The Transgressive Figure of the Dancing-Girl-in-Pain and Kanai Mieko’s Corporeal Text

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/jll.2019.81

Abstract

In ‘The Transgressive Figure of the Dancing-Girl-in-Pain and Kanai Mieko’s Corporeal Text’, Hannah Osborne analyzes the figure of the dancing-girl-in-pain in Kanai Mieko’s 1968 essay, ‘Nikutairon e jostesu dai’ippo’ (‘Towards a Theory of Corporeality’).  She advances that, through its discussion of this transgressive figure’s manifestation in both the folk stories of Hans Christian Andersen and the butō of Hijikata Tatsumi, Kanai’s essay articulates a radical understanding of both body and text whereby the body (and its consciousness) serves as a template for text, and the two are seen to intersect with each other across performance spaces.  As such the figure holds profound implications for a re-understanding of literature as a shared event akin to performance, and of the act of reading as an active re-writing (rather than a passive reception) of the text’s meaning.   For Osborne, the uniquely corporeal theory of Kanai Mieko encourages readers to actively engage with interpretive boundaries.  This is later made explicit in Kanai's 1984 essay, "Text/Reality/The Body," which echoes Barthes notion of the writerly text in advancing that "[t]ext itself has a body, and it is particularly text that relentlessly attempts to exceed its own body that is very corporeal in nature." Finally, looking at some of the strategies that Kanai herself deploys in her fiction, notably "Rotting Meat," we see how such a theory might explain how gendered systems which underpin the generation of meaning itself through literature might be overturned.

Author Biography

Hannah Osborne, SOAS, University of London

Hannah Osborne completed her doctoral thesis, Gender, Love and Text in the Early Writings of Kanai Miekoat the University of Leeds in 2015. She is currently a research associate at the Japan Research Centre, SOAS, University of London. Her research focuses on intersections between text, illustration and the avant-garde arts; gender and the body; and women's writing and translation in modern Japanese literature.

References

Kanai Mieko, “Nikutairon e josetsu dai’ippo”, Gendai shi techō, 12 (1969), 20-26.

Kanai Mieko, “Kotoba/genjitsu/nikutai” in Obasan no disukūru (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1984) 62-68.

Kanai Mieko, “Funiku” in Kanai Mieko Zentanpen Vol 1 (Tokyo: Nihonbungeisha, 1992) 515-521.

Hans Christian Andersen, “The Little Mermaid,” in Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales: A Selection, trans. L.W. Kingsland, intro. Naomi Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) 76-106.

Lucy Fraser, “Fairy Tale Transformations and Gender: The Little Mermaid's Metamorphoses in Japanese and English” (The University of Queensland, 2013).

Lucy Fraser, “Lost Property Fairy Tales: Ogawa Yoko and Higami Kumiko's Transformations of ‘the Little Mermaid,’” Marvels & Tales, 27 (2013), 181-93.

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Kasai Akira, “Sore wa ai ka shi ka soretomo yume ka: Kanai Mieko e no shishin,” in Kanai Mieko Shishū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1973) 136-44, 141.

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Bruce Baird, Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

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Stephen Barber, Hijikata: Revolt of the Body (London: Creation Books, 2006; later edition Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press [Solar Books imprint] 2010).

Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, “Zen'ei to sukyandaru” [“The Avant Garde and Scandal”] in Shibusawa Tatsuhiko Zenshū (Tokyo: Kawade shobō, 1993)

Roland Barthes, S/Z. trans. Straus and Giroux Farrar, Inc. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990)

Atsuko Sakaki, (2009) Breezes Through Rooms with Light: Kanai Mieko by Roland Barthes by Kanai Mieko. PAJLS. Vol. 10. Purdue University Press. 204-219.

Livia Monet, “Ghostly women, displaced femininities and male family romances: Violence, gender and sexuality in two texts by Nakagami Kenji: Part 1” in Japan Forum Vol 8 1996.

Sharalyn Orbaugh, “The Body in Contemporary Japanese Women’s Fiction” in P G Schalow and J A Walker (eds) The Woman’s Hand: Gender and theory in Japanese women’s writing (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1996) 119-164

Mary Knighton, “Writing the Body as Meat: Kanai Mieko's "Rotting Meat" as Surreal Fable,” in: James Baxter (ed.) Japanese Studies around the World 2004. Observing Japan from Within: Perspectives of Foreign Scholars Resident in Japan. (Kyoto: International Research Centre for Japanese Studies, 2004) 161-188.

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Published

2019-10-10

Issue

Vol. 53 No. 2 (2019): Japanese Language and Literature

Section

SPECIAL SECTION LITERATURE

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