4 Odd Bodies

The issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of which woman would be the subject or the object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself, of suspending its pretension to the production of a truth and of a meaning that are excessively univocal.

—Luce Irigaray, “The Power of Discourse”

As noted in the previous two chapters, women in the texts we have analyzed so far can be said to be held accountable to norms of femininity, whether they identify with such constructions or not, based solely on the fact that they inhabit female bodies. These norms are repeatedly instilled by a masculine disciplinary gaze that continually reminds women to “behave themselves” according to societal expectations. Women are thus taught to embody and perform femininity so that men can define themselves as masculine, according to gendered binaries that render these two terms opposite and mutually exclusive. Masculinity can therefore be understood as predicated on a profound disavowal of all qualities associated with the realm of the feminine, in order to transcend this abject position of corporeal immanence for the elevated plane of intellectual and spiritual superiority.

Luce Irigaray describes such binary distinctions as operating according to a logic of “sexual indifference,” whereby femininity is defined according to its difference from masculinity, embodying everything that men (would like to believe they) are not. While this would seem to yield two distinct genders, in effect it reduces conceptions of masculinity and femininity to one model of gender—the masculine—whereby femininity becomes “non-masculinity”—that is, incomprehensible without reference to its conceptual opposite.¹Close As we saw in chapter 1, this strictly gendered binary division was underwritten by the exigencies of the high-growth economy of the 1960s, whereby the masculine ideal of salaryman was possible only through the creation of a feminine complement, the housewife/mother who took full responsibility for the domestic sphere. Women’s contributions to society were thus understood to encompass everything that had been excluded from the masculine sphere—reproduction, care of children and the elderly, domestic labor, and any other activities required to support the total dedication of men to the world of work outside the home. Women writers of the 1960s, particularly those whose works are analyzed in this study, resisted such ideologies of gender through fictional narratives that sought to expose such binaries themselves as fictitious, thus “jamming the theoretical machinery,” in Irigaray’s terminology.

In this chapter we will examine one trope that is frequently used to critique these binary models of gender—the “odd body,” or a protagonist whose physiology fails to conform to gendered expectations of “normalcy.” The bodies examined in this chapter are perversely reproductive (or nonreproductive), deformed, or androgynous, covertly or overtly defying prescribed patterns of difference between masculine and feminine norms. In the process, they underscore the mutual imbrication of human bodies and the societies that both produce and define them, highlighting the fact that even though binary gender distinctions are fallacious and constructed, society perversely insists upon enforcing compliance with artificially crafted gender norms by assuming a one-to-one correspondence between biology and behavior. These “odd bodies” therefore serve as a subversive challenge to the logic of “sexual indifference” that would confine women to the realm of the inferior so that men may envision themselves as superior.

In the first story under discussion, Kōno Taeko’s “Toddler-Hunting,” we see a protagonist whose perverse attraction to little boys entails a fantasy of violent inscription of “feminine” bodily characteristics upon a male body. This produces a narrative that not only subverts assumptions about the “naturalness” of maternal instincts, but furthermore calls into question the integrity of gender norms themselves. Next, in Takahashi Takako’s story “Secret” (Hi, 1973) we meet a protagonist who defies normative standards of “beauty” by crafting an alternate model of femininity that is predicated on her own deformity. This new “feminine” ideal is then ironically superseded by a male character who more successfully embodies this combination of the sublime and the grotesque. Finally, in Kurahashi Yumiko’s “Snake” (Hebi, 1960) we encounter a text that combines conventionally masculine and feminine characteristics in ways that frustrate any attempt to understand sexual difference through reference to a binary model of gender. In each story, the feminization of male bodies serves as a vehicle for the subversion of both feminine and masculine norms, further destabilizing conventional linkages between sex and gender.

Akiko, the protagonist of “Toddler-Hunting,” is a self-supporting single woman with a fondness for little boys that goes well beyond what one might consider to be “normal” maternal instincts. Although motherhood was still very much the standard by which feminine maturity was judged when this story was written—with the image of women as “naturally” wives and mothers still definitive of “proper” expressions of feminine subjectivity—Akiko is childless and infertile and seems quite content to stay that way. Nevertheless, she is inexplicably drawn to little boys between the ages of three and ten, yet thoroughly repulsed by little girls of the same age.

Akiko’s hatred for little girls is explicitly linked to her own unpleasant experiences of maturing into womanhood, evoking the abjection of femininity discussed in the previous chapter. In the very first pages of the story, we learn that the feelings of constriction Akiko herself felt in the process of developing into sexual maturity are displaced onto other little girls once she has passed this stage:

Akiko could not bear to remember that she herself had once been a little girl.

But in fact her childhood had been happier than other periods of her life. She couldn’t recall a single hardship; she might have been the most fortunate child who ever lived, a cheerful thing when she was young. But beneath the sunny disposition, in the pit of her stomach, she’d been conscious of an inexplicable constriction. Something loathsome and repellent oppressed all her senses—it was as if she were trapped in a long, narrow tunnel; as if a sticky liquid seeped unseen out of her every pore—as if she were under a curse.

Once, in science class, they’d had a lesson about silkworms, and with a scalpel the teacher had sliced open a cocoon. Akiko took one look at the faintly squirming pupa—a filthy dark thing, slowly binding itself up in thread issuing from its own body—and knew she was seeing the embodiment of the feelings that afflicted her.

And then for some reason Akiko became convinced that other girls her age shared her strange inner discomfort. Grownups, however, did not feel this way, and neither did little boys and older girls.

And sure enough, once she got past ten, the queasiness left her. As if she had stepped out of a tunnel into the vast free universe finally she could breathe. It was at this time, however, that she started to feel nauseated by any girl still passing through that stage, and her repulsion grew stronger as the years went by.²Close

These descriptions of Akiko’s girlhood suggest that the sources of constriction she experienced derive simultaneously from both within and without. The girl-pupa is unquestionably surrounded by a cocoon-like shell that both protects and confines her during this critical period of development. Yet this protective enclosure is seen on some level as of her own making; the “threads” that form the prison are produced directly from her own body, an eloquent analogy to the way gender is internalized and produced through performance by the subject in question as much as it is enforced from without by societal forces.

It is interesting to compare this narrative of becoming-woman with that of Kurahashi Yumiko’s protagonist in Blue Journey, discussed in chapter 1. In Kurahashi’s text, the moment of initiation into puberty seems characterized as a kind of fall from grace, when the protagonist is first confronted with the “truth” of womanhood and wishes she could go back to the idyllic ignorance of childhood. Akiko, on the other hand, isolates an even earlier period of development as the source of discomfort. For her, the prepubescent years of three to ten are described as far more oppressive than the “freedom” that ironically coincides with a girl’s first menstruation. The issue here seems to be not merely the process of biological maturity, but also the way a young girl’s body is sculpted as feminine even before her menarche in preparation for that transition into womanhood: “The more typical a girl this age, the less Akiko could bear to be near her. The pallid complexion; the rubbery flesh; the bluish shadow at the nape of the neck left by the bobbed haircut; the unnaturally high, insipid way the girl would talk; even the cut and color of her clothes: Akiko saw in all this the filthy closeness she had glimpsed in the pupa” (46). The traits that are listed as most disagreeably feminine here evoke not merely a sense of an unfinished or immature physical form, but also the way the body in question is packaged, through grooming and sartorial regimens considered appropriate to a girl of this age. Even the child’s “pallid complexion” and “rubbery flesh” seem to signify not merely immaturity, but rather a body that has been deliberately kept at a state of arrested development through overprotection or confinement indoors—that is, in the dark cocoon of the previous passage. It is perhaps not surprising then that to Akiko, this period of becoming may have been more arduous than the entrance into puberty that followed it; having struggled as a girl to internalize the self-disciplinary mechanisms expected of a proper young woman, she may well have seen the biological change known as menstruation as a fait accompli.

Little boys, on the other hand, are desirable to Akiko because they represent freedom from such restrictive confinement. Several scenes in the text depict Akiko’s interaction with boys of the “target age” of three to ten, and in each case the child in question is charming precisely because he represents the possibility of active subjectivity that in Akiko’s mind is denied to girls.

She could just see a little boy, about four years old, pulling on this cozy, lightweight shirt, his sunburned head popping up through the neck. When the time came, he would definitely want to take it off all by himself. Crossing his chubby arms over his chest, concentrating with all his might, he would just manage to grasp the shirttails. But how difficult to pull it up and extricate himself. Screwing up his face, twisting around and wiggling his little bottom, he would try his hardest. Akiko would glimpse his tight little belly, full to bursting with all the food he stuffed in at every meal. (48)

The overwhelming use of active verbs—“wiggling,” “twisting,” “grasping”—signifies a degree of self-expression and aggressive conduct that contrasts noticeably with the depiction above of the “filthy closeness” that is said to confine young girls. This robustness is fueled by a voracious appetite, implied by the boy’s full stomach, and it seems directly opposite to the situation of the girl-pupa, whose body seems on the verge of leaking away as it continually produces the threads of its own constriction. Note also that the boy is “sunburned,” apparently through vigorous outdoor activity, whereas the world of little girls is dark, tunnel-like, and confining. If this is Akiko’s perception of gender difference, then it is no wonder that she has a preference for little boys to match her aversion to little girls—they allow her to fantasize a possibility of transcendence of the restrictive subject position to which she has been assigned by virtue of her inhabitation of a female body that has forcibly been rendered feminine.

Akiko’s attraction to male children is thus not due to any unfulfilled maternal instinct—which she claims not to have—but rather to a perception of masculine subjectivity as offering an alternative to the confinement of the gendered expectations placed upon women. On her inability to bear children, we are informed that even before Akiko learned that she was sterile, she balked at the notion of being tied down by the “long commitment” required of women who rear children:

When she’d been younger, Akiko had been amazed by her body—by its strangeness. Every month, over and over, it made a little bed inside for a baby, unaware that none would be born, and then took it apart again. And it had seemed to her a grave matter that not one person on this earth was created yet out of her own blood.

But she would always find herself wondering how, after giving birth to the baby, she could get someone else to take care of it—and whether there wasn’t some way she could reserve the right to only occasionally oversee its care. She began to greatly envy men, who could avoid parental tasks so easily. All this surely proved how poorly she was endowed with natural maternal urges. (58)

A man’s absence from the home and site of child rearing would have been considered socially acceptable at this time—even expected, given the gendered division of labor that was normative in Japan circa 1961, whereby men were assumed to work outside the home and support their families while women took sole responsibility for domestic labor. Akiko is keenly aware that her desire to evade the feminine side of this gender binary and adopt a masculine subject position renders her abnormal by the standards of common sense operative at this time. It is interesting that Kōno’s protagonist never explicitly questions the naturalness of such maternal desire or the way it is defined as total absorption in the care of one’s children to the exclusion of all else. However, the narrative itself places this “naturalness” under scrutiny by presenting us with an obvious counterexample—a character who not only is unable and unwilling to have children, but whose sexual proclivities in fact shock the reader by confronting him or her with an antithesis to the stereotype of the nurturing and loving mother.

In addition to enjoying sadomasochistic sexual play with her partner, Sasaki, Akiko experiences a recurring fantasy in which the beating and whipping she begs from her lover is instead administered to a young boy of precisely the “target age” that fascinates her so. While it is clear that the violent treatment is actually performed by a man, it is equally clear that the female witness to the beatings, a stand-in for Akiko herself, directs and orchestrates the performance. The text is quite graphic in its description of Akiko’s fantasy, particularly with respect to the following two moments of interest for this discussion:

More punishment. With every lash of the cane, there are shrieks and agonized cries. The boy is sent sprawling forward, sometimes flat on his face, but he struggles to get up each time, ready to receive the next stroke, a course of action he carries out without being told.

—Look. Look at the blood. The woman’s voice again. There it is, the red fluid trickling down over the child’s buttocks, over his thighs. The blood is smeared over the surface of his flesh by yet more thrashes of the cane. (60)

—You haven’t touched his stomach. The woman’s voice again, insinuating. The child gets a few lashes on his belly, and suddenly, his stomach splits open. Intestines, an exquisitely colored rope of violet, slither out. (61; italics in translation)

As Gretchen Jones has noted in her insightful study of sadomasochistic themes in Kōno’s work, the little boy is twice feminized in his encounter with the punitive father figure—first when the blood runs down his buttocks and thighs, as if to evoke menstruation, and again when his stomach bursts open, which is reminiscent of childbirth. Jones further notes that “Akiko identifies with the little boy not only as a male, but, as the menstrual and birth scene overlays suggest, the boy’s biology too is also reversed at times, allowing Akiko to identify with the boy as female. In a manner similar to the way in which a woman’s body boundaries are frequently crossed or violated, in the fantasy, the boy’s body becomes a site of transgression, of opening up—of blood, even of birth.”³Close Thus, feminine characteristics are in effect inscribed upon the body of the boy, in a kind of hysterical parody of the gendering process to which young girls are subjected.

As noted above with respect to the girl-pupa image, the transformation into womanhood is depicted in this text as a product of two mutually imbricated processes—a combination of biological development and social training that genders a young girl as feminine. The goal of this process of socializing girls is to prepare them not just for the biological events of menstruation and (later) pregnancy, but also for the ways in which these biological processes will be contained and structured by society in order to craft them into future wives and mothers. Girls are therefore instilled with behaviors that will facilitate this social use of their bodies—obedience, docility, dependence, self-ingratiation—and learn to replicate them “voluntarily” through mechanisms of self-discipline. For Akiko, boys represent the absence of this exhortation to subsume oneself to the demands of society. Throughout this story they are portrayed as vigorous, active, expressive, petulant—and this behavior is accepted and considered normal.⁴Close Yet the little boy in Akiko’s fantasy is not only corporeally but also behaviorally inscribed with signifiers of femininity—he docilely accepts the punishment meted out to him by his “father,” not once but repeatedly, as he continues to rise after being knocked down to accept blow after blow. As a result of this process of (self-)discipline, his body faithfully replicates the physiological signifiers of femininity—menstruation and pregnancy—that are expected of appropriately feminine subjects.

Thus, in “Toddler-Hunting” we are presented with a highly conflicted narrative that upholds masculinity as a means of escape from restrictive feminine models, even as it perversely reinscribes this body with the very qualities it wishes to transcend. As noted above, though Kōno presents her protagonist as ostensibly unaware of the contradiction inherent in accepting maternal instincts as natural to women, the narrative clearly highlights this disjunction for the benefit of the reader. Though Akiko may perceive herself as abnormal for possessing desires that place her beyond the pale of normative femininity, the reader, through her narrative alignment with the protagonist, is encouraged to wonder about the naturalness of this standard. Likewise, the author pointedly presents us with an irresolvable contradiction in presenting masculinity, in the form of the little boy in Akiko’s fantasy, as a transcendent state, on the one hand, while violently re-engendering this same character as feminine—an obvious parody of the process of gender production that highlights its artificiality.

Both Akiko and the boy in her fantasy, then, can be considered to be “odd bodies” in the sense that they defy normative models of femininity and masculinity respectively. That a woman can not only be diagnosed as infertile but revel in this status, and furthermore harbor violent thoughts against small children, is odd by the standards of normative femininity that define women as naturally maternal. That a male can be made to menstruate and give birth, through violent subjection to feminine disciplinary mechanisms that render him complicit in his own subordination is likewise odd by the standards of normative masculinity that define males as aggressive, inviolate, and penetrative (rather than penetrated). Though these narrative disjunctions go untheorized by the protagonist herself, they force the reader to question the “naturalness” of the logic of “sexual indifference” that underwrites such distinctions.

The protagonist of “Secret,” Asako, has a large birthmark that covers the length of her back and upper arms, and she learns to hide it from the censorious eyes of society. The reactions of other people to Asako’s “deformity” profoundly shape her self-image in an emphatically negative way; the boys across the street stare at her, a gang of boys at school bullies her, and another neighborhood child quotes her mother as declaring that Asako will never be able to marry because of it. She is very self-conscious about this defect until she meets a much older man with a penchant for oddities who helps her to see this abnormality as attractive rather than hideous.

While on the one hand the man’s attraction to Asako helps to liberate her from her self-described misanthropy—the result of years of being made to feel ugly and deformed—her self-image becomes inordinately dependent on his approval, and she is able to feel confident about herself only to the extent that he validates this self-image. Excluded from the category of “appropriate” femininity—defined as inhabitation of a body that is conventionally desirable to members of the opposite sex and thus marriageable—Asako is to some extent able to craft an alternative femininity for herself that is attractive within a certain limited sphere, that of men with unconventional tastes in women. On the other hand, her dependence on the man’s validation leads her to adopt a masochistic position that allows him to use her in rather degrading ways—along with possibly a large assortment of other “odd” women—and she learns to subordinate her own pleasure to his.

This text obviously echoes some of the corporeal dynamics we have seen in previous chapters. First of all, the role of the disciplinary gaze in structuring feminine subjectivity, noted in chapter 2, is clear in the way Asako is trained to see her body as freakish and shameful. She first learns that there is something wrong with her physical form in sixth grade, when the lady next door comes to inform Asako’s father that her sons are inordinately interested in watching Asako from their upstairs window: “[Until that time,] Asako had wandered about outside in a thin chemise, frequently looking up with a puzzled feeling at the two junior high school boys staring down at her from the second-floor window.”⁵Close It is interesting that the boys’ desire to gaze at her body is apparently not questioned or identified as a behavior that must be sanctioned. Rather, the offense is Asako’s, and she is therefore the one singled out for discipline, both because she is baring too much skin at an age when her body is beginning to develop and because the body in question fails to conform to the type that is most pleasing to the masculine gaze.

As a result of the negative reactions of those around her to her birthmark, Asako comes to disavow her own body (as discussed in chapter 3) by developing patterns of behavior that conceal the offending deformity from the disapproving gaze of others. It is therefore no coincidence that as the story begins, we are introduced to Asako as she is shopping for a blouse with sleeves long enough to hide her affliction. When accosted by a saleslady who insists that sleeveless tops are “in” this year and that a young lady should wear something more fashionable, she rebuffs the woman with a firmness that conceals the sadness within (63). She then catches sight of a mannequin wearing this summer’s approved costume, and regarding the feminine perfection that this anything-but-natural figure represents, she again experiences a sadness concealed within an outward posture of strength (64). To add insult to injury, this icon of femininity is rendered in Western form, further emphasizing that this standard of beauty is thoroughly unattainable for her. At this point in the text, Asako’s feeling of pathos is intimately linked with a sense of being alone in her “abnormality”—that is, in spite of the unrealistic standards of attractiveness to which women are trained to aspire, she believes that she is alone in failing to achieve the anointed status of “beautiful” because of her deformity. Asako therefore feels isolated not only because her body is unlovable to men, but also because she is set apart from other women by her difference—a feeling that is instilled by the reactions of those around her and perpetuated by her own insecurities.

This feeling of isolation is immediately undercut by a narrative flashback to a high school field trip, when Asako first encountered another girl who was likewise “deformed.” Reluctant to bathe with her schoolmates for fear of their reaction to her birthmark, Asako sneaks into an empty bathroom in another part of the inn where her class is staying. Just as she settles herself into the tub and begins to relax, she hears the door to the changing area open. She is horrified when the interloper reveals herself to be another girl from her school, but then she is fascinated to notice that one of the girl’s breasts is dramatically larger than the other. Their eyes meet briefly, and the girl quickly moves to cover herself by entering the tub with her back to Asako: “The girl, showing her back to Asako, and Asako, hiding her back from the girl, both sat in the tub facing the same direction, each observing the movements of the other. When Asako realized that she would definitely not turn around, she silently raised her body from under cover of the water and escaped by backing out through the door” (65). Asako is thus able to sneak away without having her birthmark noticed by the girl.

As she slips into the changing room, Asako notices her reflection in the full-length mirror and turns her back toward it in order to scrutinize her “deformity.” She dresses and moves to leave, thinking about the girl in the next room who suffers from the same sense of sadness as herself: “In front of the mirror was a wet mark in the shape of Asako’s foot. She had stood there with her back turned and her body twisted around, so the footprint was at a diagonal. She imagined the girl getting out of the bath and standing in the same place. She would probably face forward to gaze at her chest, so that would result in her leaving a wet footprint that intersected crosswise with Asako’s. Asako thought vaguely about the sadness of those two footprints” (65). It is remarkable that although Asako clearly senses a similarity between herself and the girl, this does not seem to yield a sense of solidarity by virtue of their shared affliction. Rather, the crossed footprints, one girl facing forward and the other facing the opposite direction, echo the scene in the bath when each girl is so concerned with hiding her own abnormality that she avoids the gaze of the other. Neither has the courage to reach out to the other and attempt a connection, in spite of the fact that they share the same pain. Both girls have apparently learned to privilege self-protection above all else as a means of coping with the disciplinary gaze of society. Furthermore, the protagonist has clearly internalized the gaze to the point that she uses it against other women whose bodies are similarly non-normative; knowing that the girl will not turn around as long as she fears Asako’s gaze, Asako uses this knowledge as a means of protecting her own secret from discovery.

Asako consequently learns to disavow her own corporeality, at least until she discovers, thanks to her older and rather unconventional lover, that this “odd body” itself presents her with an alternative to normative femininity. However, this alternative fails to offer Asako complete liberation from convention; it is at best a variation on the same gendered binaries that render women subordinate and passive objects of the masculine gaze. This much is clear during the episode that ostensibly signifies Asako’s conquest over her self-consciousness about her birthmark.

In this scene, she visits her lover one day to find him conversing with a friend. This young man invites both Asako and her lover to attend one of his upcoming performances—an interpretive dance entitled “Androgyny”—where he will apparently perform in the nude. Asako’s lover challenges her by asking if she would have the courage to reveal her own body in such a public way, and both men encourage her to take off her clothes. Asako speculates that her boyfriend might enjoy the “immorality” of “exposing the naked body of his own woman to another man.” The young man, noticing a bronze cross lying on the table, further suggests that she arrange her body in that position.

The room was filled with silence. Asako could feel on her skin that the man and the dancer were waiting. The mass of hesitation inside her unfolded layer by layer as Asako, basking in the gaze of the two men, removed layer after layer of her clothing.

“It’s not really a body worth showing to you. I have a really large birthmark,” Asako said as she stood completely naked, held out her arms, and turned around once. Strangely, there was no trace of hesitation left. (74–75)

This scene could be read as a kind of liberation in the sense that Asako seems no longer paralyzed by shame at her own body. However, there is also a rather blatant undercurrent of masochism underlying Asako’s willingness to expose herself as an object of visual gratification before the men. Her subordinate status is underscored by the fact that as she stands there, in the position of Christ on the cross, the men quickly lose interest in her and become absorbed in a totally unrelated conversation. She waits in that position, patiently, for them to take notice of her again, and they do so only when the young man realizes that the holes drilled into either end of the bronze cross are perfectly positioned at the same interval as her breasts. He has her hold the cross in front of herself as he pulls her nipples through the holes in the metal, which is sharp enough to cut her flesh, and she begins to bleed: “At this unexpected result, the men looked at her with a sublime glint in their eyes, but their expressions gradually returned to normal. … Asako herself was moved by the phenomenon that her body displayed. But she was silent because she felt that if she were to raise her voice, it would destroy the pleasure of the men. … She sensed that she was being enjoyed [by the men] as an object. Objects must remain silent. Asako rather enjoyed the fact that the men demanded this” (75–76). Asako has clearly submitted herself entirely to the desires of her male audience—by allowing them to manipulate her body as they please, by remaining passive and silent before their gaze, and by subordinating her own impulses and desires to theirs.

In addition to yielding to her lover’s demands to subordinate herself to his gaze, Asako also clearly internalizes this gaze to the point of wielding it not only against herself, but against other women as well. Asako has long suspected that the man is having relationships with other “odd” women besides herself, yet rather than feeling jealous, she derives a kind of pleasure in imagining these other women and the types of deformities they have that might titillate him. She begins to scrutinize the crowds that cross her path each day in search of women like herself whose bodies harbor such secrets, and when she finds them, she subjects them to various fantasies of the ways “a man” (such as her lover) might take pleasure in their oddness. Adopting the point of view of her lover and identifying with his pleasures and proclivities, she even imagines her own type of “deformity” as projected upon these other women:

Asako realized suddenly that she was searching for women with the eyes of a man. Looking at women with those special eyeglasses that the man had loaned her, she was now aware of previously unseen vistas. Walking alone through the streets where she passed innumerable women, Asako little by little became enthralled by visions of birthmarks. A birthmark in the shape of a butterfly in the middle of a woman’s chest, its wings extending left and right onto each breast, fluttering whenever those breasts jiggled. Or if it’s in the shape of a butterfly, one that extends left and right from the woman’s crotch, so that you couldn’t see it unless she opened her legs—that would be good. … Asako walked along enchanted by the dark visions produced by the birthmark fantasy. She thought of such birthmarks underneath her own clothes and underneath the clothes of the women she passed by, and enjoying herself in this way, she felt as if the spring heat of the streets exuded the hidden pleasures of women. (72–73)

As with the crucifixion scene above, here the power dynamics governing the relationship between subject and object of the gaze are exceedingly complex. On one level, Asako is clearly objectifying these women, just as her lover and his friend have done to her, on the basis of the same standard of value—the eroticism of “oddness”—that they employ to judge her attractiveness. The passage even specifies “the man” as the authority who determines such criteria of desirability, and therefore Asako is merely “borrowing” his way of looking at women to achieve the same purpose. On the other hand, not only does Asako seem to take pleasure in this form of erotic ventriloquism, but also the knowledge that other women may harbor the same sort of “secret” as she does helps her to conquer her feelings of isolation. In a sense it is liberating for her to know that there may be many women like her who defy standards of normative femininity and are loved for it.

One might even construe this knowledge as a nascent sense of connection between Asako and these other women—except for the fact that as in the bath scene, any similarity she observes between herself and these other women remains tightly contained within her own mind. That is to say, it does not translate into friendships or support structures based on relationships among women who perceive themselves to have something in common. This is underscored in a scene in which Asako pursues a fellow “oddity” down the street, absorbed in fantasies about how a man might find the difference in length and size of the woman’s legs to be erotically stimulating. Though her mind is abuzz with titillating visions throughout the “encounter,” she never actually makes contact with the woman. Content with a single glance at the anonymous woman’s face, Asako is satisfied and moves on, as if the woman merely provided an expedient vehicle or screen for the projection of her (lover’s) desires.

What these women represent for Asako, more than anything, is a fantasized alternative to both the “properly” feminine physical form and to the kinds of pleasures and desires that are sanctioned within the conventional society that structures them. “Women with proper bodies probably experience proper forms of pleasure. Though in the past Asako had envied such pleasures, now she didn’t care for them. Rather, she walked about searching for women with secrets hidden under their clothing” (72). While this attitude poses an obvious challenge to the oppressiveness of feminine training and gender role restrictions, it is important to remember that this alternative expression of femininity is itself still subordinated to the desires and pleasures of men and derives its legitimacy from the fact that (some unusual) men find it attractive.

The variant construction of femininity embodied by Asako and these other women is distinguished within the text itself from androgyny, which is defined as a state of being “both man and woman, neither man nor woman” and is clearly privileged as a superior form of transcendence of gender norms (81). It is furthermore implied in the conclusion of the story that only men, not women, are capable of attaining this privileged state. Women, by implication, are thus irrevocably bound by the limitations of a feminine gender identity that is grounded in their physical form, and even unorthodox versions of this feminine subjectivity are presumed to be inferior to the type of gender bending of which men are capable.

The androgynous ideal that is privileged by the text, and conveyed through the authoritative judgment of Asako’s lover, is represented not by Asako but by his friend, the young male dancer whose triumphant transgression of gender brings the story to its climax and conclusion. As the final scene begins, Asako is on her way to meet her lover at the theater where the young man’s performance is to take place when she discovers that she has started her period. She is supposed to spend that night at her lover’s place, and remembering this, she sets off on a frustrating quest for a piece of vinyl sheeting. It is implied that capitalizing on his pleasure in the perverse, she intends to use this to display her menstrual blood for her lover in much the same way as she was able to titillate him with the blood from her nipples during the crucifixion incident. As in that previous scene, it is clear here too that Asako derives pleasure from displaying her body for her lover, reveling in his enjoyment of her as a perversely erotic “object.”

At several points during this final episode, Asako’s desire to objectify herself through erotic performance for her lover is contrasted with the onstage spectacle of the androgynous male dancer in ways that make the superiority of the latter type of performance abundantly clear. This linkage is first suggested when Asako notices the lurid color of the tickets for the recital: “The tickets were printed with red lettering like the color of fresh blood, against a gray background. There was also a photograph of the dancer, but it too was the same color of red. That color made Asako remember the blood that dripped from her nipples the other day, as well as the blood of her menstrual cycle” (77). This is also the moment when she remembers that she will stay the night with her lover and sets off on the quest for the vinyl sheeting; the connection is further underscored by the blood red costume worn by the dancer onstage. The young man has painted his body white and draped himself in a loose and flowing red cloth that does not conceal his nakedness underneath.

When Asako catches sight of the beautiful youth in full display, it excites fantasies within her of the possible effects on the dancer if a similarly scantily clad young woman should emerge as his partner. It is as if she is rehearsing in her mind the entertainment that she and her lover will enjoy that evening and anticipating the reaction that her performance might have on him. This impression is further underscored when the man seems to guess her intentions:

Asako then felt shame echo noisily throughout her body. It was because the man had articulated what she had only faintly sensed. Losing her composure, she glanced at the stage, and the red cloth that the dancer was waving about took on the color of blood and covered Asako’s field of vision.

The red cloth danced above his head and seemed to separate from his hands and float in the air. Looking up at it, he seemed for a moment to thirst for blood and then in that moment melted into a frenzied dance, the red of the cloth and the white of his body delicately intertwined. Asako thought of a piece of vinyl sheeting painted with blood and thought that it had been prepared for her own pleasure tonight. She put her hand into her raincoat pocket and made sure the small folded piece of vinyl was still there. Then, as she stared at the dancer on the stage, who had converted the thing she had sought so insistently into a red cloth and was waving it about in a frenzy, she felt suffocated by feelings of oppression.

“It’s all right.” Asako heard the man’s voice as if it emanated from some place far away.

“What is?” she responded vaguely.

“He wouldn’t respond even if there were a woman there,” the man said as if joking. Those words entered Asako’s body like a foreign object. Stunned, she looked at the man and then looked at the dancer on stage. (80–81)

Asako then experiences a vision of the dancer flying higher and higher through the air, parting the layers of clouds stained red by the evening sun, “as if his life were nothing but the beauty of flight” (81). This vision of transcendence prompts her to remember her lover’s claim that the most sensual type of beauty is “neither male nor female, both male and female” and that only men can convincingly pull off this sort of “self-intoxicated” performance (79). In the final lines of the story, as the dance comes to an end, Asako experiences a sensation of sinking down into the depths of herself, looking up at the heavens into which the dancer has ascended.

In the beginning of this final sequence, Asako at first seems embarrassed about having her secret fantasy discovered. But this embarrassment quickly turns to dismay and even oppression as she realizes that the dancer has not only stolen her idea—at this point she has to check and make sure the vinyl sheeting is still there—but has managed to turn it into a form of performance that is even more pleasing to her lover. While Asako had thought to excite her lover through the perverse display of her own menstrual blood, the dancer has transformed this crude literal interpretation of the man’s desires into a highly aestheticized and artistic representation. Furthermore, he manages to achieve through this performance what Asako cannot—a beautiful and harmonious blending of masculine and feminine, symbolized by the white of his body as it mingles effortlessly with the red of the costume.⁶Close

In fact, there is no place at all for Asako in her lover’s fantasy of androgynous perfection, as she discovers to her horror when her lover reveals the young dancer’s “secret.” Asako has fundamentally misunderstood the process by which this transcendence is achieved, according to the man. While in the beginning of the sequence she envisions a man and a woman in a dance that elevates both of them onto a plane of ecstasy, she learns to her dismay that women are in fact irrelevant to this process. Transcendence, as defined by the climax of this story, is embodied in a single “male” character that beautifully fuses both masculine and feminine in a purely self-contained performance of androgyny—what her lover refers to as a state of “self-intoxication” that requires no outside assistance. Asako, who has attempted to escape normative femininity by producing an alternative subjectivity that nevertheless depends on male validation, discovers in the end that her new persona is insufficient to this task.

As in “Toddler-Hunting,” internal contradictions in Takahashi’s text likewise create a space for criticism of the sexual politics espoused by its characters. Though Asako is clearly willing to subordinate herself to her lover’s somewhat sadistic desires in exchange for the validation that promises to “liberate” her from normative femininity, the narrative makes clear that this strategy offers merely a false vision of transcendence. As in Kōno’s story, much of the criticism of gender norms is inherent in the description of the process of engendering as a form of “discipline” that limits and constricts the protagonist. In Asako’s case, the negative reaction of members of her community to her physical “deformity” is directly cited as the reason for her low self-esteem and consequent willingness to so debase herself before her boyfriend and other men. Takahashi’s story, like Kōno’s, therefore underscores the mutual imbrication of corporeality and society in creating and producing such restrictive models of gender—while the “oddness” of Asako’s body is ostensibly the reason for such treatment, the birthmark itself has no significance outside of the meanings ascribed to it (“unattractive” equals unmarriageable), and these are determined by gendered norms.

In “Secret,” Takahashi has therefore crafted a protagonist whose “odd body” renders her incapable of conforming to conventional standards of feminine beauty. Yet as Irigaray’s “law of the same” would suggest, she is still held to this feminine standard since by virtue of being not-male she must represent everything the not-male side of the gender binary represents. In the course of her narrative, Takahashi exposes the way normative concepts of feminine beauty render women dependent on the approving gaze of the Other, thereby constructing feminine subjectivity as opposite and complementary to an autonomous masculine subjectivity that is indifferent to the responses of others. This is represented within the story by a second “odd body,” that of the young male dancer whose triumphant performance brings the story to its conclusion. Disciplinary regimes of beauty therefore conflate the terms “female” and “feminine,” “body” and “gender,” defining both as not-male according to a logic of sexual indifference that allows men to rhetorically transcend all of the above in favor of an autonomous existence.

But even as she highlights the oppressiveness of this logic of sexual indifference, Takahashi narratively undermines it by presenting the “transcendent” vessel of masculine superiority as corporeally and sexually ambiguous. As in Kōno’s story, we are met with two “odd bodies,” one male and one female, and in this case too the male body is privileged as the site of transcendence of gender norms, even as it is inscribed with signifiers of femininity that yield an eerily androgynous form. If the goal of androgyny is the harmonious combination of both masculine and feminine qualities, then why should male bodies alone be characterized as privileged sites of transcendence? By underscoring the hypocrisy of this illogical set of standards, Takahashi’s narrative performs a powerful critique of the gendered discourses that render women inferior.

It is also striking that in both stories, menstrual blood serves as a prime signifier of femininity, even as it is ironically attributed to male bodies. In Kōno’s story it is produced through physical violence, albeit only in the fantasies of the protagonist. In Takahashi’s story it is transformed from (fantasized) literal display to aestheticized performance in the form of the red gown worn by the dancer. But in each case, the ascription of such a quintessentially “feminine” physiological phenomenon to a male body radically destabilizes conventional distinctions not only between “masculine” and “feminine” (that is, binary gender), but also between the sexed bodies that are said to ground such distinctions. We will see much the same process at work in the next story, wherein not only menstruation but also pregnancy is parodically attributed to male bodies in ways that thoroughly subvert gendered binaries on multiple levels at once.

Kurahashi Yumiko’s “Snake” is an absurdist farce that begins with a male university student, K, waking from a nap to find a giant pink snake attempting to enter his body through his open mouth. The snake takes up residence inside K’s belly, and the story centers on the reactions of various sectors of society as they try to find some way to account for this bizarre incident according to their own prejudices and presumptions of “normalcy.” While on one level this story can be read as a thoroughly irreverent portrayal of the ANPO-era political landscape⁷Close—Diet politicians, student activists, university administrators, academics, members of the medical establishment, and business moguls are only some of the authorities that come under fire in this text—there is also a distinctively gender-bending subtext. This particular narrative produces an “anti-world” that consistently blurs the boundary between sex and gender by reassigning or subverting many of the “commonsense” distinctions between male/masculine and female/feminine subject positions.⁸Close

The protagonist, K, is napping in his dorm room when he awakes to an uncomfortable sensation and discovers the snake in the process of inching its way down his throat. By the time his friends notice the problem, it is too late and they are unable to remove the snake, which lodges itself inside his digestive tract. Fellow dormitory residents, led by a student activist, S, who has recently been released from police custody, insist on viewing the invasion by snake as part of an evil plot by the “powers that be.” Though S and other dormitory residents clearly witness K in the process of “swallowing” the snake, they need to find some way of presenting K as the victim of government oppression in order to be able to use this episode to “mobilize the masses.” They spread the word that K has in fact been swallowed by the snake because the alternative cannot be theorized and fails to yield a viable strategy for revolution. When K attempts to argue the facts of the incident with S, he is accused of “false consciousness” for failing to see society as the agent of his victimization and for neglecting to recognize the revolutionary potential of his situation.⁹Close

Subsequently, Okusan, the housewife who employs K to tutor her children, notices his distended belly and worries that he might be pregnant. While at first K reasons that there should be no “scientific basis” for this theory about his condition, his certainty soon wavers and he begins to worry about the question of “legal responsibility” and whether or not he would be able to afford an abortion (88). He even refers to himself as pregnant later in this scene (90), and when it becomes clear that his “condition” has begun to interfere with his job, he is informed that his services are no longer needed. Apparently he has proved himself thus far to be more useful to the housewife as an unwitting sex toy than as a music teacher for the children. She has evidently been drugging him and taking advantage of him after each lesson, but this time the usual plan goes awry as the snake, whose head has lodged itself in his throat, consumes the “hormone” cocktail meant for K, and he is unable to perform because of the heavy weight in his stomach.

A visit to the hospital to determine the exact nature of K’s condition results in further confusion, as none of the medical authorities seem able to determine how best to deal with the “foreign body,” much less the question of whether or not K might be pregnant and what if anything can be done about that. The first doctor K sees is determined to gut him like a fish in order to remove the snake, until the nurse reminds him that there would be legal implications attendant upon performing surgery on a pregnant patient, should that turn out to be the case. The second doctor uses an X-ray-like machine to produce an image of the patient’s condition, only to blur the boundary further between “foreign body” and host:

“Don’t move. I see. It’s definitely a snake. However it seems there’s still quite a bit of human remaining. … That means that the snake hasn’t completely digested the human yet. Hm, it looks as though humans are difficult to digest.”

“What’s happening? Certainly it seems that the snake hasn’t dissolved completely. Sometimes it moves, so it’s probably still alive,” K started to say.

“Of course,” the doctor said in an irritated tone of voice. “The snake is still alive. What’s strange is that there is any human left.” (100)

In spite of the fact that K seems to all observers to be intact and functioning and by all scientific logic should be in the process of digesting the snake, the doctor’s diagnosis “demonstrates” that it is in fact the other way around—K has been “assimilated” by the snake, which has irrevocably fused itself to his skeletal structure and is in the process of “digesting” him from within.

K’s unfortunate condition further complicates his engagement to his fiancée, L, as she refuses to take “responsibility” for the fact that he might be pregnant, and both are concerned about the impact the snake incident may have on the process of negotiating the marriage contract. K is taken to the headquarters of a large corporation to talk to someone whom he assumes to be L’s father, although L refuses to acknowledge a blood relationship and persists in calling him her employer. K’s largest faux pas in the course of the discussion, however, turns out to have nothing to do with the snake—he insists on discussing his feelings for L, which both she and her “employer” consider irrelevant, and they cannot seem to make K understand that L is nothing but a “proxy” in the negotiations that should properly be conducted between K and the “boss” himself (102).

The snake in fact turns out to be useful to the discussion, serving as K’s only collateral—though not a very stable form of capital, as the “employer” sympathetically explains (103). While K manages to conclude this stage of the negotiations successfully—with the snake in fact according him a kind of celebrity status due to the fact that it has attracted the attention of the authorities and earned K an invitation to testify before the Diet—it ultimately puts an end to his relationship with L when it eats her during the course of their lovemaking.

The story climaxes with K’s visit to the Diet to testify, accompanied by his academic adviser, a very large, hairy, and pregnant man known as Professor Q. They travel to the legislative assembly via a long, snake-like pneumatic tube that drops them into the mail room, whereby they are whisked into the main hall and K is immediately taken into custody. Various “experts” are called to give their opinions on K’s condition and what, if anything, should be done about it. However, as each “expert” tends to approach the problem from a radically different set of presumptions and concerns, their testimonies diverge into an incoherent cacophony that produces no real conclusion. The legal scholars question the legitimacy of the proceedings themselves, the biologists stress the need to study K as an example of the future of human evolution, the sociologists are concerned about how they might craft a new set of policies to account for such an eventuality, and so on.

The proceedings are interrupted twice—once when the snake, which has not been fed since digesting L, swallows the microphone, forcing them to wait until the laxative K is given has produced the object (along with a shiny black piece of excrement). The second time, student activists storm the building, and the scene descends into a free-for-all. This seems to antagonize the hungry snake, which emerges from K’s throat once again and frightens the assembly before consuming the protagonist and ending the narrative, a neat resolution to a messy problem that seems to satisfy everyone concerned.

It is tempting to read the invasion by snake as a metaphor for pregnancy; such a reading would imply that the male protagonist is subjected to a straightforward experience of gender role reversal. In some ways Kurahashi encourages this interpretation, portraying K as increasingly identifying with the “invader” to the extent that by the end of the story, he appears to be a nurturing and loving parent who is so concerned with the welfare of his “child” that he willingly allows the snake to feed on him. However, a clear distinction is drawn in the story between “male pregnancy”—which is taken for granted to be “normal” (that is, within the realm of possibility according to the laws of Kurahashi’s alternate universe)—and the unusual experience of K as he is “penetrated” by the snake. Other male characters, such as Professor Q, are said to be pregnant or potentially pregnant, and this is not treated as aberrant in any way. Only K’s body is invaded by a snake, and this invasion is depicted as so extraordinary that a special Diet session must be called to investigate it.

In fact, the snake image itself seems to signify different things at different points in the story and is portrayed alternately as embodying consumptive, excretory, sexual, and reproductive functions. The snake rises from K’s throat whenever he becomes excited, as if to signify erection, and the description of it within the text as long, pink, and penetrative gives it a distinctly phallic character. On the other hand, several characters in the story make a point of noting that K is “penetrated” not genitally but orally, and the snake attaches itself primarily to K’s digestive tract while consuming people and things in place of K. Toward the end of the story, though, when the snake swallows the microphone during the Diet session and is forced to expel it with the aid of laxatives, its function is clearly excretory, as its tail end protrudes from K’s anus. And yet K’s fascination with the shiny black ball of excrement it deposits alongside the microphone—he is so absorbed with it that he polishes it lovingly and to distraction, completely oblivious to the proceedings that will supposedly decide his fate—once again evokes an impression of a doting parent.

Obviously, then, the implications of K’s relationship to the snake are more complex than a simple gender role reversal that “feminizes” a male protagonist by rendering him pregnant. In fact, “Snake” features a subversion of gender roles that does far more than merely reverse the masculine and feminine sides of a simple binary opposition; rather, it destabilizes the very foundation upon which such distinctions of gender or sex are predicated. Through the creation of a bizarre “anti-world” that nevertheless operates according to surprisingly familiar human dynamics, Kurahashi deliberately subverts an array of gendered binaries—subject/object, active/passive, masculine/feminine, and even male/female—in ways that call into question the “logic” according to which women and men are seen as differentiated into opposite and complementary roles in contemporary Japanese society.

From the beginning of the story, the boundary between subject and object is rendered indeterminate by the question of K’s relationship to the snake. In the opening pages of the story K clearly resists the snake’s attempt to forcibly enter his body; however, the incident is so absurd and unexpected that those around him—even the roommates who witnessed the event—have trouble describing what actually occurred. The problem of whether K should be understood as an active agent or passive victim of this incident is openly discussed among the dormitory residents. While K consistently uses the active voice “I swallowed” to describe his role in ingesting the snake, his friends seem unable to accept this explanation and at first refer to him in the passive voice as having “been swallowed” by the snake. However politically expedient the friends’ viewpoint might be as an explanation, it unfortunately fails to correspond to observed reality, so they eventually arrive at the conclusion that K has instead become a snake:

“Oh, that was you, the one who became a snake yesterday?”

“No, he’s the one who was swallowed by the snake.”

“Same difference. Essentially, he is a snake.” (94)

By positing the ontological unity of K and the snake, they are able to avoid the thorny problem of who swallowed whom and furthermore are able to characterize both K and the snake as being “sacrificed” to established authority structures. However, K objects to the use of this term to describe his situation:

“Actually, I don’t think of myself as a sacrifice. Since, after all, I swallowed the snake.” However, his explanation was drowned out by the overwhelming power of S’s voice.

“No, he’s not a sacrifice; he’s a victim—the snake, I mean.”

“The snake?” K cried, confounded.

“Right, the snake. K is a victim who was swallowed by the snake, and that makes it clear that he is essentially a snake. He is a snake, and therefore that means that we have to call the snake a victim.” (106)

Through this simple mathematical substitution, S has apparently “logically” concluded that if K = victim and K = snake, then it must also be true that snake = victim. This not only rationalizes K’s usefulness to the student movement, but also reduces what might pose a difficult philosophical problem of agency and heterogeneity to a matter of simple equivalency. If K and the snake can be considered to be one and the same, then both can be construed as “victims” of a near metaphysical system of authority without a need to grapple with the politically uncomfortable possibility that one might be seen as “victimized” by the other. Not surprisingly, the elegant simplicity of this explanation catches on, and other characters come to the same conclusion that K’s uneasy coexistence with the snake within can be most expediently dealt with by assuming that he must “essentially” be a snake.

The tendency of the characters to paper over questions of agency is underscored by the fact that the invasion by snake can be envisioned only according to a binary choice between “swallowing” or “being swallowed.” Either K has swallowed the snake or the snake has swallowed K; there apparently is no other logical alternative that can be understood by these characters. But since both terms prove inadequate to describe the complexity of the phenomenon in question, the subject/object dilemma is ultimately reduced to a metaphysically vague notion of “becoming.” It is interesting that the causative-passive form, “was made to swallow,” is never once used in this text to describe K’s condition. By withholding this option, which would seem to blur the line between victim and oppressor relative to the neat passive/active binary of “swallow/be swallowed,” Kurahashi highlights the tendency of her characters to subordinate the delicate indeterminacy of power dynamics in this “anti-world” to a false dichotomy-cum-unity. On an extradiegetic level, then, the narrative makes it clear to the reader that these binary simplicities are inadequate to describe K’s condition, creating an implicit tension between narrative inside and outside that opens a space for critique of the characters’ reductive logic.

In other words, the language employed by the characters throughout creates a set of binary options that oversimplify the “reality” of K’s dilemma. The two possibilities offered by the text effectively mirror each other, such that one may be seen as the precise opposite of the other—K either “swallows” or “is swallowed” by the snake. Given that one alternative essentially defines the other through a relationship of pure opposition, one might say that “swallowing” and “being swallowed” are therefore two sides of the same coin—one cannot exist without the other and derives its identity from the necessary presence of the other, to the extent that they might even be reduced to the same basic process known as “swallow,” which encompasses both subject and object. It is no wonder, then, that in Kurahashi’s text the two entirely different entities of K and the snake are ultimately reduced to a simple mathematical unity (K = snake).

Luce Irigaray has traced the same process at work in Western philosophy with respect to our conceptualization of gender, and she attacks it as implying a “logic of the same” that reduces gender difference to a single model that cannot understand femininity without reference to masculinity. In other words, masculine subjectivity is taken as the norm against which femininity is defined and understood to represent all that masculinity is not. In her critique of Freud, and by extension the Western philosophy upon which his theories of sexuality rest, Irigaray writes as follows:

Himself a prisoner of a certain economy of the logos, [Freud] defines sexual difference by giving a priori value to Sameness, shoring up his demonstration by falling back upon time-honored devices such as analogy, comparison, symmetry, dichotomous oppositions, and so on. Heir to an “ideology” that he does not call into question, Freud asserts that the “masculine” is the sexual model, that no representation of desire can fail to take it as the standard, can fail to submit to it. In so doing, Freud makes manifest the presuppositions of the scene of representation: the sexual indifference that subtends it ensures its coherence and its closure.¹⁰Close

By “sexual indifference,” Irigaray implies that to the extent that we are dealing with a model of gender that envisions femininity merely as the antithesis of masculinity, we are able to envision only one gender rather than two: masculinity and non-masculinity, both of which take the male subject as their model and point of reference. Feminine difference is therefore subsumed beneath an “indifference” to femininity as a separate and distinct category.

Irigaray is frequently attacked by critics for forwarding an “essentialist” model of femininity that places unwarranted emphasis on women’s “difference” from men. It is important to stress here, though, that positing women as “different” from men (in the sense meant by Irigaray) is not the same thing as characterizing women as opposite to men in every way. In fact, this misunderstanding of woman as man’s opposite is clearly something that Irigaray wishes to correct. Rather than understand femininity through contrast with masculinity, she is effectively arguing that women should be understood on their own terms without reference to some sort of spurious conceptual opposite. In the sense that Irigaray wishes to discredit the binary model of masculine/feminine as opposing and mutually exclusive terms, her theory has much in common with Kurahashi’s attempts to subvert any conception of gender as a stable and neatly bifurcated category.

In her pathbreaking dissertation on Kurahashi’s narrative style, Atsuko Sakaki demonstrates that a subversion of binary models of gender was a conscious and deliberate part of the author’s literary agenda. Sakaki sees the relationship between the “anti-world” of Kurahashi’s literature and that of the “real” world as analogous to that between women and men in society in that while the former is subordinated to the latter, it also serves as a potent site of critique. She further quotes Kurahashi as follows:

This world has the sign of sex. Just as we forget that the numbers we deal with in our daily life have a positive [plus] sign, so we forget the sexual sign, the male sign, which exists in this world. Women are shut in the world of the negative [minus] sign, or the Anti-world in the [actual] world, so to speak. In short, this [actual] world belongs to men. In it, women are regarded as nothing but those who have the other sex of female, as opposed to male. As Beauvoir points out, women belong to the category of “the Other.”¹¹Close

Thus by narrating the “anti-world,” Kurahashi in effect envisions herself as giving voice to an alternate (feminine) logic that questions the legitimacy of subordinating women as man’s “Other.”

Kurahashi’s project in “Snake” thus seems to be to force her audience to question binary models of gender by presenting the reader with an “anti-world” that subverts the reader’s desire to make sense of the distinctions between male and female, masculine and feminine, as portrayed in the text—either through direct analogy with the “real” world or through relationships of clear contrast with what is familiar. In spite of the term that the author herself uses to describe her narrative universe, Kurahashi’s “anti-world” does not seem to operate according to a logic that functions in direct opposition to that of mundane reality. In fact, it is striking how much her “anti-world” resembles what we know as “reality” in terms of the sociodynamics of the relationships among characters and the organizations that structure their lives. In fact, the dynamics of her “anti-world” seem less a contradiction of everything we know to be “true” than a hysterical mimicry of the “real world” that highlights its hypocrisies and logical fallacies.

Thus, the gender roles in Kurahashi’s narrative universe are inflected by power dynamics that seem remarkably consistent across the “anti-world”/“reality” divide, even as the author deliberately frustrates our desire to understand the gender difference between her characters according to a coherent set of rules that either replicate or contradict conventional models of gender difference. She does so primarily by reinscribing traits characteristic of one sex or gender upon the other yet refusing to do so in a consistent or fully reciprocal fashion. In other words, men are “feminized” but not entirely so, while women embody some masculine traits yet preserve something of conventional femininity, yielding a dizzying array of possible gendered and sexed subject positions that refuse to conform to any predictable pattern.

Bodies are rendered sexually indeterminate particularly by ascribing ostensibly “feminine” bodily functions to men. For example, the young male pupil that K tutors is described as feeling listless because it is “that time of the month” for him (89). K routinely worries that he might become pregnant in scenes where he is sexually involved with a woman, and this concern is taken seriously by both the medical establishment and other characters within the text (91, 96). I use the expression “feminine bodily functions” advisedly because although the term “feminine” is conventionally used to refer to behavior rather than physical sexual differences, facile distinctions between gender and sex are refuted by Kurahashi’s subversive narrative tactics. Although the bodies in Kurahashi’s “anti-world” can apparently perform some functions conventionally attributed to the opposite sex, men are not exclusively “feminized” or women exclusively “masculinized” on the plane of either sex or gender. Men may become pregnant, but they still exhibit some physical and behavioral characteristics associated with “masculinity.” Professor Q, for example, is pregnant yet described as a large man with a hairy chest who physically overpowers K during their first meeting (113) and conducts himself authoritatively in official situations, such as the Diet testimony scene.

Likewise, both women in the text, L and Okusan, are described as conventionally feminine in some ways, yet both serve as active agents in their sexual involvement with K, in contradiction to the “feminine” passivity expected of women in contemporary 1960s Japan. The housewife who employs K to tutor her menstruating son is sexually aggressive toward K and physically subdues him (with the help of a spiked cocktail) in order to take advantage of him, yet she is described as otherwise conducting herself in a deferential manner by serving him at dinner and adorning herself in a very feminine dress made of exquisitely thin material (89). L also treats K primarily as a sexual object; when they meet, she is so eager and forceful in her desire for sexual relations with him that she mostly ignores his attempts to make conversation. However, K is expected to take the lead in negotiating with her “boss” for her hand in marriage, and the fact that K is expected to produce evidence of financial solvency as the primary basis for legitimating the contract sounds very similar to what is conventionally expected of a young man attempting to establish his readiness for marriage to his fiancée’s family.

In other words, “traditional” signifiers of masculinity and femininity are combined and subverted with wild abandon in this text to produce a narrative that not only troubles the distinctions between these gendered ideals, but furthermore radically destabilizes any attempt to link gendered behaviors with the sexed bodies to which they purportedly correspond. Male bodies are alternately feminized and re-masculinized, both through atypical sexual characteristics and behaviors, whereas female characters are likewise presented as both “feminine” and “masculine” at the same time. It is interesting that the author of “Snake” seems more intent upon disturbing commonsense notions of masculinity than femininity, if the amount of attention devoted within the text to male bodies and genders is any indication. Only two female characters receive any significant attention in this story, and L and Okusan are marginal entities in comparison with K and his comrades.

In fact, as noted in the discussion of the previous two stories, all of these authors seem particularly interested in depicting the male body as a site for troubling gender norms. This fascination with “queering” male bodies is intimately related to the ideological struggle that was taking place in Japanese society during the 1960s, when conventional models of femininity came increasingly into conflict not only with the forces of social and historical change, but also with an emerging second-wave feminist discourse that sought to destabilize the logic of sexual indifference that underwrote such binary models of gender.

While we have seen a variety of “odd bodies” in this chapter, it is striking to note the frequency with which male bodies are chosen to signify transgression of gender norms. The hyperbolic and violent feminization of the male child in Kōno’s text dramatically underscores the artificiality of the process of engendering female bodies and problematizes “natural” linkages between sex and gender. Takahashi’s text also troubles the sex/gender divide by presenting the reader with a male body that supposedly transcends gender entirely, even as his “male” body is inscribed with markers of feminine corporeality. In the process, Takahashi further critiques the hypocrisy of standards of beauty that render women dependent on male validation so that men may view themselves as having transcended gender altogether in favor of an autonomous subjectivity. Kurahashi goes even farther, frustrating any attempt to impose a logic of sexual indifference upon the constellation of bodies, genders, and sexualities that coexist within her literary “anti-world.” But why this obsessive focus on male bodies?

The remarkable prevalence of this literary trope had much to do with the tension between conservative pressures on women to conform to a strictly gendered division of labor and legal and societal transformations that opened a space for transgression of conventional gender roles. The process of renegotiating feminine identity was already well under way in Japan during the 1960s, with women increasingly venturing into the public sphere in various capacities as students, workers, and political agents even as they continued to perform the “traditional” roles of wife and mother. On the other hand, masculine gender ideals remained stubbornly fixed around the model of salaried work, which contributed to the process of national rebuilding and reinvention of the corporate society known as “Japan, Inc.”

While women’s roles and identities were undergoing a rapid process of change as the result of the new opportunities that were just beginning to open to them, men were resistant to such changes not only because change would require them to accept new roles for women, but also because it would require corresponding alterations to male gender identity. The authors represented in this study seem to have sensed that redefining femininity would require a reinvention of masculine gender roles as well. If male subjectivity is the ground upon which conventional gender norms are based, as Irigaray and others have argued, then destabilizing the conceptual foundation of masculinity would offer the most effective challenge to the existing structure of gender roles. This seems to be precisely what these authors had in mind.

In this chapter, we have seen how these authors have attempted to problematize the binary logic that underlies the strict policing of gender norms. Having attacked the disciplinary mechanisms and the logic of normative gender that undergird relationships between women and men, these authors further turn their attention to relationships among women. One common thread in the literature of these writers is a profound pessimism about the possibility of solidarity among women, and women in these texts tend to serve variously as figures of longing as well as fear or resentment. In the next chapter, we will explore the function of the body of the Other Woman as a trope for expressing this highly ambivalent attitude toward intimacy among women.