3 Feminist Misogyny? or How I Learned to Hate My Body

It takes a feminist to know a misogynist, and vice versa.

—Susan Gubar, “Feminist Misogyny”

In chapter 2, we saw the importance of the masculine gaze in disciplining women to behave as “appropriately” feminine subjects. While such discipline implies a negative form of reinforcement of gender norms, it is nevertheless clear that in other stories, the desire for positive validation by the men in one’s life is equally important in rendering women complicit with social constructions of femininity. In this chapter, we will examine three stories that detail the bond between a female protagonist and her male lover or mentor, underscoring the ways male chauvinism or misogyny is internalized and reproduced by the women themselves in the context of intimate relationships. In each case the hierarchical nature of such relationships, whereby the male occupies a dominant position vis-à-vis the female, encourages the protagonist to compensate for her relative lack of power through compliance with and/or manipulation of the standards used to judge her as “inferior.” In the process of trying to outwit the male at his own game, she unwittingly winds up internalizing and replicating negative attitudes toward women, a phenomenon that Susan Gubar has ironically termed “feminist misogyny.”

In chapter 1 we saw that in postwar Japanese literature by male authors, women’s bodies formed the ground for construction of a masculine subjectivity that rendered women inferior by aligning them with the realm of the corporeal. By disavowing those qualities that threatened them with emasculation in the face of a superior occupying army—physical fragility, sexual vulnerability, submission to authority—and then projecting them onto women, Japanese men were able to posit themselves as superior to women by virtue of their own theoretical invulnerability. Misogynist rhetoric thus served as a palliative strategy for coping with the crisis to postwar Japanese masculinity posed by the Occupation. Julia Kristeva has described this strategy of disavowal and projection of undesirable qualities as a process of “abjection,” whereby the abject or “unclean” entity is expelled from the economy of power but is at the same time a crucial structuring element of it. As such, the strategy serves to define the boundary between “clean” and “unclean,” “normal” and “abnormal”—or in this case, “masculine” and “feminine.”¹Close

As we will see in this chapter, Kōno, Takahashi, and Kurahashi challenge this misogynist “logic” head on by crafting narratives that demonstrate the psychological cost to women who are thus rendered “inferior.” As in fiction by contemporary male authors, women here are aligned with the realm of bodily specificity so that men may identify themselves with the realm of the spiritual, the intellectual, or some otherwise exalted sphere of existence. But narratives by women differ in their attention to the adverse effects of this logic on women. The male characters in these stories so convince the female protagonists of the validity of this hierarchically gendered value system that the women either accept it at face value and succumb to self-destructive behavior or identify themselves as provisionally masculine in order to prove that they are an exception to the rule of feminine inferiority.

“Bone Meat” (Hone no niku, 1969), by Kōno Taeko, is an example of the first type of narrative, wherein the female protagonist’s abandonment by her lover sends her into a state of hysterical self-abjection that may in fact result in her death at the end of the story. “Like a Witch” (Yōjo no yō ni, 1964), by Kurahashi Yumiko, and “Castle of Bones” (Hone no shiro, 1969), by Takahashi Takako, are examples of the latter type of story, in which women’s internalization of the “superiority” of men results in a contempt for their own sex and a desire to transcend feminine immanence in favor of a valorized state of existence that is explicitly coded as masculine. Rather than affirming this negative valuation of femininity, these stories expose and critique the way such misogynist “logic” works to trap women in an emphatically illogical and unjust double bind, whereby neither resistance nor compliance serves as an effective strategy for building a tenable feminine subjectivity.

The protagonist of “Bone Meat” is an unmarried woman whose live-in lover abandons her about six months before the time when the story begins. Much of the tale is told in flashback, as she remembers the time they spent together leading up to their breakup. She remembers with particular fondness times when they ate food “with bones or shells” because these meals were accompanied by a specific form of role-playing in which the man took the meaty parts for himself and left the woman with the merest scraps of leftover food. This literal performance of the hierarchical structure of their relationship—wherein the male demonstrates his dominance and the woman gracefully submits—is cited by the protagonist as the very reason that these meals were pleasurable to her above all others.

The woman’s pleasure is evident in a remembered scene in which the two eat raw oysters on the half-shell together. As if in deliberate parody of the stereotype of the cheerfully submissive wife, the woman carefully prepares the meal and serves it to the man, taking pleasure not only in watching him eat, but also in denying herself food even when he offers it to her. After watching him eat a few of the oysters, she takes up one of his discarded shells and begins to scrape at the tiny bits of flesh left stuck to the shell, from which she derives immense pleasure. Evidently the ritual nature of their role-playing, during which she repeatedly asks him for a whole oyster and he refuses her, is an important part of the enjoyment for her because when he unexpectedly offers her one, she is disappointed at this “departure from the usual order of things.”²Close It turns out that the man simply finds that night’s product to be inferior in quality to the oysters they usually buy, and since the meal lacks flavor, he seems to grow tired of the usual game:

“How is it?” the man asked.

“Well, I can’t really tell,” she replied. What she could tell was that it was not nearly so good as the taste of the hinge muscle scraped from the empty shell or the other bit of meat that had given her such ecstasy. And it seemed distinctly inferior to the flavor, the smell, the freshness of the seashore called up in her mind by the voluptuous sound the man made when he raised the shell to his lips and sucked out the oyster. Even the flavor evoked by that sound amounted to little more than imagining a long-past and much-faded sensation. (259–260)

With this rather unexpected turn of events, the meal ends, along with the role-playing that is supposed to accompany it, and the scene concludes as follows:

She felt dissatisfied that the scene they always played when they ate oysters on the half-shell had not been followed. The man took her hand and stroked it. She wished she might feel that on another part of her body. …

That evening, however, which ended without the usual fulfillment of the scene she associated with the taste, was the last time they ate oysters together. Before too many more days passed, spring was upon them and the raw-oyster season was over. The summer passed and autumn came, and by the time the air again began to turn cold, the man had already left. (261)

It is clear in this scene that eating oysters together is a pleasurable and even erotic experience for the woman and that her own pleasure is predicated on a posture of self-denial that privileges the desires of the man. It is the sound of him eating and enjoying his meal, not the food itself, that evokes “the flavor, the smell, the freshness of the seashore” and makes the meal of oysters special to her. It is also clear that this scene represents the beginning of the end of their relationship—already “long-past and much-faded” by the time the story itself begins. In fact, enjoyment of the oysters, linked as it is with the sexual play that accompanies the meal, can be read as a kind of metaphor for the relationship itself—neither of which, it is implied in this passage, gives him pleasure any longer.

The linkages between physical and emotional nourishment are further evident in the fact that when he leaves her, the protagonist’s appetite disappears and she becomes extremely thin. The passion that she felt for the man, which is intimately bound up with the performance of self-denial that structures their relationship, is apparently inextricable from her desire for food so that she literally begins to starve herself after he leaves her:

Since girlhood, the woman had hardly been what could be described as plump. However, from about the time the man began gradually bringing in his personal belongings, she had started to gain a little weight.

Their tastes concurred, and they both liked dishes with bones or with shells. The woman was poor, and the man’s prospects, up until about the time he abandoned her, had not looked good, so in order to serve such dishes often, they had to economize on their other meals. Even so, it was mostly the bones or shells which went to the woman. But although she seldom ate richly, she began to gain weight.

The woman recalled this odd phenomenon as not odd in the least. … All those varied bone and shell dishes began to give her the feeling that a sense of taste had been awakened throughout her body; that all her senses had become so concentrated in her sense of taste that it was difficult for her even to move. And when she awoke the next morning, she felt her body brimming with a new vitality. It would have been odd had she not gained weight. (262–263)

The woman had never been critical of him when they had dishes with bones or shells, because at those times he never made her anxious or brought her troubles to mind. He coveted meat even more fiercely than before, and she even more wholeheartedly savored the tiny bits of bone meat. They were a single organism, a union of objectively different parts, immersed in a dream. (263–264)

The description of their relationship as like “a single organism” underscores the extent to which the woman’s physical well-being becomes dependent on the presence and participation of the man. She is able to thrive even though she eats little because their relationship provides her with an identity and proves that she is necessary to him; what use is a sadist without a masochist, and vice versa? Her feminine identity becomes so structured around this performance of a masochistic subject position that when the integrity of their bond is threatened—that is, when the game ceases to provide the usual pleasure—she begins to pick fights with him in order to provoke the kind of passionate exchange they used to share with food. Her constant refrain, “I’d be better off without you!” seems intended to elicit reassurance that this is not the case, and indeed the fact that he continues to stay with her for some time after she begins to criticize him so vehemently appears to offer her some solace—until the day when he takes her at her word and leaves.

It is not surprising that the story begins with a long description of the woman’s attempts to deal with the personal belongings he has left behind, given that throughout the story these discarded material objects are likened to her feelings of abandonment:

The first hints that the man was beginning to think of a life in which she had no part appeared even before his work took a turn for the better. His decision to abandon her had been reflected in both his private and public aspects; even the clothing he wore was all newly made. She felt the sympathy of a fellow-sufferer for the old clothes that he took no more notice of, and yet felt scorned by the very things she tried to pity. And thus the woman found even more unbearable these troublesome leftover belongings. (253)

Not only does she equate herself with these material objects, but it is also clear that she perceives the man to have left her behind in exchange for something better. Effectively, he has cast off both her and his own worn-out things as he moves up the ladder of success. Elsewhere in the text the woman’s poverty is stressed, and it is explicitly contrasted with the man’s more advantageous situation: “She had decided that the best method of dealing with the perplexing problem of the man’s belongings was herself to abandon them entirely, along with her own, and move to a new place. But she didn’t have the money to move to a new place or to buy all the necessary things for it. Although the woman would have liked to abandon it all, she could not, and even her own belongings and the place itself became repugnant to her” (253). It is as though the man has managed to transcend the realm of base materiality only by relegating her to a position of immanence, and her feelings of being discarded along with his old things are transformed into a level of self-loathing that renders her indifferent even to her own well-being.

The protagonist’s frustration with feeling stuck in her current situation, literally weighed down by the baggage of a failed relationship that she is too poor to abandon and too distraught to discard, prompts self-destructive fantasies of escape that may in fact culminate in her death. She becomes haunted by obsessive thoughts of fire that seem to imply both a fear of and a desire for this outcome:

She felt she would like to burn it all—the man’s things, and her own, and the place. If she too were to burn up with them, she thought, so much the better. But she merely hoped for it, and made no plans. Strangely, for a woman who wanted even herself to be destroyed in the conflagration, she was inclined to be wary of fire. … She was tortured by the fear that if she were to start a fire accidentally it would seem like arson. (254)

All that the woman had disposed of among the things the man had left behind was the discarded toothbrush, the old razor blades, and the cigarettes. A moment before, when she had held the ashtray in her hands, she had the dreamlike feeling that everything would, happily, burn to ashes like the cigarettes. (254–255)

In the final lines of the story, it is suggested that she has (perhaps unconsciously) chosen self-immolation over continued misery, as a dream of burning the physical remains of their relationship morphs into an image of an actual house fire:

The siren of a fire engine wailed somewhere continuously. But what caused her dream to recede was less the siren than the words she had just heard in her dream.

From the ashes of the man’s belongings, that there should be so many bones and shells! “Is that so? Is that so?” she said nodding, and the siren, to which was added a furiously ringing bell, filled her ears. Was what she had been told in the dream perhaps prophetic? The bell stopped, and just then the siren arrived blaring under her window. But the woman, her eyes closed, nodding “Is that so? Is that so?” simply snuggled deeper into the quilt as it seemed to begin to smolder. (266)

“Bone Meat” thus offers a fairly literal illustration of the process whereby a woman’s desire for validation by a male authority figure—in this case a former lover—ultimately results in a self-destructive internalization of the very discourses that render her inferior. The protagonist’s complicity with hierarchical power dynamics that encourage and reward her for her submission to their vaguely sadomasochistic role-play is crucial in the success of this process of self-abjection. She even learns to take pleasure in subordinating her own desires to his, and her feminine gender identity becomes inseparable from the masochistic role she plays vis-à-vis her lover. Therefore, when he abandons her, she is unable to extricate herself from the position of identification with his discarded material possessions. The only escape she can envision from this intolerable situation is apparently to destroy herself, along with the rest of the “garbage.”

The central character of “Like a Witch” is a writer who returns home to her family in Kōchi prefecture, a rural area in southern Japan where the pace of life and cultural patterns of the inhabitants are far more traditional than the metropolitan lifestyle to which she has accustomed herself as an adult. On the pretext of helping her younger brother reopen their late father’s dental practice, she has left her husband “without permission” in the hope of gaining some respite from their married life together, which she finds dull and an impediment to her writing career.

The gap in educational level, attitudes, and expectations between the protagonist and the residents of her former hometown is evident from the very first pages of the story, as she describes the mundane routine of housework and gossip that structures the daily life of the women of the village with a mixture of dismissal and contempt. For example, she likens the voice of the woman next door, a former classmate of hers, to the clamoring of stray dogs and wonders how someone so poor could produce so many children.³Close Though the protagonist is married, she has deliberately kept this information from the villagers because she dreads being held accountable to the expectations they have of a properly wed young woman. She therefore sees her marriage as thoroughly different in content and quality than the norm, as defined by this small town, and is determined to keep it that way (219).

The basic conflict of this story, between the normative feminine role of housewife and the protagonist’s status as writer and intellectual, is dramatically illustrated through her relationships with two men—her current husband, whom she views dispassionately and is able to defy seemingly at will, and her former lover, a much older man and mentor whose approval she desperately sought yet who never treated her as an intellectual equal. We know of her relationship with the husband through several phone calls, interspersed throughout the story, during which he repeatedly and unsuccessfully entreats her to come home and fulfill her duties as his wife. She responds by referring to married life as a “prison” and dismisses his suggestion that sexual “service” is an important part of marriage (216). She refuses to express jealousy at the possibility that he might become unfaithful and blithely replies, “If you feel you’re being inconvenienced, please go ahead and sleep with another woman. Don’t hold back on my account.” Even when his language becomes explicitly violent, she is seemingly unfazed:

“Why do you want to do it with me? Shall I put it in more strident terms? What makes it inevitable that you would do so? It’s ridiculous.”

“Listening to you talk, all the penises of the world would probably go flaccid from the poison.”

“That’s the idea.”

“With a woman like you, there’s nothing I can do but beat you, tie you up, whip you until you lose consciousness and then rape you.”

“Ah, you want to give me the role of masochist. But it would be hard for me to be any more masochistic than I am by being bound by the rope of married life.” (215)

Perhaps their banter is intended to be tongue-in-cheek, but the sheer misogyny of the husband’s discourse suggests how desperately he is attempting to reassert his authority. As we will see below, even as the wife appears rather cavalierly to dismiss this rhetorical power play, she unwittingly echoes the same sentiments vis-à-vis other women elsewhere in the text.

The protagonist’s casual disregard of her husband’s demands would make it seem that she is immune to the pressures to yield to masculine authority, but this initial impression is increasingly undermined the more we learn of her relationship with her former lover. Structurally, the story begins with the conversations between husband and wife, and it is almost halfway through the narrative that we first learn of the older man, but at this point her relationship with him, and the impact it has had on her current self, begins to dominate the story. It concludes with her feelings of abandonment by her mentor, which have created a sense of “deepening night” within her, profoundly affecting her personality and the quality of her relationships with others in the present. The story therefore moves gradually from a description of the protagonist’s exterior persona, through her ties to her husband, family, and neighbors, to the very core of her psyche, which has been dramatically shaped by the bond she shared with “him,” the much older man with whom she fell in love at the age of seventeen. It is this man who represents the essence of masculine authority for her and to whom she has submitted herself emotionally, physically, and intellectually in an attempt to win his approval.

Her feelings about this older man are conveyed through two sequences that interrupt the flow of the narrative and provide psychological depth at crucial junctures. The first is a long flashback sequence to the time when she met him, and it occupies nearly a third of the entire text. Then after a brief return to “reality,” in which a subplot concerning the brother is wrapped up, her former lover reappears in a fantasy sequence that intrudes upon the diegetic present and concludes the story with her abandonment by the older man. While the first part of the story revolves around relatively mundane aspects of life in the village—her relationships with husband, family, and neighbors and her feelings of being a fish out of water in her own home town—the introduction of the older man takes the narrative to a more philosophical and abstract level that reveals much about the psychology of the protagonist and how she has come to feel so alienated from her roots. The importance of her relationship with the lover is evident from the way his character, once introduced, completely overshadows the daily life dramas of the first section of the story and the fact that his departure concludes the story itself.

The tension between feminine corporeality and intellectual or spiritual pursuits dominates the lovers’ first meeting and is explored explicitly and at length in the dialogue that establishes the basis for their relationship. They first meet when he helps her up after she collapses due to anemia brought on by menstruation. She is horrified that he has seen her predicament—apparently she has dripped blood on his floor—and her discomfort with her own bodily functions then becomes their first topic of conversation. In fact, she seems to believe that having been “seen” as feminine in such a decisively corporeal fashion is much more invasive than being sexually violated, and she concludes that now that he has “known” her in this sense, they might as well become lovers: “OK, look at me as much as you want. I’ve been seen by you, and it seems that your eyes have taken up residence inside my body” (231).⁴Close It is interesting that although she claims later to be infertile, here and elsewhere the image of being “inhabited” or impregnated by his gaze is used as a metaphor for the profound effect he would have on her later intellectual and psychological development.

While the older man clearly seems to appreciate women’s bodies, and her body in particular, he reveals himself to be less impressed with their spiritual and intellectual potential. In the context of a conversation between the lovers that is part argumentative and part flirtatious, she attempts to earn his respect by appealing to his obvious penchant for intellectualism. His response to her banter is more than a little patronizing:

“You’re a troublesome girl, aren’t you? Good girls don’t argue like that. It just makes you look pouty and stern.”

“You don’t respect me for my mind, do you? You underestimate me. Even in this little body I harbor a soul and spirit and intelligence about a meter long.”

“That’s adorable. Your intellectualism is part of your charm, like the whiskers on a kitten.”

“Because cats have whiskers, they can catch mice even at night.”

“Catching mice is a trivial game so never mind that. But men are stupid animals who will chase rats with such abandon that they forfeit their lives. Men are made exclusively of spirit so they can become as ugly as they want. Women don’t have that. Or even if they do it’s one with their body. It burns inside their bones and shines out beautifully from inside their flesh. It’s hard to say whether it’s flesh or illusion or a ray of light.” (235)

While his reference to men as “stupid animals” would seem to suggest some derision, thereby mitigating the double standard that underlines his assessment of women’s potential, in fact the effect of this phrasing is to posit men as rather heroic in their steadfast pursuit of a goal. Women, on the other hand, are bound by their corporeal immanence, and to the extent that they can be said to have a “spirit”—here a kind of code word for a selfhood that transcends the mortal coil—it is inevitably trapped within a physical package that although pleasing to the eye, is obviously understood as inferior. This much is clear from the assertion that men can “become as ugly as they want” in a corporeal sense, precisely because they possess spirituality, something that is implicitly more valuable than physical beauty.

The protagonist has evidently internalized these prejudices to some extent because she continually attempts to distance herself from the kind of corporeal experience that would bind her to the stereotype of femininity that her lover describes. She balks at his claim that she is “just a woman” and insists on referring to herself as barren in an effort to disavow distinctively feminine experiences like pregnancy and childbirth (233). Likewise, as noted above, she also clearly harbors feelings of abhorrence for her menstrual periods—understood not as a natural cycle of feminine experience but as a corrosive force of decay that destroys from within: “Menstruation. Yuck. I don’t use words like that. My ‘monthly guest.’ More like an angel of death that comes to pick the vines clean, who spits out the dregs and then leaves. It makes the him inside of me particularly testy” (233). Her reference to a male self that resides within the outer feminine shell seems calculated to establish a kind of intellectual authority defined along precisely the lines that he has laid out for her. If only men can be said to possess “spirit” and if he insists on focusing on the feminine exterior, then she must present herself as masculine on the inside, forcing him to recognize her as an intellectual equal.

Furthermore, she is careful to distinguish her own implicitly masculine persona from that of other girls, who only pretend at the sort of philosophical inquiry that marks serious writing:

“You said once that you wrote poetry and fiction, right? You don’t anymore?”

“I don’t. No way. I’m not the kind of girl that pretends to be a writer. Girls can’t become beautiful even if they write fiction. I have some friends who are still writing, but it makes me sick to see them writing out of such feelings of self-love. I can’t stand to be near someone like that. I’ve given up looking in the mirror, and at night, so I won’t touch myself, I keep my hands above the covers. I don’t use makeup either. But the worst is women who make themselves up using words.” (233–234)

It is interesting that her contempt for women’s self-expression, or “writing with makeup,” is so intimately imbricated with both the beauty myth that she is attempting to resist and with feminine sexuality. This is explicitly in response to his repeated attempts to conflate “femininity” with physical beauty. In a determined effort to distance herself from such stereotypes, she disavows both concern for her own appearance, which would mark her as a conventionally and exclusively feminine creature, and the kind of “self-love,” whether explicitly sexual or expressed obliquely through writing, that would validate a feminine perspective.

In fact, the protagonist tries so hard to distance herself from normative femininity that she, perhaps unwittingly, seems to internalize the very misogynist discourse and attitudes that she is attempting to resist. She does so by drawing a clear line of demarcation between herself and other women, presenting herself as the exception to the rules that determine gender normativity for him:

[Man:] “But aren’t women creatures who live on beauty? Every woman lives thinking of herself as beautiful. If a woman were to become unable to believe that, she couldn’t go on living another day. They live praying to themselves to become more and more beautiful. Even old hags.”

“That’s stupid.”

“You should think of it as tragic instead.”

“You should have said comic. It’s so amusing I can’t stand it. … If the kind of woman that fits your definition of ‘woman’ is the most feminine type, then I can’t stand to be a woman. Women who are the ugliest things in the world and yet pretend not to see that and try to find something beautiful about themselves, try to make themselves even 1 percent more beautiful, thinking that if beautiful people are good and proper, then they’ll try to be good and proper—women who live lying to themselves like that should be raped and killed. Don’t you think you’d like to exterminate all those lady teachers and PTA moms, female critics, and Diet members when you see them?”

“Well, you just have to put up with them, don’t you? Anyway, they’re incapable of doing anything important. Women don’t have the power to destroy the world or anything.”

“Bear and raise children and build a family. The happiness of domesticity. Peaceful daily life. It’s dull. Makes me yawn.” (234–235)

The protagonist’s language here is shockingly misogynist and reminiscent of her husband’s rhetorical attempts to discipline her during a telephone conversation earlier in the story. Yet it is important to distinguish that what she objects to here is the “good and proper” woman, one who aligns herself with the status quo and/or conforms to normative expectations of feminine roles.⁵Close Clearly the protagonist sees herself as altogether outside this paradigm and justifies her position by her own adoption of masculinist contempt for such women.

As in “Like a Witch,” the female protagonist of Takahashi Takako’s “Castle of Bones” is primarily influenced in her hatred of her own sex by a male mentor, in this case a quasi-religious guru who initiates her into a set of devotional practices designed to transcend the body by literally crushing it underneath a giant roller. Women’s bodies are found to be particularly unresponsive to this “training,” as they are intimately associated with the realm of bodily existence, and the man is particularly keen on forcing those women most clearly identified with the corporeal to submit to his rather sadistic form of “training.” The protagonist, Watashi (“I”), admires this man very much for his pursuit of pure spirituality, but she is seemingly frustrated in her attempts to get him to take her as a serious candidate for transcendence on account of the fact that she inhabits a female body. She therefore sets out to prove to him that she is an exception to the rule of feminine spiritual inferiority by voluntarily submitting herself to the training. Her desire for validation by this man she admires thus leads her to take a misogynist attitude toward other women and to abject her own femininity in order to impress him.

“Castle of Bones” opens with Watashi wandering through the back streets of a large city, where she encounters a mysterious, mummy-like old man in the process of “training.” Watashi expresses interest in the training, so the old man takes her to a windowless room eight stories high that he calls the “beauty parlor.” Here she witnesses armor-clad men who, on the orders of the old man, force unwilling, naked female victims to submit to the roller. According to the old man, the exercise results in failure because the women refuse to accept the fact that their bodies are ugly.

Strangely enough, though Watashi is also female, the old man does not attempt to train her, and it is this fact that brings Watashi to the realization that she is not like other women. In order to trick the old man into abducting her for training as well, she sets out on a quest to learn to behave like a regular woman, and after much trial and error, she discovers that the thing that most sets her apart from other women is her total lack of concern with her appearance. After ducking into a beauty shop and submitting to a lengthy makeover, which she describes as a “sacrifice” willingly undertaken to qualify her for training, she is finally abducted and taken to the old man’s “beauty parlor.”⁶Close

Here Watashi is stripped naked and submitted to the roller, but unlike the other women, she resolves not to scream or betray pain or fear, in an effort to prove her worthiness to the old man. Sure enough, the old man notes with satisfaction that the shadow produced by Watashi’s flattened body is black like his own, rather than oozing red like that of the other women. Pleased with this measure of success, the old man favors Watashi by leading her to the “Castle of Bones” denoted by the title of the story. He explains that the castle is constructed of the whitened bones and crystalline eyes of those who have successfully completed the training. In attaining this inorganic state, the trainees do not die; they have merely concentrated their life in their eyes in order to attain the power to see the invisible—in effect achieving a god-like status. Unfortunately, the old man continues, even though Watashi seems like a promising candidate, because she is female it would be unsuitable for her to aspire to the Castle of Bones. Upon hearing this, Watashi realizes that her vision of the Castle of Bones was just an illusion and that she still has a long road to travel before reaching it. Despite the old man’s efforts to dissuade her, in the end she cannot bring herself to give up the quest.

In this story, Takahashi portrays an environment that is strictly demarcated into male space, from which women are excluded as unworthy, and female space, in which women’s bodies are treated as abject and controlled by men. Yet her portrayal of the protagonist undermines this structure, as men are found to be less “pure” than they pretend to be, and women are more “worthy” than they are purported to be. The result is a text that subverts from within the very structure on which it is built. In the indoor, female space of the beauty parlor, great attention is paid to women’s bodies in an effort either to beautify them through the application of cosmetics and hair care products or to emphasize their ugliness by mutilating them through training. While the old man also undergoes training in an effort to transcend the corporeal, it is important to note that for him, this process is not only voluntary and meaningful, but also takes place outdoors in free, open space. Similarly, the path to the Castle of Bones is of course also traversed in open space, and it is taken for granted that the men who travel it have the possibility of reaching their destination. By contrast, for the women who suffer inside the old man’s beauty parlor, the training is nothing but senseless torture and their failure to overcome it a foregone conclusion. Furthermore, whereas the Castle of Bones is demarcated as male space into which females must not trespass, within the supposedly female space of the beauty parlor, women are clearly subjected to the control and abuse of men who have absolute power over them. This power differential is underscored by the hyper-masculine signifier of armor-clad men, versus the total vulnerability of women stripped naked and subjected to the male gaze.

In fact, this economy of the visual proves to be an integral part of the geography of power articulated in “Castle of Bones.” The ultimate form of power sought by the old man and his followers is the power to “see the invisible,” which is defined in the text as a kind of cosmic truth at the “center of the universe” available only to those who have successfully completed the training (29). This power of vision is symbolized by the crystalline eyeballs that cover the surface of the Castle of Bones. As if to underscore his position as arbiter of power in this visual economy, the old man has forbidden his armor-clad underlings from visually observing the women’s training—they are allowed to participate but must wear helmets that prevent them from seeing the women’s agony.

Thus, Watashi occupies an extremely problematic and disruptive position with respect to the network of power relationships that structure the world depicted in the story. Since she is allowed to witness the training on her first visit to the old man’s beauty parlor, not only does she occupy a masculine position with respect to the female victims, but according to the logic of this world that denies the right of vision to all but the most worthy, her status is actually superior in this scene to that of the old man’s followers. Watashi initially is favored with the right to the gaze because the old man approves of her utter lack of concern with the feminine objective of self-beautification (17). Yet precisely because of her cosmetophobia, she fails to attract the attention of the old man as a potential target for training. In effect, she is invisible to him because though he knows that she is not male, he cannot seem to see her as female either because she does not fit his conception of femininity.

In order to attract the old man’s attention, Watashi is forced to “perform” femininity in a way that is experienced by her as exceedingly unnatural. On looking in the mirror, she describes the effect of her transformation after the application of a “sticky film of gaudy makeup” (31) as a moment of nonrecognition of a self that “did and did not look like her” (21). But thanks to this makeover she is finally able to qualify for training. In other words, in order to gain the old man’s recognition as an appropriate candidate, she has to learn to perform the role of a woman obsessed with her appearance—the type of woman that the old man himself identifies as simultaneously most feminine and, consequently least likely to complete the training successfully.

Thus, Watashi’s gender acrobatics serve to cast suspicion on the old man’s motives for attempting to train these women in the first place. He claims to want to train them “just as he does himself,” in order to help them to transcend the “ugliness” of the corporeal body in favor of an inorganic and spiritual existence (11). Yet by deliberately choosing only those women who he believes will fail to embrace this transcendence, he preserves his position as sole possessor of the gaze while simultaneously justifying his role as arbiter of power on the grounds that he is closer to spiritual purity than anyone else. Furthermore, despite the old man’s self-proclaimed holier-than-thou status, he seems to enjoy witnessing the women’s torture, as is evident from Watashi’s description of her own experience during training: “Then I saw the old man’s eyes lose their gleam of purity and burn with a strange greediness, just as they had done here the other day. Because today I was in the opposite position of being punished, I was able to see clearly what was in the old man’s eyes. Those eyes seemed to express a cold pleasure at the women’s agonies” (24–25). So although the old man suggests that he is able to renounce corporeal pleasure in favor of a supposedly higher realm of knowledge, his eyes betray him—the eyes, of course, being the vehicle by which such knowledge is attained, according to the man’s own logic. It is Watashi’s renunciation of the masculine role of possessor of the gaze, in favor of a feminine vantage point as object of the gaze, that makes this fact clear to her.

To pursue the visual motif one step further, although the old man bases his theory of knowledge acquisition on the power of vision, this power is accompanied by a corresponding blindness to his own limitations (and those of his world view). In contrast, Watashi’s deferral of the masculine gaze in favor of a feminized visual position gives her access to a different sort of knowledge, in effect making the hypocrisy of the prevailing power structure fully visible for the first time. Furthermore, this role reversal subverts the binary of male as subject of the gaze versus female as viewed object by giving the “object” the power to see (and judge) the “subject.”

In the end, however, Watashi is unable to renounce once and for all her desire for the very sort of visual power that the old man describes, in spite of her apparent understanding that the economy of the gaze is based on a fallacious distinction between supposedly masculine and feminine attributes. It seems clear that Watashi’s primary motivation here is not a hatred of the corporeal or the feminine per se but a desire to earn the respect of the old man, and her various sacrifices are undertaken precisely for this purpose, as she states clearly during her own experience of training: “The screams and groans of the other women increased in proportion to my own pain. But I made no sound. Yes, wasn’t that precisely why I had come here? In order to show the old man that I could bear the pain, for that reason only, I had spent days and days wandering around in places I had not chosen at times I had not chosen, and finally through the great sacrifice of that disguise, I had created the opportunity to be abducted by the old man” (24). It would perhaps not be going too far to characterize the old man as a kind of father figure from whom Watashi is seeking validation—so desperately, in fact, that she is willing to resort to self-abuse to get it.

Sadly, in spite of Watashi’s attempts to prove her worthiness, the old man seems unable to get past the fact that she is female. Though in their first encounter Watashi and the old man seem to share a kind of intimacy—both demonstrate an uncanny understanding of each other’s motives⁷Close—the disguise she dons to recapture this intimacy actually makes it impossible for the old man to see her as anything but a female body. When she appears again at the old man’s beauty salon after her transformation into a visually recognizable female, he is unable to connect this image of her with the person he met before.

Even after Watashi submits to his torture to prove that her shadow is just as black as his, the old man at first offers her a vision of the Castle of Bones only to retract it, accusing her of “arrogantly trying to invade male territory” (30). At this accusation Watashi puts her hand up to touch her made-over hair and face and reflects, “Oh, am I nothing but a woman, then?” (31) Given this Catch-22 situation, it is hardly surprising that Watashi is tempted by the old man’s notion of transcending the body in favor of a purely spiritual existence. Regardless of her own image of self, her female flesh marks her in the eyes of the fathers as “nothing but a woman.” The “feeling of liberation” she experiences as her body is transformed into a lifeless mass by the roller can be read not necessarily as a hatred of women or corporeality per se but as a desire to be free of the cage of binary male/female existence (25).

It is significant that while embracing this desire for transcendence of the corporeal and the binary logic it invites, Takahashi’s text deconstructs its own message by simultaneously suggesting the impossibility of such a feat. Bodies subjected to the roller resume their original form when it is removed. Visions of reaching the Castle of Bones prove to be nothing but an illusion. For those, like Watashi, seeking a way out of the binary gender trap, Takahashi’s text offers no solutions, only an invitation to rethink that structure from within, by portraying a protagonist who is literally not “visible” through the lens of conventional binary distinctions. In doing so, Takahashi emphasizes the artificial and constructed nature of this difference between binary opposites, ultimately demonstrating the hypocritical and self-contradictory logic whereby women are excluded from dominant power structures.

We have seen that all three narratives discussed in this chapter trace a process wherein women are seduced into complicity with the very structures that render them inferior, in the context of affective relationships that reward properly feminine behavior. Such complicity requires women to accept relegation to the realm of corporeal immanence so that men may pose as spiritually transcendent or intellectually superior beings. The female protagonists depicted in these texts all learn to replicate this misogynist philosophy in order to win the regard of male mentors or lovers whose opinions they respect, with varying consequences. The main character of “Bone Meat” seems to accept her inferiority at face value and even learns to take a kind of masochistic pleasure in it, but this likely results in self-destruction by the end of the tale. The protagonists of “Like a Witch” and “Castle of Bones,” by contrast, provisionally accept this chauvinist logic in an unsuccessful attempt to free themselves from the hierarchical structure by proving that they are exceptions to the rule of feminine inferiority.

While their female characters are unable to overturn the ideological structures that bind them, all three authors effect a powerful critique of this misogynist attitude toward femininity by replicating and then parodying it within their texts. The ritual nature of the sadomasochistic role-playing depicted in Kōno’s story highlights the performative, and therefore artificial, nature of constructions of feminine inferiority. Kurahashi encodes chauvinist dialogue into her story in order to allow her heroine to explicitly refute it in arguments with her husband. Even as she reproduces these attitudes in an attempt to distance herself from other women who ostensibly resemble the stereotypes, the shockingly misogynist tenor of her claims hyperbolically underscores their lack of truth value, mocking while drawing attention to their artificiality and the self-serving motivations of the men who attempt to enforce them. Finally, Takahashi exposes the hypocrisy of the standards used to judge women as inferior by demonstrating that women can display mastery of the standards used to measure “masculine” excellence yet still be denied recognition for their accomplishments.

Given that all three of these authors had to fight for inclusion in the male intellectual space that the Japanese literary world represented, it is perhaps no surprise that such themes reemerged in imaginative form in their literature. Each story depicts a world ruled by networks of power that structure human relationships according to positions of superiority/inferiority, dominance/submission, intellect/body, transcendence/immanence, and spiritual/material along strictly gendered lines. Each protagonist finds that as a woman, she is automatically relegated to the negative side of each binary opposition, whether she identifies with this position or not.

Each protagonist then faces a choice between complying with the terms of her subordination, or attempting resistance. Kōno’s heroine chooses compliance, only to discover that even playing by the rules does not guarantee the security of the fragile identity that she has crafted for herself, as this leaves her dependent on the cooperation of a male partner who can capriciously withdraw his participation at will. Kurahashi’s main character chooses resistance and attempts to justify a position for herself on the opposite end of the binary. However, she discovers that only those already in a position of authority have the power to grant inclusion and that merely inhabiting a female body is enough to disqualify her. Takahashi’s protagonist faces a similar situation, with the added indignity of successfully passing the test for inclusion, only to be turned away at the gates of the establishment.

The rhetorical power of each text, from a feminist perspective, thus lies in its exposure of the hypocrisy of the “rules” whereby women are rendered abject and subordinated to authorities who pretend to be superior, only to reveal their own lack of credibility. These narratives demonstrate that under such a rigidly illogical system of value, neither compliance nor resistance offers a tenable position for women to establish any kind of feminine subjectivity. Indeed, there can be no possibility of subjectivity for women so long as their only value is as a ground for the construction of male subjectivity.

In the previous two chapters we have outlined some of the disciplinary mechanisms used to produce and enforce feminine behavior as envisioned in these authors’ textual worlds. In the next chapter we will encounter another persistent trope employed to critique restrictive gender binaries—the “odd body,” or alternate forms of corporeality that resist characterization as either male or female, masculine or feminine. These bodies not only expose as false the dichotomy that underwrites such binary distinctions, but further undermine this structure at its core by “queering” the male body that forms the theoretical standard for binary gender difference.