2 The Masculine Gaze as Disciplinary Mechanism

Sadism demands a story.

—Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”

It is striking how many Japanese expressions related to interpersonal communication employ the word “eye.” In a culture that so prizes wordless communication, apparently the “eyes” have it. Children are admonished to behave lest others look at them with the whites of their eyes. An unpardonable offense can be described as too much for one’s eyes. One’s superiors in a hierarchical system are said to be above the eyes. Not surprisingly, many of these expressions also imply the power of the bearer of the gaze to discipline or dominate the one who is seen.

Western theorists have likewise been fascinated with the interconnectedness of power, knowledge, and visuality. In his landmark study on the subject, Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault devotes an entire chapter to the topic of “panopticism,” or the ways in which power may be exercised most effectively by causing subjects to discipline themselves, through mere anticipation of the gaze of the authorities. Here Foucault draws on the logic underlying the “Panopticon,” Jeremy Bentham’s ingenious architectural design for a prison in which inmates are arranged in cells monitored by a central tower. The inhabitants of these cells are at all times visible to those manning the tower, but they cannot see the authorities who observe them.

He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. … And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape. … If they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time. … Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. … The inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.¹Close

Under this arrangement, it becomes unnecessary to discipline or punish the inmates of such a facility—they are induced to discipline themselves merely by virtue of the anticipation of punishment, precisely because they know that any infraction will immediately be seen by the authorities. Foucault goes on to demonstrate that such disciplinary mechanisms characterize not only prisons but also all institutions of modern society, ending his chapter with the wry comment that in terms of the way power functions in and through those who are subjected to it, “prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons.”²Close

Feminist film theorists have also made use of scopic dynamics to understand the relationship among power, gender, and film spectator-ship. Laura Mulvey’s pathbreaking article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), first brought critical attention to the way classical Hollywood cinema constructs the body of woman as object of the masculine gaze. She contends in this essay that the spectator derives pleasure from voyeuristic control and mastery of the onscreen female object, possessing her by proxy through identification with the hero of the tale. As in Foucault’s theory of panopticism, there is an implied power differential here between subject and object of the gaze, and in Mulvey’s theory this is coded in explicitly gendered terms. Men wield the gaze; women are subjected to it. In a subsequent elaboration of her theory, Mulvey even contends that filmic techniques work to so thoroughly construct the gaze of the viewer as masculine that in order for female viewers to derive visual pleasure from such forms of spectatorship, they must subconsciously adopt a masculine subject position vis-à-vis the women onscreen.³Close

Reading these two theories together tells us much about the complex web of relationships among power, knowledge, and visuality; moreover, it is interesting to note that Mulvey and Foucault each seem to highlight the theoretical blind spots of the other. Foucault has frequently been criticized by feminist theorists, even those who find his work useful, for neglecting to deal explicitly with the gendered aspects of the exercise of power.⁴Close Foucault’s understanding of the functioning of “panopticism” is a perfect example of this blindness to sexual politics. Nowhere in his elaboration of the workings of this disciplinary mechanism does he deal with the question of how sexual difference might alter or nuance the power dynamics that obtain between observer and observed. On the other hand, Mulvey, perhaps because she is concerned with questions of spectatorship rather than human relationships unmediated by a film screen, appears not to recognize the disciplinary potential inherent in the exercise of visual power by a male subject vis-à-vis a female object. In other words, while she explores in great detail the potential for pleasure experienced by the subject who wields the gaze, her theory cannot account for the experience of the female object who is visually subordinated to that gaze.

The experience of women in modern Japan speaks eloquently to the role of visual surveillance in policing behavior, as well as to the gendered effects of such scopic disciplinary mechanisms. For example, during the Pacific War, when Japanese citizens were exhorted to display nationalistic fervor in all aspects of their lives, particular attention was paid to sartorial cues as evidence of one’s level of dedication to the imperialist cause. Women, who unlike men could not demonstrate their patriotism by participating directly in combat, were expected to show their solidarity with Japanese soldiers in various ways, most especially by eschewing “Western” adornments like permanent waves and high heels. Instead they were expected to wear traditional Japanese clothing like kimono, and later monpe, or work trousers, which announced their total dedication to empire building on the domestic front. Andrew Gordon, in his survey history of modern Japan, provides photographic evidence of the way these sartorial restrictions were enforced by military inspectors, who patrolled the streets looking for women who failed to conform and harangued those whose physical appearance flouted this policy of austerity.⁵Close

The state continued to actively intervene in the daily lives of women in the postwar period, as economic recovery and growth replaced military imperialism as the national goal. Such intervention frequently occurred with the support and participation of women themselves, who helped to police the behavior of other women. As Sheldon Garon illustrates, women were mobilized to participate in the process of postwar rebuilding through “moral suasion” campaigns that encouraged them to carefully manage every aspect of their lives, from household savings and expenditures to the care of the elderly to their own reproductive potential. Compliance with such initiatives frequently emphasized visual surveillance of women’s lives and activities.⁶Close Scopic dynamics were thus central to enforcement of gender norms, and this state of affairs remained remarkably continuous across the prewar-postwar divide, even as the specific types of desired behavior may have changed.

As this chapter will illustrate, the authors analyzed in this study, whose lives traversed this prewar-postwar divide, were very familiar with the power of such scopic dynamics to regulate the behavior of Japanese women. In their literature, these three writers portray such visual disciplinary mechanisms as an insidious means of enforcing restrictive models of femininity. I will introduce three works of fiction—“Broken Oath” (Haisei, 1966), a short story by Kōno Taeko; “Getting on the Wrong Train” (Jōsha sakugo, 1972), a short story by Takahashi Takako; and Blue Journey (Kurai tabi, 1961), a novel by Kurahashi Yumiko—that illustrate the relevance of Foucault’s and Mulvey’s theories to women in postwar Japan. All three of these stories can be said to operate at the nexus of these two theoretical models.

Each narrative features a female protagonist who finds herself subjected to a disciplinary gaze that is invasive and even violent. As per Foucault’s theory, the protagonist learns to internalize and reproduce the gaze, resulting in a kind of “voluntary” compliance with societal expectations, but this process of self-discipline is experienced as traumatic from the perspective of the engendered object. Thus, while poignantly illustrating Foucault’s model of “panopticism,” these stories underscore the fact that the authorities who wield the gaze are anything but gender-neutral observers. Society is explicitly or implicitly figured as masculine in each of these texts, and the effect of the gaze is to induce its objects not merely to behave, but also to behave as gendered objects.

Each of these narratives features a climactic moment when the female protagonist, who initially perceives herself to be gender-neutral, is confronted with her own femininity, in the form of a gender identity that is forcibly assigned to her by virtue of the fact that she inhabits a female body. In each case, attempts to resist this process of engendering are overcome by the overwhelming power of the masculine gaze, which recognizes the protagonist only through the lens of conventional markers of femininity such as menstruation, pregnancy, and sexuality that is confined within a framework of monogamous marriage. Failure to identify with these stereotypes of femininity precipitates a crisis in subjectivity as the protagonist turns the gaze upon herself, resulting in a loss of identity and relationship to language. These fictional stories thus provide valuable insights into the way bodies are engendered as feminine, through a complex and detailed elaboration of the relationships between power, knowledge, and visuality.

In “Broken Oath,” the protagonist, Momoko, is summoned to court to testify as a character witness for her ex-boyfriend, who has been charged with assaulting a female employee. Through suggestive lines of questioning, the prosecution and the defense attempt to portray Momoko according to opposing stereotypes of femininity. The prosecution would like her to play the role of the scorned woman, whose live-in lover Otaka refused to marry her and then abandoned her as a pathetic old maid, with no chance of a “normal” life as proper wife and mother. In spite of the fact that Momoko never sought marriage to Otaka, her credibility, within the context of these court proceedings, is predicated on an understanding of her as an innocent who was seduced and discarded by an inveterate ladies’ man. The defense, on the other hand, is determined to destroy Momoko’s reputation by insinuating that she carried on affairs with colleagues behind Otaka’s back. Both of these narratives subscribe to a view of femininity as properly confined within a heterosexual framework that assumes fidelity to one man; the “good,” and therefore credible, woman is then defined by her adherence to this role type, while the “bad” woman, one who is lacking in credibility, defies this stereotype.

Momoko recognizes these strategies for what they are and attempts to resist them through the creation of an objective persona that transcends such gendered typecasting. Throughout her testimony, she scrupulously monitors her own responses for their truth value, determined to present her story in a disinterested fashion that would render her a neutral participant, rather than a scorned or unfaithful woman. The reaction of the all-male audience becomes crucial to Momoko in determining how well she manages to live up to this ideal—when she is able to respond to a question dispassionately, she feels supported by the gaze directed at her and actively seeks eye contact with individual members of the courtroom to confirm this. Furthermore, her constant attempts to reassure herself that “there is nothing in her testimony to betray her vow” of truthfulness vies with the interrogation of the lawyers in the intensity of its scrutiny of her character, indicating that she has on some level turned the masculine gaze in upon herself.⁷Close

Momoko’s shield of neutral objectivity serves as only a temporary protection, however, as the moment the possibility of other lovers is raised, the crowd begins to turn on her. “The gaze of the people [in the courtroom] all at once stopped being supportive and turned to curiosity” (294). Her body begins to fail her as the stutter she thought she had conquered years ago returns under the pressure of cross-examination. “Momoko wanted to tell the truth. She hurried to tell them that she didn’t begin to stutter because of confusion or perjury. It was because the moment the subject [of infidelity] was broached in questioning, people already began to doubt her” (295). The more Momoko tries to defend herself, the worse her stutter gets, and the guiltier she appears before the gaze of the all-male audience. The story concludes with Momoko unable to voice a single comprehensible utterance, paralyzed by a role that she has not chosen for herself and deprived even of her capacity for speech.

From the very beginning of the story, tropes of concealment and revelation are intimately connected with the exercise of power, such that being “discovered” or “known” in a visual sense is effectively equated with being fixed by the gaze of authoritarian structures. As the story opens, Momoko is just arriving at the courthouse, but the narrative quickly shifts to a flashback sequence in which she recalls first receiving the subpoena that has summoned her there. She is thoroughly shocked by the appearance of the officer on her doorstep and shudders at the efficiency with which the authorities have managed to track her down:

Of course, it was common sense that the police could find out anything that they wanted to. If they investigated Otaka’s past, naturally they would find out about the existence of a woman he lived with even for a short time. And it wasn’t like she was hiding out or using a fake name or anything, so it must have been a simple job for them to find the whereabouts of a person like herself who was living openly. But to think that the police had been going around and searching for her when she was unaware of it made her feel that the past that she had neatly tucked away had been arbitrarily scattered about again. Though she had not attempted to conceal anything, she couldn’t help but feel that it was humiliating and vaguely creepy. Gradually she began to feel like a suspect herself. (272–273)

Since the breakup with Otaka five years ago, Momoko has not seen or talked to him and has no idea of his whereabouts, and thus the officer’s discovery of her comes as something of a shock as she is confronted with a chapter of her personal history that she had believed to be over. In fact the relationship is described as something that she has worked hard to put out of her mind and would prefer to leave safely concealed in her past. The fact that the authorities have so effectively revealed what she implicitly seems determined to conceal—from herself, if not also from the outside world—makes her feel violated, as if they have willfully thrown into disarray a part of her life that she has struggled to bring to order. This disturbs her sense of composure, unsettling her before she even enters the courtroom, so she is already in a vulnerable state when she is challenged on the stand—the experience that leads directly to the breakdown in her capacity for language by the end of the story.

As the theoretical frameworks of both Foucault and Mulvey would suggest, there is a clear power imbalance between the parties in this episode. While the authorities appear to know much already about Momoko’s relationship with Otaka, she is thoroughly unaware of the crime in which she has indirectly been implicated. The officer who arrives at her doorstep hands her a summons that tells her nothing about the nature of the case in which she is ordered to provide testimony or the nature of the information that they will solicit from her. All she knows is that it has something to do with Otaka and that she cannot refuse to reveal herself to the court. She is required to give information about herself, but they are not required to tell her anything unless it pleases them. Momoko is thus rendered utterly subordinate to a system of authority that knows much and can impel her to reveal even more, yet she cannot even know the circumstances of her subordination. To borrow Foucault’s phrasing once more: “He [sic] is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.”⁸Close The days leading up to Momoko’s initial interview with the prosecutor are fraught with anxiety; she is unable to sleep and cannot help pulling out the subpoena and staring at it, as if searching for clues to the nature of the crime in which she has been implicated by association. But all the mute document reveals to her is a display of its own authority, in the form of the Kasumigaseki address to which she must report.⁹Close

Momoko is thus thoroughly intimidated before she even takes the stand, and the persistence with which she admonishes herself to tell the truth reveals how much she perceives herself to be on trial, as if she is taking on the role of both witness and prosecution in her own mind. Based on her previous interview with the prosecutor, she knows before taking the stand that he wishes her to play the role of the abandoned woman in order to destroy Otaka’s character, and she arrives ready to refuse this role by giving testimony that neither slanders nor supports her ex-boyfriend. As she prepares herself mentally to testify while waiting outside the courtroom, she reflects:

In the more than twenty days that had passed [since her meeting with the prosecutor], she repeated to herself over and over what she had said to him: “You’re terribly mistaken if you think that I still hold a grudge against him for abandoning me. I’ve hated him to the point that my feelings for him have totally disintegrated. At this late date, there’s no way that you can give me satisfaction [by seeing him convicted]. If a fossil from his past will do, then please use me.” Regardless of whether or not there was a penalty for perjury, she was determined to be completely faithful to her own feelings in her testimony to the prosecutor.

At the same time, Momoko also decided to give absolutely correct testimony to Otaka’s lawyer as well. They were veterans at this. They assumed that because he had abandoned her, she must still be hung up on him, and probably they would try to use that cleverly to elicit testimony from her that would be beneficial to their cases. … I did live with him, but I’m not that sentimental a woman, she thought. However I may appear, I’m tough. (276)

Momoko is thus clearly aware of the intentions of the men who will question her and actively takes steps to prepare herself for this ordeal through a form of self-discipline, “repeated over and over,” that is designed to produce an objective and truthful persona.

Momoko’s vow to tell the truth seems motivated by two related desires. First, she seems determined not to allow either side to manipulate her into tailoring her story to fit their agendas. Knowing that each man intends to characterize her according to opposite but similarly unacceptable tropes of femininity—as a “good” (scorned) or a “bad” (unfaithful) woman—she strives to refuse either role by aiming for a position somewhere in the middle. She therefore enters the courtroom having crafted an objective persona that is capable of presenting the facts without succumbing to emotional responses to the lawyers’ lines of questioning. Second, she seems determined to demonstrate to herself, and to everyone else, that she has dealt with the pain of her breakup with Otaka and has moved on and therefore feels no need to either defend or attack Otaka’s character. Having “tucked away” their relationship neatly into the closet of her past life, she is mindful of the potential of the trial to “scatter about” the remnants of her past that she has worked so hard to bring to order. She envisions herself as a “fossil” from Otaka’s past as if to will him to stay buried within her own—a desiccated, emotionless relic that no longer poses any threat to her equilibrium. The objective persona that she crafts for herself thus becomes her best defense against the psychological violation that the experience of cross-examination represents for her.

Ironically, while Momoko sees her vow to tell the truth as a kind of defensive strategy to protect herself from the scrutiny of the court, it also requires her to adopt a posture of self-scrutiny that replicates and internalizes the invasive gaze of the men who question her. Poised between two opposing camps both determined to plunder her personal history and warp it into a hackneyed stereotype of femininity with which she cannot identify, Momoko senses that the only way she can forestall this invasion of her memory closet is to maintain a defensive position midway between them. They are seeking not merely factual information but also knowledge of her that can be willfully interpreted to characterize her as a scorned or unfaithful woman, and Momoko’s strategy is to provide only those bits of information that will fail to be useful to each case since if she takes the side of one man, she will be rapidly attacked by the other. She is able to deflect the invasive gaze of the Other, then, only by preemptively turning it upon herself, carefully monitoring her own testimony to ensure that she does not provide anything that can be used to make a case for either side. Momoko’s objective persona is revealed to the reader to be anything but—her constant reminder to herself to tell only the “truth” is rather a mask for the discipline she has imposed upon herself to edit her testimony so as to remove all emotional content, thus presenting herself defensively as a “neutral” party to the debate.

Momoko is able to maintain this smooth wall of defensive objectivity only as long as she is able to remain deliberately unaware of the gaze of the court upon her. Upon first taking the stand, she manages to protect herself from the eyes of the observers by maintaining a downcast gaze, but she is then admonished by the judge to face forward and speak up. She complies with the judge’s order by fixing her gaze upon a safely vacant corner of the opposite wall, so that her line of vision does not intersect with that of anyone else in the room. Her testimony proceeds smoothly after this, and she is able to continue to feel comfortable in her objective persona until, apropos of establishing a precedent for Otaka’s violent treatment of women, the prosecutor presses her on the question of whether or not her first experience of sexual relations with him was entirely consensual.

At this point Momoko’s confidence in her objectivity begins to falter, as she has remembered the night in question in different ways over the years since the breakup, and the scene has appeared in her memory as alternately violent or romantic (281). She selects a relatively neutral account for the purpose of the courtroom testimony, but her steadiness on the stand begins to waver soon after, when the prosecutor presses her on the reasons for the breakup. She then begins to feel acutely aware of the gaze of the members of the courtroom upon her:

The reason she had not felt anyone’s gaze for some time seemed not to be because she was calm after all. The initial nervousness she had felt when she was sworn in seemed to have simply frozen that way. Now perhaps that had begun to thaw, for the moment she began to search her feelings, she once again was forced to realize that she was all alone on the witness stand in front of the court.

Until just a moment ago, whenever the prosecutor’s words emerged from the upper-right-hand corner of her atmosphere, she had been able to produce a correct answer, just like a machine operated by a remote-control device. Even when she had to search her memory about the time in question, she had quickly felt with a palpable certainty that her answer was true beyond any doubt and was able to put into words what she had felt. But suddenly that changed. …

Since the judge had told her to face the court, she had kept her gaze fixed straight ahead on the far corner of the room, and within that hazy field of vision the whole court had appeared strangely bright. The gaze of the people in the courtroom that she had only felt up to now with her body now entered her unexpectedly wide field of vision. On the far right, Otaka sat bolt upright and occasionally turned only his eyes in her direction. On the left side, the judge had turned his chair sideways to look at her. Below her the tape recorder behind the court reporter’s desk was revolving. After each question was asked, Momoko felt that the whole courtroom became quiet, the gaze of everyone in the room hardened upon her, and even the revolution of the tape recorder reel became more deliberate. Then the memories and words that had seemed to come together instantly fell apart, and she had to search for them again. As this was happening, the prosecutor would change the angle of questioning, and her mind would become even more confused. (282–283)

It is at precisely at this point in the text that Momoko’s composure is shattered, and she begins to lose confidence in her ability to respond objectively to the prosecutor’s questioning. During the remainder of the interrogation, there are several moments when she seems to doubt her responses or feel unsure as to what might constitute a truthful response. During the cross-examination, as the defense attorney begins to capitalize on her uncertainty and use her previous testimony against her, her stutter returns, and by the final lines of the story she is mute and defenseless on the stand.

This pivotal moment in the narrative, when Momoko begins to lose control of the situation and succumbs to the masculine gaze, reveals much about the role of scopic power as a disciplinary mechanism. While she seems to have been aware of the gaze of the court on some level throughout the proceedings, having “felt it with her body,” she is able to maintain her composure until she makes eye contact with those who are watching her. It is as though the Achilles’ heel of her psychological armor is the part that is turned inward—her own gaze—and her willingness to discipline herself through a strict monitoring of her testimony, however preemptive and self-protective a gesture that may be, is precisely what leaves her so vulnerable to the opportunistic questioning of the prosecutor. Her need to produce absolutely truthful testimony is what causes her to hesitate on the stand, and the more her confidence in her ability to tell the truth falters, the more the gaze of the audience “stop[s] being supportive, and turn[s] to curiosity” (294).

It is significant that the part of the interrogation that flusters her so relates directly to the problem of her own tenuous sense of sexual subjectivity because it is on this point that both men attempt to make their case about Momoko’s credibility as a witness. As noted, while the prosecutor’s line of questioning is designed to portray Momoko as a good woman who was an unfortunate victim of the “ladykiller” Otaka, the defense attorney wishes to present her as a loose woman who is undeserving of the sympathy of the court. Both men therefore are invasive in their queries about Momoko’s sexual history and relationship with the accused. Was she raped by Otaka on that first night? Did he use force or coercion? What words and tactics did he use to persuade her? Although the prosecutor justifies this line of questioning on the pretext that it is relevant to Otaka’s treatment of other women, there is a prurient subtext to his desire to know and expose Momoko’s sexual history for the edification of the members of the courtroom, whose curious gaze leaves her feeling even further exposed. Even though the prosecutor is pushing the “good woman” theory of Momoko’s character, his questioning at this point gives the impression that she is the one on trial.

When this story was published (1966), it was still very much the norm in Japan for feminine sexuality to be subordinated to the twin projects of marriage and motherhood. Not only does Momoko’s experience of having lived with a man outside of marriage mark her as a marginal figure of some disrepute, but she further offends normative models of femininity by expressing little interest in the prospect of marriage. In fact the prosecutor seems somewhat taken aback by her testimony that she never pressed Otaka to marry her (280). As if attempting to reinscribe Momoko within a framework analogous to conventional marriage, so as to make the case for his characterization of her as a “good” woman who was unfortunately used and discarded by a “bad” man, he describes her initially as Otaka’s “common-law wife,” a characterization that she refuses (279). She likewise declines to support the prosecutor’s portrayal of herself as a victim of Otaka’s “ladykiller” ways when asked to describe their first night together, opting instead to emphasize her own role in choosing to sleep with him (281).

Unfortunately Momoko’s insistence on her own sexual agency provides the defense attorney precisely the information he needs to make the case for her as a “bad” woman. He first capitalizes on her insistence that she chose, rather than was coerced, to sleep with Otaka. He then turns the conversation to an inquiry into her sexual history, wanting to know how many previous lovers she has had, how many “male acquaintances” she had during the time she was living with Otaka, and how many of these she “associated with” during their relationship (293–294). He deliberately uses language that can be interpreted as variously innocent or suggestive, making it difficult for Momoko to answer truthfully without implicating herself in a romantic relationship that she never had with any of these men. Momoko’s vow of truth, then, becomes her undoing as she is led down a line of questioning that makes it impossible to protest that she is innocent of what the attorney is implying without making herself seem even more guilty. It is at this point that she begins to stutter, which confirms for the curious members of the courtroom the verdict that she is in fact a “bad” woman after all.

Momoko is unable to resist this outcome precisely because the terms of debate are decided for her in advance. Given that the gaze of the authorities recognizes only two valid types of women—good ones and bad ones—she cannot resist one stereotype without being tarred with the brush of the other. Her attempt to maintain a neutral position between these two options is ultimately shown to be untenable; the members of the court scrutinize her with the explicit purpose of determining whether she is good or bad and literally refuse to see her according to any other model of femininity.

Kōno’s story thus offers an ironic twist on Foucault’s theory of visually imposed disciplinary mechanisms, as her protagonist is twice disciplined within the space of this short story to very different ends. Momoko first adopts a posture of absolute truthfulness, in an almost hyperbolically faithful acquittal of her legal responsibility to give accurate testimony before the court. In a sense she is attempting to protect herself through a parodic performance of her sworn duty to tell the truth, as she is instructed by the court. Yet what the court says it requires of her and what it actually requires of her appear to be two different things. She learns during the course of the proceedings that she is in fact expected not to tell the truth about her relationship with Otaka as per her own understanding of what transpired between them, but rather to play a role that is designed to aid the prosecution in making its case against him.

Momoko’s attempt to resist this role backfires, as the more she refutes the “good” woman stereotype, the more the audience sees her as its logical opposite. She is even disciplined to perform in accordance with the bad woman role type, contrary to her own intentions, first by providing information on the stand to support these assumptions, and then by failing to defend herself against them through her loss of speech. It is important to note that Momoko’s own perception of herself has nothing whatsoever to do with how she is seen and understood by the members of the courtroom—in fact the more she resists their attempts to fix her in the role of unfaithful woman, the more guilty she seems in the eyes of the spectators. Her silence in the final lines of the story thereby renders her, against her own will, as compliant with the mold of femininity to which she has inevitably been assigned, according to the perception of the male observers who are empowered to so define her by virtue of being possessors of the gaze.

In contrast to Kōno’s realistic courtroom narrative, Takahashi Takako’s “Getting on the Wrong Train” is a surreal and abstract tale of scopic violation and loss of identity. The protagonist’s misadventures begin as she leaves home for a class reunion and encounters a mysteriously adult-looking boy on the train whose penetrating gaze intimidates her. During her train journey the main character, known to the reader only as “Watashi” (“I”), becomes hungry and decides to purchase a boxed lunch from a platform vendor. She begins eating the meal, but to her dismay this action draws the gaze of the boy even more persistently in her direction, which unnerves her: “Because of those eyes, I was made to see the horror of the fact that I was eating. No, the boy seemed to be looking at something more than that. Perhaps he was looking at the horror of the fact that I was sustaining my life through eating. … Because I had committed the single mistake of eating, the boy began to exist beside me as the very incarnation of misfortune.”¹⁰Close He continues staring at her, and she experiences the gaze as oppressively coming at her from all sides, as his stare is also reflected in the window beside her.

As a result of this encounter, Watashi begins to experience a bizarre form of physical transformation that is explicitly linked to the “penetration” of the boy’s gaze: “The feeling of oppression threatened to flow out of my mouth, so I forced myself to swallow it down. It swelled larger inside me, and along with that mass I was assaulted by an unsteady feeling of being scooped up into the air. This engorged thing reached saturation point and exploded into shards that whirled about with a roar. Inside me, something fundamentally abnormal had formed” (223). Confused by the intensity of his observation of her, she first gets off the train too soon and then mistakenly boards another train going in the wrong direction. She finally disembarks in an unknown town, and as she wanders aimlessly through the streets, she reflects on her situation: “Points of departure and destination had both dissolved into something vague and elusive. A bare self surrounded by darkness and buffeted by strong winds—what was I? Neither male nor female. Ageless. Cut off from past or future, brought to the point of nakedness—it was the fault of this station, but it was that boy’s fault that I was forced to get off here. That’s right; it seems that my fate was sealed on that train platform when I first got on the train” (226).

But although she momentarily sees herself as a form of disembodied existence that has come untethered from the gendered structures of everyday life, she is soon redirected by a series of arrows that point her toward a house where five men are sprawled on the floor in philosophical discussion of suicide. They first ignore her and then turn on her, demanding to know “what” she is. When she falters and is unable to speak, they punish her for her silence by threatening to “take” her thoughts in what can only be described as a scopic gang-rape. Each pulls out a camera and begins snapping photos of her against her will. While she consoles herself with the reassurance that they won’t be able to discover anything about her this way, she is aghast when they return triumphantly with developed photos of the “fetus” that she supposedly harbors within her. She associates the object in the photographs with the gaze of the strange boy on the train that unnerved her so: “The thing in the photograph wasn’t a fetus. It was that evil boy who was encased in that womb-like space. He’s living inside me with those terrifying eyes that see through everything. When I stare off into space, the boy’s eyes follow my gaze. Even if I close my eyes, that boy’s eyes stay wide open in place of mine. Those eyes are guiding me in an unknown direction. A dreadful yet sweet abstract pregnancy” (237).

Watashi seems to lose consciousness from the shock of this exposure, and the story concludes with the protagonist’s total loss of identity and capacity for speech. In the final lines of the story, Watashi is aimlessly wandering the streets of this unfamiliar town with nothing but an endless night before her, having literally internalized the masculine gaze. She “hears” the voice of the boy as if it emanates from the strange mass inside her, and her own will has apparently been completely overridden by the demands of the voice within.

As in Kōno’s courtroom narrative, Takahashi’s story likewise illustrates the futility of women’s attempts to remain gender-neutral in a society that insists they conform to feminine norms. The protagonist is first marked as “feminine” when she is fixed by the gaze of the boy on the train, whose eyes seem to rebuke her for eating. The consumption of food is implicitly associated with female corporeality in a scene just prior to this, when Watashi notices a middle-aged woman buying a large quantity of boxed lunches on the platform outside the train:

From the front of the train emerged a middle-aged woman who went running at a frenzied pace toward the vendor. She called out to him in a voice that resembled a bird of prey descending from the sky to pounce on a corpse. … I could see her return carrying an armload of ten boxed lunches or so. She was probably buying for a large group of travelers, but I imagined her devouring them all herself. She didn’t buy any tea, I realized. It seemed like she intended to choke down all ten lunches without any tea. Imagining such vast quantities of rice passing through her mouth, mixing with a copious amount of saliva, and making their way to her stomach, I felt my appetite diminish. (220)

The middle-aged woman in this scene seems almost a hyperbolic representation of that icon of normative Japanese femininity, the “good wife and wise mother,” whose primary role is to nurture life, especially through her preparation and provision of food. Yet here the stereotype is mischievously turned on its head through a grotesque parody of another aspect of domestic womanhood circa the age of high economic growth—her function as consumer, by virtue of her designated role of household manager.

The unsavory images evoked by the sight of this woman as Watashi imagines her consuming excessive amounts of food cause the protagonist to recoil from her own physiological needs, as if wishing to erase any traces of biological femininity through a kind of extreme self-denial akin to anorexia. However, this strategy proves to be unsuccessful, as she is nevertheless fixed by the boy’s gaze and defined as feminine, through a negative association of femininity with bodily desire and need. Revealingly, even the gaze of an immature man-boy seems to have the power to scopically engender the protagonist. The boy’s authority as bearer of the gaze is visually underscored by his physical appearance—clad in a business suit and carrying a briefcase, he is the very image of a miniature salaryman, the logical complement to the housewife whose excessive consumption threatens to implicate Watashi as feminine.

Watashi experiences a second kind of forcible engendering at the hands of the male philosophers, whose infliction of the rape-by-camera results in her breakdown at the end of the story. Prior to her encounter with the men, Watashi clearly had fancied herself to be a genderless creature, as is evident by her thoughts just prior to arriving at their house: “What was I? Neither male nor female. Ageless. Cut off from past or future, brought to the point of nakedness.” Even after entering the room where the men are sprawled on the floor talking, so long as they take no notice of her, she is able to think, “Well, it seems like I’m really not a woman after all” (230). In fact, envisioning herself as an anonymous and sexless entity seems to provide her a kind of protective camouflage, for she senses that, as on the train, drawing attention to herself as a feminine subject could have dire repercussions: “The men drained their cups and poured more water from the kettle. I was thirsty too. But there were only five cups, for the men. Yes, I can’t go on drinking carelessly like that, I reminded myself. Because of that mistake of eating on the train, that boy became aware of me and brought misfortune upon me, didn’t he? In this place devoted to talk of suicide, I mustn’t wish for life-sustaining food or even water” (234). As with the boxed-lunch incident on the train, Watashi assumes a posture of self-denial designed to conceal her gendered identity through refusal of even the most basic biological necessities, food and water.

Underlying this logic of refusal is an implicit binary distinction between men and women that posits men (in the guise of the philosophers) as rational, logical, and intellectual. In contrast, women are defined as embodied creatures who consume, and if this marks them as “feminine” in a distinctly negative sense, then Watashi’s instinct is to conceal her physical presence through an anorexic effacement of her own embodiment. However, as with Momoko’s attempt to hide behind a shield of neutral objectivity in “Broken Oath,” Watashi’s efforts to deny her gender through the suppression of bodily desire fail to protect her from the overwhelming power of the masculine gaze, as the men eventually notice her and succeed in proving her femininity through photographic evidence of her reproductive potential. At the end of the story, she is forced to yield to the dictates of the “abstract pregnancy” that now apparently controls her destiny, as she is literally inhabited by the gaze of the boy.

This story thus posits a femininity that is defined by society, in the person of a male observer, as consumptive and reproductive excess. The protagonist is keenly aware that these “offenses” mark her as feminine in a negative and derogatory sense, and she actively attempts to evade such characterizations by denying these aspects of her own subjectivity. She first reveals herself as “feminine” on the train when she acknowledges her hunger and begins to eat, drawing the penetrative gaze of the boy toward her. Though this unwanted attention prompts her to deny her appetite, she has already been fixed by his gaze, and the result is a curious sort of transformation that suggests impregnation by force-feeding: “I forced myself to swallow it down. It swelled larger inside me.” Having been visually violated and impregnated once by the boy, she experiences the same treatment again at the hands of the philosophers, who assail her with visual “proof” of her capacity to produce life—that is, the photograph of the “fetus” within—highlighting another bodily function associated with femininity. In spite of Watashi’s sense of herself as “neither male nor female,” the men she encounters seem determined to remind her of her feminine (and by implication inferior) subject position.

At the same time, this story also highlights the hypocrisy of such binary distinctions, as the disembodied intellectualism of the philosophers is implicitly called into question. Though the consumption of food or water is necessary to sustain life for any human being, male or female, only women are taken to task for expressing such bodily necessities. When Watashi eats, she is subjected to the accusatory stare of the boy, whose visual penetration of her further feminizes her in an implicitly sexual way. The male philosophers, on the other hand, freely help themselves to the kettle of water that is explicitly marked for their exclusive use. Clearly the men in this story may drink, and presumably eat, without gendered consequences, even as they posture rhetorically about casting off their own lives. Furthermore, their “philosophical” discussion of suicide is permeated with crude sexual references that border on misogyny. For example, one man jokes about “shooting” a woman with a pistol/phallus, underscoring what he perceives as the real source of masculine authority, while unwittingly highlighting his own embodiment (231). Thus, while on one level Takahashi’s protagonist is inextricably bound to the negative polarity of a binary opposition that renders her inferior, on another level the author highlights the illogical nature of the fantasies of gender that underpin this structure.

Unlike the previous two narratives, both of which are short stories that climax with the protagonist’s encounter with the masculine gaze, the novel Blue Journey offers a more sustained exploration of the consequences of this process of engendering on its protagonist. Blue Journey, narrated entirely in the second person by a female protagonist, reads like a series of diary entries written by and addressed to the same person. The story alternates between present and past, with the primary narrative continuously interrupted by a series of flashback sequences. The primary narrative chronicles the protagonist’s search for her fiancé, who has disappeared after a long and vexed “platonic” courtship, marked by both parties’ open acknowledgment of their sexual affairs with other people. The flashback sequences trace the development of their relationship, from their first meeting in high school to the present, when both are university students nominally “engaged” to one another but with no intention of actually marrying.

The portion of the story of interest for us—an episode that is strikingly similar to the visual rape in “Getting on the Wrong Train”—is presented in a flashback sequence that provides crucial information about the main character’s development from girlhood into the woman she is in the present. It is particularly important to the novel as a whole because it helps us to understand the protagonist’s highly conflicted feelings about her own femininity, her consequent rejection of normative ideologies of romantic love, and her resistance to marriage as the natural and inevitable denouement of the feminine life course.

In this particular episode the protagonist recalls a painful event from her adolescence, when she was accosted near her parents’ seaside villa by a gang of young boys who compelled her to remove her bathing suit and submit to their curious and derisive gaze:

It was the squeaky voice of that pubescent youth that ordered you to open your legs and assume the shape of the letter Y—the most vulnerable position, leaving you stripped of any action that might allow you to cover yourself. They raped you with their eyes, the eyes of those boys assembled in the space between your open legs. The pain of shame pierced you like a hot skewer. … After a long silence, the boys raised their voices in a persistent round of insane laughter, stamping their feet and hooting obscenely at your faint growth of hair.¹¹Close

Rendered speechless and unable to defend herself from the assault, the protagonist collapses onto the sand and loses consciousness. The following day she menstruates for the first time, an episode that is explicitly linked to the scopic violation of the day before in its capacity to inflict trauma on her. Rather than an auspicious transformation from girlhood to womanhood, the main character of Blue Journey experiences her first period as an “execution” of her subjectivity, rendering her feminine in ways that force her to assume roles and character traits that are alien to her sense of self.

Though prior to this event she had no perception of herself as feminine, the protagonist describes this experience as having “forced her to know” the fact of her own gender in an emphatically unpleasant way. The text is explicit here in disavowing any “natural” basis for gender roles, emphasizing instead the social construction of feminine identity:

You are adamant about the fact that it’s not that you are a woman; you are sentenced to be a woman, so in accepting this sentence you merely perform as a woman. … Until you accepted this sentence, you were nothing but a cute kid, a flexible existence that was neither female nor male, and as a child bundled in silken flesh, you drank the blessed milk of the breast of society. But everything changed after that, you became a different person as a result of this sudden change, and your harmony with society was severed. … From that time on society became Other to you, an evil executioner. … It was your twelfth summer when your blood first arrived, and that symbol of shame that flowed from the wound raped by society sentenced you to womanhood. (97)

While menstruation is clearly a biological process that occurs regardless of the intervention (or indifference) of society, the text is insistent here on the linkage between the trauma of scopic violation and the resultant flow of blood—both are encoded as a kind of rape that forcibly engenders a girl as feminine. In other words, the biological nature of this corporeal experience is subordinated to the meaning placed upon it by society as a rite of passage and the corresponding societal need to confine female bodies within specific tropes of womanhood.

As in the previous two stories under discussion here, Blue Journey likewise highlights the overwhelming power of the engendering gaze, illustrating how it is internalized even by women who attempt to resist it. As a consequence of this experience, the protagonist of Kurahashi’s novel begins to scrutinize her own anatomy in an exact replication—or perhaps parody—of the way she was violated by the gang of young boys:

Glittering with the teeth of a witch and the eyes of a martyr, you made a sacrifice of yourself and offered it to yourself. … You devised a way to gaze at that secret part of yourself in the mirror. … It was a hole, a hideous but seductive brand in the shape of a flower, an open wound torn by the teeth of society. … You can’t really say that you felt hatred toward this hole of yours, but it was something that you just couldn’t get used to. That hole with rose-colored walls, that concave existence that revealed your eerie interior—that was woman. You squatted in a horrifying posture above your own image, eyes glittering like those of a crazy woman as you wrung out all the knowledge you could [from this experience]. You figured it would be cleverest to make a virtue out of necessity and intoned like a curse, I am a woman, I shall become a woman. … That is, you thought you would have to perform as a woman; that would be fine; there was no other way for you to attain liberation and revenge. (100–101)

The trauma of enforced feminization here yields a protagonist who is literally rent in two, divided against herself into observer and observed, and in replicating the masculine gaze, she effectively takes the explicitly unnatural role of policing gender norms upon herself.

Feminine complicity in enforcing gender norms is further underscored in the protagonist’s relationship with her mother, which is irreparably damaged once the daughter realizes the futility of explaining her anguish at this “felicitous” transformation into adulthood: “Shouldn’t you have confessed the situation to someone—for example, your mother—and had her deal with it on your behalf? But that way of thinking was alien to you. If you had done so, mother would probably have behaved like a knowledgeable guardian, a co-conspirator, in front of this daughter who had felicitously become a proper <woman>” (100). Thereafter the protagonist begins to conceal her true self behind a “mask” in order to take on the appropriately feminine persona expected of her by society. This performance is so effective that not only does she convince her mother and others of her transformation, but she even loses sight of herself as the distinction between the masquerade and the actress collapses: “From then on you ceased being yourself and became increasingly proficient at donning the mask and playing the role of yourself. Even the word “self” came to mean to you nothing more than the crevice, the vacant passageway, between you and the mask, because from that time on you lost substance” (99).

The “solution” to this victimization by womanhood is to embrace and aestheticize the infliction through a parodic performance of femininity. While on the one hand this amounts to a kind of perpetual self-victimization, on the other, the protagonist is able to control and thus distance herself from the damage to her ego; this is evident in the way the strategy is described as a means of both “revenge” and “liberation.”

Of the three narratives under consideration here, Blue Journey ironically seems to offer both the most explicitly violent example of forcible engendering and the only strategy for overcoming such trauma. Although the protagonists of the first two stories actively try to preserve their sense of agency, their attempts at resistance are ultimately unsuccessful, and they are left defeated and silenced by their experience as objects of the masculine gaze. Momoko is left catatonic on the stand in the final lines of “Broken Oath,” and Watashi of “Getting on the Wrong Train” has evidently gone insane.

In contrast, Kurahashi’s protagonist is able to narrate her way out of total psychic dissolution. By complying with yet parodying the role that is forced upon her, but more important by retaining her relationship to language, the main character of Blue Journey is able to stand on her own by the end of the story. As Atsuko Sakaki has demonstrated in her study of this novel, Blue Journey may be read as a narrative about narration, foregrounding the process of writing in ways that allow the protagonist to reinvent herself by the end of the story as the author of her own tale.¹²Close In this sense, while she has accepted the self-fragmentation attendant upon “performing” the feminine role assigned to her, she is able to retain a measure of control over the process of performance (or narration) itself, thus preserving some degree of subjectivity.

Though very different in narrative style and structure, these three texts demonstrate striking similarities in their portrayal of the impact of the masculine gaze on a female object. In each case, a female protagonist who aspires to gender-neutral status is abruptly reminded of her femininity through the disciplinary gaze of society, which is figured in the text implicitly or explicitly as masculine and personified within the texts through groups of men who collectively outnumber and overpower her. Although the disciplinary gaze in these stories is figured as masculine, this does not mean that the one who wields the gaze must necessarily be male.

In fact, each of these narratives demonstrates in its own way that feminine complicity is requisite in order for the process of engendering to be successful—whether this gaze is wielded by one woman against another (as in the mother of Blue Journey) or is self-inflicted. In each case, the protagonist is isolated, either because there are no other women around with whom she can seek solidarity or because other women ally themselves with the disciplinary mechanisms that seek to engender her as feminine. Alone in her subjection to the masculine gaze, the protagonist’s defenses crumble and she loses the ability to speak out on her own behalf. The masculine gaze in each story, therefore, can be understood in Foucault’s terms as a disciplinary mechanism that functions to enforce norms of femininity, through the reluctant complicity of the protagonist, as she internalizes the gaze and turns it upon herself.¹³Close

By highlighting the catastrophic effects of these disciplinary mechanisms on their protagonists—not to mention the hypocritical and self-contradictory nature of the binary structures that contain them—each of these authors effects a powerful critique of normative femininity. Kōno’s character may be frozen on the stand at the end of “Broken Oath,” but her struggles to remain outside of gendered stereotypes elicit the reader’s sympathy. Momoko’s experiences further underscore the failure of justice in a legal system that operates not according to standards of objective truth, but on the basis of stereotypically gendered expectations of human behavior that have no basis in reality. Likewise, the experiences of Takahashi’s protagonist eloquently attest to the pretensions of male intellectual elites who scorn women as base corporeal objects, even as they prove themselves to be equally embodied creatures of the flesh. Finally, through her explicit characterization of femininity as a “mask” worn by an actress forced to deny any sense of a “true” self within, Kurahashi savagely parodies the lack of substance of gendered conventions that confine women to playing a role that is scripted for them by society.

While my analysis thus far has focused on the role of plot and characterization in forwarding a feminist critique of gender norms, it is also important to note the way narrative style contributes to the effectiveness of this critique. “Broken Oath” is told in the third person and is largely plot-driven, which allows the reader to observe Momoko’s victimization from a position of some psychological remove—the reader is able to witness her tribulations on the stand and feel sympathy for her but nevertheless is not directly interpellated by the story itself. On the other hand, “Getting on the Wrong Train,” with a first-person narrative that is almost claustrophobically contained within the psyche of the female protagonist, forces the reader to align him- or herself more closely with Watashi, which makes the experience of the rape-by-camera scene markedly more uncomfortable.

Yet both of these techniques pale in comparison to Kurahashi’s second-person stratagem in Blue Journey, where the reader is constantly interpellated (or even verbally assaulted) by an accusatory “you” that places him or her in the position of the protagonist, as object of the gaze. So when the main character of the novel is forced to strip and submit to the derisive gaze of the gang of boys, the reader likewise experiences this scene as if she—and I use this pronoun advisedly since the experience of this scene implicitly feminizes the reader regardless of his or her biological sex—is violated simultaneously with the protagonist. Kurahashi’s avant-garde technique in this scene thus effects a powerfully political gesture, forcing the reader to acknowledge the horrific violence of the engendering gaze and turning the tables on her readers by subjecting them to the same disciplinary mechanism. In this sense, Kurahashi’s strategy of feminizing her audience seems to enact, on the level of narrative structure, the very “revenge” against society that her protagonist fantasizes about within the story. Although readers may approach this story with the expectation of a spectator desiring to witness, from a safely distanced perspective, the trials and tribulations of a character that is Other to them, they are quickly and violently repositioned as the objects of the gaze through interpellation as the “you” that is defined as the protagonist of this story.

These stories, therefore, yield very different readings, depending on whether one is concerned primarily with character dynamics within the story itself or the impact of each narrative on the reader. A reading of each story based solely on the fate of the main character would suggest a fairly bleak assessment of the possibility for resistance against disciplinary regimes of engendering, given that two of these narratives end with their protagonists in a state of total incapacitation and the third at best leaves its female character radically alienated from (and divided against) herself. Yet these three narratives performatively effect a critique of such disciplinary mechanisms by placing the reader in the awkward position of witnessing, and even identifying with, a protagonist who is victimized by society’s intrusive gaze.

Having explored how gender norms are enforced and internalized through the oppressive and invasive masculine gaze as a disciplinary mechanism, we will turn in the next chapter to a discussion of the incentives offered to women to comply “voluntarily” with such constructions of femininity. Chapter 3, on “feminist misogyny,” analyzes fiction that depicts the process of feminine self-abjection, whereby women learn to accept the notion that they occupy an inferior position vis-à-vis men. This sense of inferiority is based on a binary logic that relegates women to the realm of the corporeal so that men may transcend this abject state as spiritual or intellectual beings. This lesson is imparted in the context of intimate relationships with men who serve as lovers or mentors of the protagonists and who discipline these women through a system of rewards and punishments based on the women’s willingness to comply. Women are rewarded for embracing a position of corporeal immanence through affective ties with men whom they love and respect, or else they are punished for their failure to do so through the withholding of such affections. In tracing these microchannels of power, the authors of these texts wish to expose the hypocrisy of such power dynamics by demonstrating that they cause women to internalize misogynist attitudes, replicating them not only toward other women but toward themselves as well.