no reference to an absent lover, a common theme in classical Japanese poetry.Instead, the speaker appears to burn the incense for its own sake, for sensory pleasure.The incense is described in terms that suggest secrecy or even illicitness: it is "deep," "suppressed," and "hidden."This creates the impression that the speaker is burning the incense alone, for herself, and that the physical pleasure she experiences is private and personal.
The poem ends with the speaker waking up to the reddening of night into daytime, which reminds her of blood.Until this moment, the incense has produced a trance-like state, almost like a drug, and she awakes to heightened sense of her own corporeality as a physical being, with a heart and blood.The blood creates corporeality, and it also introduces disturbing associations.Is it blood from violence?From sexual experience and the loss of virginity?From menstruation or birth?The end of the night produces an intense sense of the speaker's self as a body, a thing made of blood.
The poem ends in song and laughter, a reference to poetry itself as song.The speaker has produced a composition from her body, writing through her experience of fragrance.By submitting to the scent and becoming just a body, she has produced the silent, wordless song of bodily creation.The burning of incense enables a poetic act of creation that is auto-erotic in nature, outside the constraints of marriage and heterosexuality.
In another poem "Hidden Dream" (Hisomeru Yume, 1919, Seisuiban), the smell of cinnamon emitted by a Catholic-esque "holy fount" (seisuiban) provokes an ecstatic spiritual vision.The end of the poem links this spiritual ecstasy of the holy fount to creating poetry with the body: A dream, In the shadow of the faintly darkened holy fount, Whitely submerges its body, Forever giving birth to pure red "creation," Forever singing gold-colored "eternity." 27e act of creation is coded red, similar to the blood in the vision of the speaker at dawn in "Night and Fragrance."The dream is made corporeal so that it has a body to submerge in the fount.The submergence of the white dream body gives birth to the red of creation, and to a transcendent poetic song of eternity.In sum, the smell of cinnamon inspires a bodily creative act, of giving birth to a poetic song.
What does it mean to give birth to a song, and what does this mean about Yonezawa's view of female sexuality?In the poem "Creation" (Sōzō), both romantic love and birth are invoked, but in the service of a creative pursuit, rather than coupling or creating a family.She invokes the sense of smell to perform the Symbolist dissolution of the self and inspire the act of bodily creation.

It comes visiting, formless bondage Smoothly
On oh so pliant flesh Ah Pleasure the color of flower petals Pearling drops of oil My body fills with an ever-changing smell All of a sudden to love heaven and earth, Ah, The heart can give birth to a precious thing. 28e poem describes writing as an act of bodily creation, in which the speaker gives her "pliant flesh" ( 平 ら け き し し む ら ) over to the "formless bondage" (無形の緊縛) of sensory pleasure, probably a floralscented oil such as camellia.The phrase "formless bondage" links the oblique violence of poetic creation with sexual pleasure so that there is an experience of gaining power through being dominated, of a creative act emerging out of an experience of submission.Throughout Yonezawa's work, the bodily act of creation is framed as passive and submissive, whether an act of "submerging the body" (mi o hisome) in "Submerged Dream," or of "formless bondage" in "Night and Fragrance." Throughout the poem, female sexuality is invoked in oblique terms.While the speaker is not overtly gendered, flowers are associated with femininity and are a common ingredient in perfume, especially for women's products. 29The flower's appearance in the poem has a kind of sensual, even a masturbatory quality, how it appears at the moment of pleasure.The fragrance it emits is associated with change and transformation (tsune naki kaori), which in turn is linked to creation, so that the masturbatory pleasure of the flower is a creative act, leading to the birth of a poetic song, rather than a child.
The poem features an emphatically physical image of the speaker's body.The "[p]earling drops of oil" that fill the speaker's body "with an ever-changing smell" suggest the speaker is using scented oil, but they could also be drops of something bodily, like sweat or discharge.The speaker's body itself is a productive agent, creating drops of liquid and smells that mix with the odor of scented products to provide the speaker with inspiration.
In the next Yonezawa poem I will look at, "October Veranda" (Jūgatsu no veranda, 1919, Seisuiban), the dissolution of the self is not solitary, but shared by a speaker and a feminine companion.Here the avant-garde pursuit of sensory disorientation through smell is linked to the idealized same-sex relationships between girls often found in popular shōjo, or girls', literature of the day.
Ripe, shaken fennel's faintly sweet Cool blue of peppermint left on the round table of the veranda, We, cheerfully bathing in October sunlight, All the more, for no reason thinking of nothingness, With hearts that would forget all things.In any case, the stray hairs on your forehead You comb them up in the fragrance-filled spaces between words -Black comb-This, You are addictive, how you recall a suddenly young queen.Two women here, Looking up at the October sun.
To taste this faint wind Sneaking to the marble round table Transparent blue scent of peppermint Unseen ripples are sent, October atmosphere that deepens dreams, Layering them increasingly around the body At such a time, The round pillar of the veranda, so good for leaning upon, -Ah, its strange feel to the skin. 30e aesthetics of shōjo culture permeate the setting of the poem.It is mysterious and exotic, a Westernesque veranda (written with the Chinese compound ryōrō [凉廊], which is sometimes used for the Italian word "loggia") furnished with a rounded marble table and pillars that all suggest something like a European villa.The pair of women (koko onna futari) occupying the space resemble the pairs of graceful women portrayed by popular shōjo visual artists like Takabatake Kashō (1888-1986) or Yumeji Takehisa (1884-1934). 31he two women have a passionate connection and appreciation for each other's beauty.The speaker calls her addressee an "addiction" or "habit" (kimi ga kuse nari)-perhaps like the absinthe suggested by the fennel-and compares her to a "young queen." Deborah Shamoon argues that shōjo culture practices a liminal femininity outside the strictures of marriage and patriarchy-in a safe space that does not actually challenge them.She describes what were called "S relationships,", relationships between girls based on a same-sex idealized romantic love that is pure and spiritual, not physical. 32ogether, the two women indulge the sense of smell, as they share an experience of blurring between self and environment.Borders between their bodies and the setting blur due to the intensity of sensory experience: "October atmosphere that deepens dreams,/Layering them increasingly around the body…." The scene of shōjo love includes an eroticized portrayal of language and writing.The words themselves-koto no ha (⾔の葉)-are plant-like, emphasizing the "leaf" kanji and filled with fragrance.Perhaps Yonezawa is referring to Yosano Akiko's famous tanka collection Midaregami (1901), in which tangled hair serves as a figure for both erotic pleasure and the act of writing.Here too the hair is associated with words, and like language with a pen, the tangled hair can be shaped and formed with the comb.The typography of Yonezawa's poem, including several end dashes, draws attention to the materiality of language and its capacity to create sensory experience independent of its communicatory function.Writing, the act of selfbeautification or adornment, smell, and a same-sex passionate relationship, are all linked, in a space of the unsaid, between the words.
The prolonging of the liminality of the shōjo into the realm of womanhood appears in the cover illustration of Yonezawa's 1919 poetry collection, Seisuiban (Holy Fount, Fig. 2), featuring a self-portrait by the poet.
In this image, she is singular, not in a pair like the artist Takabatake's shōjo or the two girls in the photo I described earlier (Fig. 1).In the cover to Yonezawa's collection, the girl's hair looks modern, maybe permed, cut short.There is something kind of adult about her, how she is holding her hand with the bracelet.She has a self-possession, a deliberateness, as if she is posing, or thinking very hard.She is positioned straight-on, not coyly turned to the side, and she is gazing out of the paper, rather than only getting gazed at by the viewer.This woman seems like she might be more adult and experienced in the world than a shōjo, though she shares her liminality.Her body is liminal and ethereal, mostly made up of empty space, like a human fragrance wafting across the paper, a body of pure smell.Is this a shōjo with corporeality, with her body and her sexuality not entirely disavowed, but added obliquely into the equation using the sense of smell?
In her self-portrait, Yonezawa prolongs the liminality of the shōjo into adulthood.As a married woman herself, she blurs the line between womanhood and girlhood, suggesting that the auto-sexuality and same-sex desires practiced by the shōjo are compatible with heterosexual, married adult life.Olfactory practices such as incense, perfume, and scented oils are the conduit for liminality to enter the realm of adult life and to transgress the line with girlhood.Yonezawa draws on the long Japanese poetic and aesthetic lineage of smell, linking it to creative expression.They allow for the act of writing to be corporealized, even sexualized, and for the shōjo practices of same-sex desire and auto-sexuality to pervade the adult world.The logic of smell, which transgresses and blurs boundaries between bodies and environment, permeates her poetry and allows it to transgress borders between womanhood and girlhood.In "Night and Fragrance," the sense of smell creates an auto-erotic act of poetic creation.While in "October Veranda," the sense of smell creates a moment of same-sex desire between women that also manifests in the creative act of writing poetry.In her work, the sense of smell, poetry, and sexuality are linked in a portrait of femininity that hovers between womanhood and girlhood, transgressing and blurring the boundaries of these two realms.
In so doing, Yonezawa connects shōjo culture to the Symbolists' larger avant-garde project of critiquing the unitary modern subject, from the specific position of womanhood and girlhood in early twentiethcentury Japan.Bridging the gap between popular ephemera and high poetics, between the department store and avant-garde coteries, Yonezawa's work transgresses borders between high and low, as well as between girl and woman.In the "fragrant spaces between words" of Yonezawa's flowery, shōjo-inflected texts, there exists a corporealized language of the body that, through the sense of smell, creates possibilities for new subjective experiences.Her work allows readers to imagine a world where bodies and sexuality are fluid and in a state of becoming, not contained by already decided-upon boundaries.
Ōte Takuji, "Kōsui no hyōjō' ni tsuite: Mandanteki-na muda-banashi," in Kaori, edited by Tsukamoto Kunio, Nihon no meizuihitsu 48 (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 1986), 97.If we consider the possibility that all women-from the infant suckling her mother's breast, to the grown woman experiencing orgasm sensations while suckling her own child, perhaps recalling her milk-smell in her own; to two women, like Virginia Woolf's Chloe and Olivia, who share a laboratory; to the woman dying at ninety, touched and handled by women-exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not (650-651).
3 Cixous discusses écriture feminine in her essay "The Laugh of the Medusa," Signs 1.4 (Summer, 1976): 875-893.She argues that although there is no single typical female experience, there is a universal woman subject rooted in the experience of the body: A world of searching, the elaboration of a knowledge, on the basis of a systematic experimentation with the bodily functions, a passionate and precise interrogation of her erotogeneity.This practice, extraordinarily rich and inventive, in particular as