Enchi Fumiko and the Hidden Energy of the Supernatural more

Enchi Fumiko and the Hidden Energy of the Supernatural Author(s): Wayne Pounds Source: The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Nov., 1990), pp. 167-183 Published by: Association of Teachers of Japanese Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488952 Accessed: 31/08/2010 22:40 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=atj. 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Association of Teachers of Japanese is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese. http://www.jstor.org of Journal the Association Teachers Japanese of of 167 ENCHI FUMIKO AND THE HIDDEN ENERGY OF THE SUPERNATURAL Wayne Pounds Recent scholarship has shown us how serious writers may critique female images which a particular culture validates by dramatizing their limitations as representations of real women.1 Enchi Fumiko's novels do precisely that. Though the concern seems to run throughout her fiction, in one particular sequence of three novels, Onnamen (1958), Yasashiki yoru no monogatari (1961), and Namamiko monogatari (1965),2 Enchi takes the image of the shamaness (miko), and appropriates it for the purpose of critique by forging an unconventional link between the shamaness and the traditional image of the woman possessed by vindictiveness and jealousy.3 By bringing to consciousness the link between spirit possession and possession by powerful emotions, showing how the latter are inscribed in women's bodies as cultural codes,4 Enchi harnesses hidden energies and affirms the continuity of women's history. To provide a context for the novel I want to examine, Onnamen, translated as Masks (1983), I will first sketch the Japanese supernatural story as a traditional genre; then, centering on Masks, I will examine Enchi's appropriation of the image of the "shamaness." Masks is a rich and subtle work which presents itself first as a story of vengeance and then, at the conclusion, forces the reader to a re-evaluation of the vengeance plot, a reassessment which can be made in terms of the novel's subtext, which deals with the social channeling of female creativity and with the task of establishing the historical continuity between the contemporary writer and her predecessors in the classical period. The supernatural or ghost story (kaidan) has a long history in Japanese literature, and a longer one still in its Chinese precursors. In China, despite Confucian exhortation that the spiritual world is not a proper topic for human inquiry, tales and anecdotes about supernatural beings are as old as recorded literature . . . Marvelous creatures appear freely in Taoist writings. 168 Volume24, Number2 Notices of occult beings occur in early dynastic histories. The oldest separate collection of supernatural tales was compiled around the end of the 3rd century A.D. In T'ang times the literary tale of the marvelous attained maturity, and from early times Chinese examples inspired Japanese writers.5 In Japan, tales with supernatural elements appear as early as the ninth century Nihon ryoiki, and the Konjaku monogatari, a massive compilation of stories used by Buddhist priests, many of them dealing with the supernatural, dates from the twelfth century. "Ghost stories emerged as a distinct genre during the Tokugawa period,"6 which saw the consolidation of the feudal state and the state establishment of Confucianism. Japanese literary historians trace the rise of the genre to three sources: the translation and adaptation of Chinese novels (to describe which the term shosetsu first comes into use in the mid-1700s), the popularity of gatherings to tell ghost stories (the hyaku monogatari tradition), and Buddhist tales of retributive justice (inga-oho) involving elements of the marvelous and supernatural.7 This traditional explanation, however, surely omits one important factor, the growing authoritarianism of Tokugawa rule, to which supernatural tales may well have appeared as a reaction; for the supernatural, by virtue of its other-worldly nature, possesses a utopian dimension, an area of freedom whose existence potentiates a critique of the repressive state.8 When in 1722 the Tokugawa regime prohibited the discussion in of contemporary affairs, it must have made the supernatural that print much more attractive to writers. One critic finds this function in the vengeful female ghosts in Yotsuya kaidan (first performed in 1825), expressing "an extreme reaction to the repressed position of women in society."9 Ghost stories, set in the past and in remote parts of the country, could express longing for a past imagined as freer than the repressive present, and as such they contained the potential for social protest. Ueda Akinari, among the most accomplished prose stylists of the eighteenth century and Japan's most famous writer of supernatural stories, spoke explicitly of the truth-telling or subversive nature of the genre, noting that nostalgia for the past reflected a lament for the present. "When an author sees a nation flourishing, he knows that it must eventually decay, like the bloom of a fragrant flower. When he considers what happens in the end to leaders of state, he privately laughs at their folly ... He makes foolish sures feel ashamed of themselves. He tries to avoid the desire for fame, composing his innocent tales about events of the past for which there men who struggle to collect rare trea- Journal the Association Teachers Japanese of of of 169 are no sources."10 In his stories, Akinari used the supernatural to satirize Buddhist other-worldliness, as in "The Destiny That Spanned Two Lifetimes" (Nise no en), and to escape the limitations of Confucian morality, as in "Wealth and Poverty" (Hinpuku-ron). Akinari is important to the present discussion because Enchi's "A Bond for Two Lifetimes-Gleanings" (Nise no en-shui) is a rewriting of Akinari's Nise no en (in Tales of the Spring Rain), an act of re-vision that shows both her awareness of the subversive tradition of the ghost story and her subversion of patriarchal definitions of the literary tradition. Enchi, however, is not a writer of supernatural stories in the traditional sense. Though I use the term in order to link her work with Akinari's and the Tokugawa period, her work does not involve that confrontation with the inexplicable and other-worldly which traditionally defines the genre East and West.11 Her practice is instead psychological, and among Western practitioners she seems closest to Henry James in the way the psychological and the supernatural are balanced as possible explanations of the story's events. Enchi differs from James, however, in that her work draws upon a historical culture, the aristocratic culture of Heian Japan, in which supernatural belief systems were represented in enduring social and literary forms. Enchi started her career as a dramatist in the modern theatre (shingeki) movement, under the influence of Ibsen and Strindberg in particular (who, of course, wrote their own kind of ghost plays12), and she was part of the pre-war leftist movement.13 After the appearance of her first book of short stories in 1939, poor health caused a period of silence which lasted until the early fifties, when she emerged as a novelist of the fates of women, both past and contemporary. A lifelong student of classical Japanese literature, Enchi translated The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese between 1967 and 1972, and the historical range of her work from the Heian era to the present reflects her concern to bind the fragmentary history of women into a single continuum. This devotion to resurrecting the past for the nourishment of the present is further evident in the two novels which follow Masks, Yasashiki yoru no monogatari (1961) and Namamiko monogatari (1965), both set in the Heian period. It is evident too in all three of the works I will discuss; but it is clearest in the novel which is my central focus, Masks, which explicitly interrogates the relationship between the past and the present, between the powerful and accomplished women of the classical period and women of today. In its surface expression Masks is a story of vengeance, of an alliance of women who accomplish the "crime" of retribution against men and against patriarchal society. The particular wrong to be avenged is 170 Volume24, Number2 that committed against Togano Mieko by her husband, Togano Masatsugu. A rural samurai of the kind who created the Meiji government, he brings to his marriage the Confucian tradition of female subservience to males and, in accordance with established custom, he also brings his concubine. The Toganos' relations with the many hundreds of tenant farmers on their land had been maintained strictly according to the feudal code. Domestic servants were recruited from tenant families, and by custom, every Togano male of a certain age was entitled to choose a good-looking tenant girl to serve him as maid and mistress (pp. 84-85).14 The mistress-maid Aguri had conceived twice before Mieko's arrival, but both times Masatsugu, ignoring Aguri's wishes, had arranged an abortion. Clearly, the original wrong in this scenario is that done to Aguri, a crime compounding class and sexual oppression, and we may take this incident as a shorthand notation for the brutal suppression of women during the medieval and feudal periods.15 The phase of Japanese history referred to so briefly in Masks has a fuller development in The Waiting Years (Onnazaka, 1961), which in several respects reads like a preparatory study for Masks. (Masks preceded it in magazine publication, first appearing in 1958, but did not appear in book form until 1966.)16 In Japanese the two titles are parallel: the title of Masks (Onnamen) literally translates as "woman's mask," that of The Waiting Years, "woman's hill" (onnazaka refers to the gentler of two slopes leading to a shrine), or more idiomatically, "woman's fate," which the novel images as a long uphill climb ending in defeat. The heroine of The Waiting Years, Tomo, suffers a situation much like Mieko's, married to a man who makes his maids his concubines. The difference, however, to some extent a reflection of different historical periods, is crucial. In The Waiting Years, set in early Meiji, Tomo stoically endures her condition, waiting throughout her life for the only vengeance her Confucian upbringing allows her to imagine: for her husband to die first. (He does not.) As a response to an identical injustice, Mieko's "shamanic" vengeance, as will be seen, seems preferable to Tomo's stoicism, since it is an active rather than a passive response17 to the injustice of which she is a victim-to the sequence of events that begins when she arrives at the home in which Masatsugu has already installed Aguri, his twice-violated concubine. "To such a house, where a woman of such desperate wounds lived, Mieko came as a bride of nineteen" (p. 85). During her pregnancy, Mieko suffers a miscarriage after a fall down a flight of stairs caused by a pro- Journal of the Association of Teachersof Japanese 171 truding nail planted there by Aguri, who watches at the bottom of the stairs. Mieko recognizes that the source of her physical injury is ultiit is mately the same as that of her moral injury-her husband-and him that she directs the first stage of her vengeance. Here, the against reader must suppose, begins that personal involvement in spirit-possession which characterizes Mieko from her first appearance in the novel (pp. 4-10). Mieko does not leave her husband, in spite of her own family's support for such a move; instead, she takes a lover and by him has children whom Masatsugu, ignorant, accepts as his own. But just as the original crime against Mieko is not simple but compound, so her vengeance is not simple but compounds itself into consequences which envelop her children and return upon herself as nemesis, a balancing of karmic relations (inga-oho). But what the religious viewpoint calls karma (go), a social viewpoint sees as the inheritance of sex and class relations, and in reading Masks one of the foremost problems is to distinguish between what pertains to Mieko as an individual and what pertains to her as a representative of her sex and class. To bear this distinction in mind, however, is complicated by the way in which the text presents Mieko not as an individual woman but as a type of Japanese femininity. A clue to her nature is the three Chinese characters of her given name, Mieko ( --fS). Read literally, they a three-fold personality structure, which I would elaborate in suggest this way. First, she is an incarnation of that spirit of vengeance whose images are preserved in classical literature (especially certain noh plays and The Tale of Genji) and which constitute part of the cultural inheritance of Japanese women. As such, Mieko is closely allied to the ancient "shamaness," whose rituals are obscurely preserved in the noh, a historical matter which the text takes up explicitly in an essay written by Mieko in her youth. Second, she is woman-as-victim, woman reduced to brute physical nature by patriarchal denial of her humanity. At this level the term "karma" has its strict application, and the reader understands the text's repeated insistence on female karma (variants on onna no go ga fukai recur in the Japanese text), a Buddhist notion that historically excluded women from nirvana on the grounds that their bodies were too bestial for them to escape the wheel of reincarnation.18 Third, Mieko is an individual person and as such is to some degree unknown to herself, carrying about her that essential clay of individuality which muddies the water of our self-knowledge. I venture this three-layered view of Mieko with some confidence, for the novel itself divides into three parts, each named after a noh mask that suggests one of the layers I have identified. The formal homology implies 172 Volume24, Number2 that to understand Mieko is to understand the novel, and I will use the three dimensions of her character to try to do just that. Noh is of central importance in the novel's metaphorical strucfor it best exemplifies that energy of unseen powers, "as if someture, thing dead had come to life" (p. 25), which defines the novel's supernaturalism. Anthropologists find in the plays "concealed shamanic rituals ... which were in former times used to call up a ghost and cause it to speak, or to cajole a divinity to descend, to dance and to deliver messages."19 The eponymous mask of Part One is ryo no onna ( It ), literally "spirit woman," representing the vengeful spirit of an older woman tormented beyond the grave by the resentments of her life. Mieko's own youthful essay linking the Rokujo lady to "shamanism," referred to earlier, identifies the ryo no onna with the Rokujo lady of Genji and describes the persona as "one who chafes at her inability to sublimate her strong ego in deference to any man, but who can carry out her will only by forcing it upon others-and that indirectly, through the possessive capacity of her spirit" (p. 52). The statement describes Mieko herself. She is the spirit woman who forces her will upon others in order to enact her vengeance. In this plot Yasuko, the widow of Mieko's son Akio, is the medium through which Mieko's spirit causes others to act by playing upon their romantic and sexual responses to Yasuko's youth and beauty. Even the men in the story, the obtuse victims of the plot, recognize that Mieko is the spirit and Yasuko the medium (p. 13), but last of all to recognize the relationship is Mieko herself. This fits the theory of spirit-possession which Mieko herself expounds in the aforementioned essay, according to which the spirit of the wronged woman acts without conscious knowledge, as exemplified in the story of the Rokujo lady, who would never have consciously brought harm to the man she loves but whose spirit brings Genji a succession of miseries.20 Masks, in this respect, is a novel about the painful development of self-knowledge. The name of the second part of the novel is that of the noh mask ), a young madwoman, thus woman as victim, woman Masugami (--,' reduced to the mindless physical. The headnote to Part Two defines the mask as "a young woman in a state of frenzy," but this phrase fits any of the central cast of female characters in the book: the maid Aguri, who receives the first injuries; Mieko, who is incited to vengeance by the wrongs her husband has done her; and Yasuko, who in a dream pokes out the eye of her husband's corpse. But for all these characters, the frenzy is a momentary condition. The character for whom madness is permanent is Mieko's daughter, Harume, the twin of Yasuko's deceased husband Akio. Having suffered brain damage from her twin brother's Journal of the Association of Teachersof Japanese 173 feet while still in the womb, she is an image of brutalized womanhood. Because she lacks rational intelligence, she is woman reduced to physical being. The Togano family viewed the bearing of twins as itself "vaguely beastly and unpleasant" (p. 40) and was ready to lock Harume away in the attic even before her mental retardation became evident and gave the procedure its cloak of justification. Harume is further associated with bestiality, for during her periods she becomes "like a wild animal" (p. 72) and bites those who try to help her. The onset of these attacks during Harume's periods shows that what is at issue here is feminine physiology, which Harume shares with all women and which helps define the social meaning of "karma." Clearly the issue here is a social-cultural attitude, represented by the Buddhist and Shinto view of menstrual blood as defilement. In Shinto practice, purification is readily available, and a little water cleanses the defilement, but in Buddhism the prohibition was severe and excluded women from certain holy places until as recently as the middle of the present century. The novel defines this sense of feminine karma very firmly. Mieko describes it in her essay as "a stream of blood flowing on and on, unbroken, from generation to generation" (pp. 57,127). And toward the end of the novel, as self-knowledge breaks on Mieko, she has a vivid perception of "the heavy load of karma that weighed upon her." A vision came to her of an ancient goddess lying stretched out in the underworld, prey of death. Her flesh was putrid and swarming with maggots, her decaying form covered with all manner of festering sores that smoldered and gave off black sparks. The luridness of the sight sent the goddess's lover reeling in horror, and the moment that he turned and ran, she arose and swept after him in fury, all the love she had borne him transformed utterly into blinding hatred (p. 127). Mieko's vision repeats in precise detail the famous scene in the Nihongi in which the god Izanagi pursues the goddess Izanami, his sister and wife, into the land of the dead.21 Mieko is thus tracing back her karma to a prehistorical stratum in which the primal male flees from female physiology, envisioned as death and defilement. The mythological scene neatly fits what modern scholars have identified as the sources of male dread of the female. As Simone de Beauvoir writes: "woman's first lie, her first [betrayal of the male ideal, is] life itself-life which, though clothed in the most attractive form, is always infested by the ferments of age and death."22 In terms of the mythical scene which Mieko's vision recalls, the male revulsion which rouses the 174 Volume24, Number2 female wrath has its roots in the man's fear of his own mortalitysickness, old age, and death-which he denies by pursuing a younger woman. The name of the last part of the novel comes from the noh mask Fukai, used in roles depicting middle-aged women, especially mothers. According to the daughter of the noh master Yakushiji, Fukai may be "written either of two ways: with the characters for 'deep well' or 'deep woman"' ( MI: fukai or Zit fukai onna).23 For Yakushiji himself the two readings suggested "a metaphor comparing the heart of an older woman to the depths of a bottomless well-a well so deep that its water would seem totally without color" (pp. 138-39). This is the well of the self into which Mieko had peered in her youth without success, unable to distinguish her own features (p. 47). This mask represents the individual dimension of Mieko's character, in which she leads her social existence and possesses her essential humanity. "The long, conical slope of the [mask's] eyelids, the melancholy, sunken cheeks, and the subdued red of the mouth with its blackened teeth-all conveyed the somber and grief-laden look of a woman long past the age of sensuality" (p. 138). Pondering this mask, Mieko sees herself; and in this scene, the last in the novel, her self-knowledge enlarges. She understands the crime she has perpetrated, and drops the mask in shocked or sorrowful recognition of the price of the vengeance she has taken and its effect on herself. To avenge herself upon her husband, she took a lover and bore his children. But her own son, while still in the womb, deprived her daughter of her chance to be fully human. The spirit of vengeance (whether hers or Aguri's) exacted her son's life, depriving her of the possibility of a successor. She adopted her widowed daughter-in-law Yasuko as her daughter, but in order to have offspring of her own blood she substituted the retarded Harume in Yasuko's place to have a child by Yasuko's lover. Harume died in childbirth, but the infant is not the daughter Mieko wanted-"the woman in me I tried, but failed, to pass on to Harume" (p. 68)-for it is a boy, "the image of Master Akio" (p. 140), bearer of male karma and next in the succession of Togano males. Such, I submit, is a reading of Masks as a tale of vengeance, the successful accomplishment, Yasuko boasts, of "a crime only women could commit" (p. 126). But I find this reading incomplete and unsatisfactory. It makes the novel a cautionary tale, warning that while there may be strength in female solidarity, vengeance rebounds on the avenger. Furthermore, if, as Mieko implies in her essay, male critics are mistaken to read the Rokujo story only in terms of jealousy and vindictiveness, we would be no less mistaken to read Mieko's very similar story as one of Journal of the Association of Teachersof Japanese 175 vengeance only. These difficulties may be avoided if the conflicts of the plot are transcribed at a higher level of abstraction and the novel read as a self-reflective tale about female creativity, the artist as woman. The justification for this reading is explicit in the essay by Mieko referred to, an essay that speaks with authority for Enchi as well just as Mieko, for shortly before her death Enchi referred to the essay as "a statement of my own opinion" and added, "in general my idea has not changed."24 Mieko's "An Account of the Shrine in the Fields" begins as a meditation on the remains of the shrine where, as Mieko explains, in ancient times unmarried daughters of emperors and imperial princes retired for a period of purification before leaving the capital to serve as high priestesses at the Grand Shrine in Ise. Fallen into disuse, she notes, today the fame of the Shrine in the Fields rests on its preservation in the Genji and the noh. But the essay quickly moves to its central concern, a reinterpretation of the character of the Rokujo lady and her significance to Murasaki's novel. Mieko confesses that her interest in the spot "derives not from its historical significance but from the intense sympathy [she feels] for the character of the Rokujo lady in The Tale of Genji" (p. 48). The Rokujo lady is famous among readers of the Genji as a personwhich male commentaification of jealousy and vindictiveness-traits tors, their view colored by Buddhist misogyny, agree drove Genji from her. Mieko explains: "As passion transforms the Rokujo lady into a living ghost, her spirit taking leave of her body again and again to attack and finally to kill Genji's wife Aoi, the commentators see in her tragic obsession a classic illustration of the evil karma attached to all womankind" (p. 51). Mieko's essay argues against this standard interpretation and makes three major points: that the Rokujo lady's influence on Genji and events in the novel has been greatly underrated; that the key to her character is a strong will, "a spirit of such lively intensity that she was incapable of surrendering it fully to any man" (p. 50); and that she is a ryo no onna, "one who chafes at her inability to sublimate her strong ego in deference to any man, but who can carry out her will only by forcing it upon others-and that indirectly, through the possessive capacity of her spirit" (p. 50). Given the rigidity of her social sphere, her will could only find outlet through spirit possession. The reader of Masks finds in these three points an accurate description of Mieko herself, a mirror image which Mieko cannot see until her insight at the end of the novel. In Mieko's essay, the foil to the Rokujo lady's aggrieved spirit is the Akashi lady, who rivals Rokujo in her pride of spirit and artistic 176 Volume 24, Number 2 accomplishments. But unlike the latter, Mieko writes, "the Akashi lady is endowed with a sufficiently keen intellect and enough common sense to avoid squandering her mental energy in spirit possession, turning instead to literary creation as the ideal means of exercizing her powers. We find her in the chapter entitled 'The First Warbler' writing 'something like a novel'-a sign of the literary gifts which she shares with the Rokujo lady" (p. 55). That Mieko is unable to apply this insight to herself shows her blindness. The crucial point in "An Account of the Shrine in the Fields," however, is less the self-portrait of Mieko than the portrait the essay provides of the Genji's author Murasaki Shikibu, which indicates that Mieko's essay-and by extension Enchi's novel-is less concerned with the traits of jealousy and vindictiveness than with creativity. The terms "shamaness" (in Enchi's special sense) and "artist" fuse in a single term, artist-shamaness, that fits both Rokujo and Murasaki. First, the Rokujo lady is herself an artist with "superb gifts as a writer, poet, and calligrapher" (p. 49), but her will finds no outlet in her art because the latter never transcends the lyrical. The examples the text of the Genji provides are the poetic farewells she exchanges with Genji, a form of verse which, however fine the calligraphy, does not transcend personal emotions. Second, Murasaki Shikibu is herself a type of "shamaness." As Mieko notes, Murasaki may have taken a modern skeptical view of the shamaness's powers, perceiving that "what is taken for seizure by a malign spirit might in fact be the working of the victim's own conscience" (pp. 56-57).25 Yet, I would argue, she writes so persuasively about the phenomenon that it causes a willing suspension of disbelief and opens readers, regardless of their skepticism about the supernatural, to the transformative power of the text. Murasaki is not forced to resort to crude forms of spirit possession to find an outlet for her will, a medium through which she can act on others. Her writing is the medium, her novel the body through which she confronts social reality, drawing the social into her text and giving it that critical form which has allowed its unsurpassed longevity. Murasaki's writing provides an example which enables the writing of Enchi, and Enchi in turn helps her audience to understand the relationship between the achievements of the classical past and the difficulties of the present, between women's literary tradition and women's contemporary writing. While Masks has a great deal to say about women's literary tradition, I would like to supplement it by examining a story of the supernatural which Enchi published the same year that Masks first appeared and which provides a satirical light on the male of Journal the Association Teachers Japanese of of 177 tradition and women's relation to it. Like Masks, it too is concerned with women's relation to the hidden energy of the supernatural. The story, called "A Bond for Two Lifetimes-Gleanings" (Nise no en-shui), is for many readers a powerful expression of mono no aware, a feeling intensely present at the end of Masks as well, for in both stories the woman's sexuality finds expression through an encounter with the supernatural that ultimately intensifies our sense of "the pathos of things." But just as "An Account of the Shrine in the Fields" allows Masks to be read in terms of female creativity, so Masks in turn reveals a dimension of "A Bond for Two Lifetimes" concerned with the female writer's relationship to male literary tradition, with authorship, and with the authority of origination. Formally, the story's striking features are its intertextuality and its use of a frame. The central tale is Ueda Akinari's eighteenth-century story, "The Destiny That Spanned Two Lifetimes" (Nise no en). It is framed by the first person account of a woman acting as amanuensis for a scholar of classical Japanese who is translating Akinari's ghost tales-from wabun, an elegant variation of the "Chinese-Japanese mixed style" (wakan konkobun) of the Edo period, into the contemporary language. The anonymous female narrator had once been the professor's student, and he had tried unsuccessfully to take sexual advantage of their relationship. Now, as attendant women take over his primary functions, he is reduced to a parody of his earlier domination. He entrusts his urination to a nurse, who hooks him up to a tube through which he dribbles out his urine, and he entrusts his pen, the displaced penis, to the narrator. The link between sexuality and writing is explicit in the description of Akinari in his old age, when "his tone half ridiculed and half feared those still smoldering, seemingly inextinguishable inner fires of sexual desire which were as strong as his creative impulses."26 The story of Josuke, the story within the frame story, is Enchi's modern Japanese translation of Akinari's "The Destiny That Spanned Two Lifetimes," from the posthumous collection Tales of Spring Rain (Harusame monogatari, 1798-1802?).27 Josuke is a priest who, unable to free himself from desire, fails to enter nirvana and returns to life to complete his karma by marrying. When the landowner in the story disinters Josuke after hearing the chime of his prayer bell on a rainy night, inside the coffin he finds "a peculiar object which now and then rang a bell it held in its hand ... a form which might have been a human being, and then again might not. Its appearance was parched and hard, shrivelled up like a dried-up salmon, and bony. The hair had grown long and hung down to the knees."28 But as Josuke revives under solicitous care, he begins to demonstrate not holiness but the full range 178 Volume 24, Number 2 of carnal appetite, from the eating of meat to the consummation of sexual desire, causing a general loss of faith among the villagers and giving rise to speculation that he had been reborn to fulfill a bond of love which he had incurred in his previous life. In the original eighteenthcentury context, Akinari's story is a satire on popular belief in miraculous holy men,29 which makes its point through the humorous image of the aged holy man unable to eliminate desire and attain nirvana. The satirical point is contained in the name J6suke ( .Wi ), which is equivalent to calling him "Joe Trance." The story also includes a clear element of social protest in the episode of the mayor's wife, who as a result of the loss of faith occasioned by the spectacle of Josuke's carnal appetite, derides the hollowness of religious consolation for the present life's poverty, heavy taxes, and brutal toil.30 Enchi's frame story alters Akinari's social satire to a satire of the patriarchal literary tradition, and it assimilates the sexual imagery of Akinari's story to the thematics of creativity. The image of Josuke beating his gong in the coffin parodies the male writer's relation to tradition by suggesting an obsessively repetitious tie to the past. Neither the Professor nor Josuke originates anything to add to the tradition; and even Akinari, whom the text compares to the professor on two occasions, bases his story on a twelfth century work whose ultimate source is the anonymous folk. "A Bond for Two Lifetimes" thus suggests the patriarchal tradition to be sterile, repetitious, non-originative, and obsessively concerned with dominance, of which male sexuality is one expression. Women in this world, as in the feudal world of Togano Masatsugu, have only three possible roles: mistress (the role the narrator has earlier refused), mother (the role of the nurse), and maid (the narrator's role of amanuensis). The one positive role imagined is that of a satisfactory marriage, and the narrator's marriage, at least as she remembers it years later, seems to have been that; but this idyllic possibility is aborted by patriarchal violence-the war in which her husband dies. The husband's attitude toward death highlights the underlying contrast between two types of energy, a male death energy and a female creative energy. As a soldier, the husband has separated love for his wife from his duty to "die alone" in the service of his country. In spite of the narrator's admiration for him, she wonders whether it is possible that even to the moment of his death "he really [did] not see any contradiction between loving a woman and dying.. ."31 "A Bond for Two Lifetimes" thus provides a commentary on the male tradition and women's relation to it that makes it a satisfying complement to the examination of women's literary tradition in Masks, and helps the Journal of the Association of Teachersof Japanese 179 reader to comprehend the range of uses which Enchi has found for the traditional supernatural story.32 The common element that characterizes Enchi's concern with the supernatural and the genre of the supernatural tale, I believe, is a concern with the energy latent in traditional distorted images of women and male-female relationships. Yoko McClain provides an interesting complement to this social view, for she emphasizes a metaphysical dimension of Enchi's thinking. Among several characteristics of Enchi's eroticism, McClain demonstrates Enchi's erudition, which pulls the reader naturally into the world of classical literature; her fantasybased, non-realistic treatment of sex, deriving in part from her early love of kabuki; and her interest "in the sexual impulse more than in the act itself."33 McClain believes Enchi attributed "the mystery of the human sexual impulse" to a larger power, and she cites Enchi on the nature of this power: "[woman] is probably moved by something other than herself ... This something is the source of life that is rooted deeply in the earth and gives birth to everything on earth, and makes it live."34 From this perspective, this "something" may be understood as the common source of supernatural and sexual energy. McClain sees this phase of Enchi's thinking as metaphysical, and compares her to Tanizaki, noting his influence on Enchi and citing Enchi's comment that Tanizaki had "reached an almost religious stage in pursuing the beauty of women."35 Tanizaki, however, is a male, as are the other writers whose treatment of the supernatural has been the object of scholarly interest.36 To add a woman writer like Enchi to the discussion produces a new configuration, an example of that doubling which feminist critics find characteristic of women's vision, reflecting the duality that women live as members of both the general culture and women's subculture.37 For writers like Tanizaki and Kawabata, the ghost, representing female beauty, is a compensation for the alienation produced by modern industrial culture and its devotion to routinized work. For the contemporary playwrights David Goodman has written about, the ghost expresses anxieties about death and spiritual continuity and the need to liberate spiritual energy by acknowledging the past.38 But for Enchi, the vengeful spirit or any other fearful image of woman is the nether pole of her idealization and aestheticization in more "positive" images; and both the dark and the light images result from the projection of male emotion onto the female, psychological manifestations of that "otherness" which is the core of the feminine in a patriarchal society. For Enchi, the vengeful spirit of the literary heritage is first of all what men have made of women, and the attraction of the supernatural 180 Volume24, Number2 story is in part the opportunity to reclaim suppressed energies from the past, liberating them for use in the present. NOTES 1. For modern Japanese literature, this argument is developed by Victoria Vernon, Daughters of the Moon: Wish, Will, and Social Constraint in Fiction by Modern Japanese Women (Berkeley: Institute for East Asian Studies, 1988). Her chapter on Tanizaki and Kawabata is particularly useful for thinking about Enchi. For background on Enchi's interest in the shamaness (miko) and reference to other works that embody this concern, see her interview with Takenishi Hiroko, "Mikoteki na mono," in Enchi zenshu (Shinchosha, 1977-78), prefatory pamphlets to vols. 5 and 15. Takenishi brings up Saimu and Yukon, two novellas, along with the longer works I have mentioned. Enchi's calling a spirit which possesses or manipulates another a shamaness, or miko, is unconventional. The shamanic aspect of noh in its power to free the troubled soul from its attachment to vindictiveness and jealousy is precisely opposite from Enchi's sense. The semantic blurring of shamanism and possession by strong feeling is entirely Enchi's own. In using the term here I follow the English translation of Onnamen. Hereafter quotation marks around "shamanism" denotes Enchi's usage. "Like Kafka's victim in 'The Penal Colony,' women have had to experience cultural scripts in their lives by suffering them in their bodies." Susan Gubar, "'The Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity," in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 299. Leon Zolbrod, Introduction to Ugetsu Monogatari: Tales of Moonlight and Rain, tr. and ed., Leon Zolbrod (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1977), p. 54. Donald Keene, Dawn to the West (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984), p. 379. I am summarizing the position of Tachikawa Kiyoshi's Kinsei kaii shosetsu kenkyu (Kasama Shoin, 1979). On Japanese ghosts and literature of the supernatural I have also consulted Stephen Addiss, ed., Japanese Ghosts and Demons: Art of the Supernatural (George Braziller and Spencer Museum of Art [University of Kansas], 1985); Akiyama Masayuki, "James and Nanboku: A Comparative Study of Supernatural Stories in the West and East," 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Journal the Association Teachers Japanese of of of 181 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. Comparative Literature Studies 22 (1985): 43-52; Ema Tsutomu, "Nihon y6kai henge shi," Ema chosakushu (Chiu K6ronsha, 1977), 6.367-81; and Takada Mamoru, Edo genso bungakushi (Heibonsha, 1987). This is Robert C. Elliott's argument in The Shape of Utopia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Brenda Jordan, "Yurei: Tales of Female Ghosts," in Addiss, pp. 25-33. Cited in Zolbrod, p. 50. Howard Kerr, ed., The Haunted Dusk: American Supernatural Fiction, 1820-1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), p. 2; S. L. Vernado, Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987), pp. 1-7. For the Japanese tradition, see note 7 above. While I would not argue direct influence, it is worth noting that Ibsen's Ghosts, concerned with marital infidelity and its consequences, bears a striking resemblance to Enchi's Masks. In Ibsen's play a wife's long suffering of her husband's philandering leads to the visitation of the father's sin upon the son-a protestant version of the karmic relations explored in Masks. Itagaki Naoko, "Enchi Fumiko," in Enchi Fumiko bungakushu, in Shinsen gendai Nihon bungaku zenshu (Chikuma Shobo, 1959), 17.69. Parenthetical numbers refer to Enchi Fumiko, Masks, tr. Juliet Winters Carpenter (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1983). Vernon, pp. 144-45, shows how class distinctions underlie two enduring stereotypes of Japanese literature: the respectable, dutiful housewife and the less respectable, passionate geisha, which originated with "Osan" and "Koharu" in Chikamatsu's The Love Suicides at Amijima. For details of the publication history of Masks, see Van C. Gessel, "The 'Medium' of Fiction: Fumiko Enchi as Narrator," World Literature Today (1988) p. 385, n.1. Gessel also sees a close relation between these two novels, arguing that with Namamiko monogatari (1965) they form a trilogy "echoing aspects of [Enchi's] lifelong attraction to The Tale of Genji." p. 380. Enchi might not accept my view of Tomo as passive and Mieko as active, for in the interview with Takenishi, Enchi notes that Tomo's uncontrollable outburst on her deathbed is "not totally unrelated to the spirit woman [ryo no onna]," and she relates "shamanism" to passivity (Enchi zenshu, vol. 15, prefatory pamphlet, p. 4). 182 Volume24, Number2 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1978), pp. 117, 121-22, 205. Carmen Blacker, The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1975), p. 31. Umehara Takeshi argues that the ghost repertoire in noh originated in the ritual appeasement or exorcism of angry ghosts such as the Fujiwara undertook during the Nara Period to appease the ghost of Prince Shotoku. See his Kakusareta jujika: Horyujiron (Shinchosha, 1974), pp. 508 ff. A comparison suggests itself with ancient Greek tragedy, which retains similar elements of "magic rituals, performed in a religious spirit." See Jacqueline de Romilly, Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 14. Here Enchi's notion follows standard scholarship. See Haruo Shirane, The Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of The Tale of Genji (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), p. 114. W. G. Aston, tr. and ed., Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697 (1896; Tokyo: Tuttle, 1972), p. 24. Cited in Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 14. The name of this mask is traditionally Fukai, "deep well," but Fukai onna also exists. See Saitoh Taro, "Nomen chokanzu," Kanze, July 1959, pp. 1-9, especially p. 9. Enchi Fumiko, Genji monogatari shiken (Shinchosha, 1985), p. 133. Mieko's view of Murasaki's skepticism is supported by Shirane (pp. 114-15), who cites Murasaki's poetry collection, the Murasaki Shikibu shu. Enchi Fumiko, "A Bond for Two Lifetimes-Gleanings," in Phyllis Birnbaum, ed. and tr., Rabbits, Crabs, Etc.: Stories by Japanese Women (University of Hawaii Press, 1982), p. 44. Tales of the Spring Rain was probably begun in 1798 and the Tenri Notebook manuscript completed by 1802, though Akinari continued to revise the work until his death in 1809. It was not published until a fragmentary edition appeared in 1907; the first complete edition was published in 1951. See Barry Jackman, Tales of The Spring Rain: Harusame Monogatari by Ueda Akinari (University of Tokyo Press, 1975), pp. xiii, xix; and Blake Morgan Journal of the Association of Teachersof Japanese 183 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. Young, Akinari Ueda (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1982), p. 129. "A Bond for Two Lifetimes," p. 31. Jackman, p. 69. "A Bond for Two Lifetimes," p. 41. "A Bond for Two Lifetimes," p. 46. The original makes a starker contrast: "honto ni ano hito wa shinu shunkan made onna o aisuru koto to shinu koto to o mujun nashi ni kanjite ita no kashira." "Nise no en-shii," Enchi Fumiko shu, Shinsen gendai Nihon vol. 17 (Chikuma Shobo, 1959), p. 351. bungaku zenshu, Gessel finds comparable qualities in Enchi's Nanamiko monogatari. He reads it as a self-reflective work which opposes true and false "shamanesses" to suggest a critique of a male-dominated literary genre, the I-novel (p. 384). Yoko McClain, "Eroticism and the Writings of Enchi Fumiko," Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 15:1 (April 1980), p. 44. McClain, p. 43. The brackets and ellipsis are McClain's. McClain, pp. 35, 43. See Mori Joji, "The Liberation of Japanese Ghosts," in Listening to Japan: A Japanese Anthology, ed. Jackson H. Bailey (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973), pp. 21-67; and David Goodman, Japanese Drama and Culture in the 1960s: The Return of the Gods (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1988). Gerda Lerner, "The Challenge of Women's History," The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 158, 170. Goodman, p. 13.