Fantasizing What Happens When the Goods Get Together: Female Homoeroticism as Literary Trope Julia C.

Bullock

In the 1960s a new generation of women writers exploded onto the Japanese literary scene, producing narratives that depicted autonomous expressions of female sexuality in graphic, sometimes fantastic, and frequently shocking ways. This was in startling contrast to then-dominant discourses of female sexuality that encouraged women to channel such impulses either into the service of male desires or, alternatively, into the birth and care of children by good wives and wise mothers.1 Authors like Kurahashi Yumiko, Kno Taeko, ba Minako, Kanai Mieko, and Takahashi Takako (among many others) thus opened the door to new conversations about what women want. Their efforts generated both controversy and praise, and some of them were even rewarded with the Japanese literary worlds official seal of approval, the Akutagawa prize.2

positions 14:3 doi 10.1215/10679847-2006-017 Copyright 2006 by Duke University Press

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This level of acclaim was remarkable given the atmosphere of chauvinism that characterized male critics assumptions of womens intellectual abilities at the time. Many of these writers were among the first generation of women to attend elite universities alongside men, an opportunity newly granted to women as part of the postwar constitutional revisions that guaranteed equal political and educational rights to both sexes.3 They struggled to carve out an intellectual space for themselves within a literary world that had heretofore ghettoized writing by women as jory bungaku (womens literature). This type of writing was considered inherently inferior to literature produced by male authors by virtue of its concern with the particularities of feminine experience.4 Such chauvinism, and the increasing willingness of women to challenge this type of attitude, must be understood against a landscape of shifting gender roles in postwar Japan. While womens roles changed greatly during the 1960s and 1970s, thanks in part to the new rights and opportunities mentioned above, women who ventured into public space (literally or literarily) still had to contend with normative discourses of their proper place in society. These discourses emphasized the importance of womens contributions as wives and mothers within a nuclear family structure that was supported by a strictly gendered division of labor. The urgency of maintaining these norms, or at least the perception of conformity to them, intensified with the rapid economic growth of the 1960s. As Japanese men attempted to shed the stigma of wartime defeat through self-reinvention as a nation of corporate warriors, they relied more and more on womens supportive roles in both the workplace and the home.5 Practically as well as ideologically, these emerging discourses of masculinity, which subordinated male desires to the project of national rebuilding, required a complementary model of femininity that subordinated feminine desires to home and family. Attempts by women writers during this period to construct new forms of feminine sexual subjectivity must therefore be read against the normative discourses of gender in which (and through which) they were produced. One striking example of this kind of literary experimentation with new modes of sexual subjectivity is a small but intriguing subset of stories, written by ostensibly heterosexual female authors, that depict the erotic desire of one woman for another. While these stories are undeniably queer in

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the sense of resistan[t] to regimes of the normal,6 it is difficult to interpret them as lesbian if one understands this term to denote an expression of sexual identity in a politicized and categorical sense. In this essay I examine a set of such short stories by Takahashi Takako, a writer who debuted in the late 1960s and rose to prominence on the literary scene in the 1970s. The function of female homoerotic themes in Takahashis literature, and indeed in the literature of most heterosexual Japanese women writers, has thus far largely gone untheorized in both Japanese- and English-language scholarship.7 Like her contemporaries mentioned above, Takahashi presents herself as exclusively heterosexual (judging from the biographical and autobiographical information available on her life), and yet a number of her stories depict female homoeroticism in ways that offer an intriguing commentary on the structure of sexualities and gender roles available to women in postwar Japan.8
Background

Before entering into discussion of Takahashis literature, I would like to contextualize this discussion by offering a brief survey of the field of discourse that affected literary expression of same-sex sexual desire in postwar Japan. As a number of excellent recent studies have shown, in premodern Japan (before 1868) same-sex sexual contact was not stigmatized as it was in the West, nor was there any operative notion that the sex of ones partner defined ones identity in any meaningful way. Furthermore, the introduction of Western sexological discourse in the early twentieth century did not supplant so much as supplement this attitude of tolerance with an array of medicalized discourses useful in narrating a range of behaviors newly discovered to be perverse (hentai).9 The 1920s in particular experienced a boom in publications devoted to analyzing sexual perversion in a highly commercialized and prurient fashion. Even as such publications strove to maintain a veneer of scientific objectivity, they appealed to mass audiences who eagerly wrote in to narrate their own perverse experiences and desires.10 The discursive loquacity surrounding ostensibly abnormal forms of sexuality, including (primarily male but also female) homosexuality, indicates the extent to which such

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medicalized discourses were imported and popularized without supplanting such behaviors or rendering them unacceptable. This created situations whereby, for example, passionate friendships between young girls in the early decades of the twentieth century were tacitly accepted, even as they were considered to be aberrant. Such relationships were assumed (often wrongly) to be more spiritual than sexual in motivation, and thus to some extent [were even] encouraged by parents to steer their daughters away from pre-marital heterosexual relations.11 After a period of suppression during the 1930s and early 1940s, as mobilization for war gradually overtook all other goals, these perverse publications once again flourished in the immediate postwar atmosphere of relative press freedom. Like their prewar predecessors, such periodicals continued to present a polymorphously perverse range of sexualities in a format that featured first-person testimonials from readers alongside expert commentary. However, as Mark McLelland notes, such discourse in the 1950s tended to deemphasize sexological diagnoses in favor of a nonjudgmental, even celebratory, narration of the pleasures of queer desires.12 While such publications gradually became more specialized in the 1960s, so that by the 1970s the field had become divided into niche markets devoted to particular types of sexual discourse, what is important for our purposes is to note the range of available fantasy outlets through which consumers could try on alternative sexualities. This occurred even across gender lines, as is evident from the wildly popular lesbian pornography marketed to male audiences and its counterpart in the boy love comics depicting homoerotic relationships between beautiful young boys, which were aimed primarily at a readership of women and girls.13 As noted above, this boom in mass media discourses of perverse sexuality was paralleled in the postwar period by the ascent of a large cohort of women writers of so-called pure (as opposed to popular) literature ( junbungaku) this would include Takahashi who were equally interested in exploring unconventional expressions of feminine sexuality. Like many readers (and quite possibly writers) of more lowbrow articulations of perverse desire, these authors can be seen as trying on alternative versions of sexual expression. Whether this experimentation was motivated by playful impulses, genuine personal desires, or something in between, for the pur-

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pose of this essay these narratives are interesting because of the queering effect that they have on the field of normative sexualities and gender roles that they depict. In one of the many definitions of queer that she provides in her book Tendencies, Eve Sedgwick describes this term as referring to the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyones gender, of anyones sexuality arent made (or cant be made) to signify monolithically in other words, any way of being in the world (or imagining such being) that differs from what is considered normative.14 In Japan of the 1970s, the decade in which all of the texts under consideration in this essay were written, the norm still would have been a nuclear family headed by a father who worked outside the home and a mother whose primary responsibility was to the domestic sphere, particularly the bearing and raising of children. This model of normalcy was also implicitly heteronormative, meaning that all parties were assumed and expected to harbor strictly heterosexual desires. These expectations were then enforced by channeling feminine sexuality, in particular, into the fulfillment of marital and reproductive obligations. Such ideologies of appropriate gender roles and sexualities of course obscure the large number of people who fail to conform to those standards, and yet these imaginary relationships to reality continued to hold great sway over how ordinary Japanese citizens understood their own lives and behaviors.15 Interestingly, Takahashi herself did not conform to this ideal of genderappropriate behavior, and her own unconventional background no doubt gave her a personal stake in the alternate visions of femininity that she depicted in her texts. Born in 1932 into a well-to-do household, she was one of the first generation of young women to take advantage of the postwar educational reforms that opened up elite universities like Kyoto University, her alma mater, to women. On graduation she married another writer, Takahashi Kazumi, and frequently worked to support them both so her husband could concentrate on his writing. And most unusual in an era when womanhood was still conflated with motherhood in the societal imaginary, she chose not to have children, preferring an independent lifestyle that left her free to pursue her own intellectual interests. Her literature frequently depicts similarly independent women who are unfettered by the

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bonds of the traditional nuclear family. When she does depict family life, as we will see in Kysei kkan, the first story under discussion here, she does so from an emphatically queer perspective. In fact the stories to be discussed in this essay Shiroi hikari (1973), Kysei kkan (1973), and Kesshtai (1976) demonstrate a remarkable regularity in the way they queer normative conceptions of sexuality and gender roles. All of these stories deal with love triangles involving two women and one man. While the women are rivals for the affection of the male partner, they simultaneously experience a fascination or attraction for one another, which is expressible only through an intimacy that is mediated by the male lover.16 Furthermore, in each case the two women are depicted as possessing opposite personality types or performing complementary roles: wife/mother versus lover, intellectual equal versus sexual object. Therefore it becomes possible to read the feminine dyad as representing two halves of the same person, desiring fusion with one another yet inevitably fractured through their participation in a heterosexual economy that divides women into types according to their usefulness to the family system. On the other hand, the intimacy between the two women, and the propensity of their perspectives to merge at crucial points in the narrative, effectively (if temporarily) subverts the notion of clear role divisions. So although the triangular relationships depicted in these stories are firmly grounded in a heterosexual economy of binary gender roles, they nevertheless are articulated in such a way as to blur the boundaries between heterosexuality, homoeroticism, and (if we take both female characters to represent the same person) autoeroticism.
Kyosei kukan (Symbiotic Space)

In Kysei kkan (1973) this divided self is expressed through two sisters who are simultaneously opposite personality types, rivals for the same man, and intimately linked to one another through a mysterious psychic connection. Whereas Shko, the protagonist, is a housewife who is apparently pregnant with her first child, her older sister, Fujiyo, has remained single and therefore outside the structure of marriage and motherhood. The two sisters thus represent opposite life paths for women, and though Shko seems con-

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vinced that Fujiyo is jealous of her status as a properly married woman, it seems just as likely throughout the text that the jealousy works both ways, with Shko somewhat resentful of her sisters relative freedom. The story begins with Shko receiving a letter from her older sister to the effect that she will be paying a sudden visit the next day. Shko is dubious about her sisters motives because, since her marriage to her husband, Nobuo, the two have been estranged. It turns out that both women had initially been interested in Nobuo, but after he chose Shko over Fujiyo, the formerly close relationship between the sisters grew awkward, causing Fujiyo to leave home. However, all of this information is recollected and filtered through the protagonist Shkos perspective, and to the very end of the story it remains unclear what (if anything) Fujiyo thinks about their present or former relationship. There is ample indication that Shko may not be a reliable narrator; at times she seems paranoid and even unstable, particularly when it comes to her perception of her sisters intentions. We learn through a series of flashbacks that the sisters have always shared an uncannily close bond bordering on extrasensory perception. Shko frequently describes them as sharing the same soul or as two halves of the same person. Significantly, rather than perceiving this as a problem as she does now, during their youth growing up in the same household this depth of understanding seems to have been a source of pleasure and solace at least from the perspective of the main character. It is only when Nobuo appears and chooses one over the other that this symbiotic relationship becomes untenable. Thus, although Shkos first reaction when she hears about Fujiyos planned visit is to feel suspicious and concerned that Fujiyo may still have a romantic interest in her husband, at the same time she seems to want to believe in the intimate bond she thinks she still shares with her sister. But a deeper cause of Shkos ambivalence toward her sister is highlighted during a dramatic scene in which, as she and her husband have sex in their own room, she imagines that the psychic boundary between herself and her sister in the next room blurs, giving her the illusion that she and Fujiyo have joint possession of Nobuo. Shko describes the feeling this gives her as horrifying, but significantly, this seems due less to a fear of having her husband stolen or appropriated from her than to the possibility that Fujiyo may actually have won the contest precisely because she was not chosen. She

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imagines Fujiyo saying to her, as their psyches merge, Its much better to be alone. Being alone like this, I can still be with Nobuo. You are my substitute body, but I am the real thing. You may be corrupted, but I can feel all this yet still remain a maiden. Im much happier than you are.17 This one moment seems to epitomize the real source of Shkos anxiety; her frequent references to her suspected pregnancy, rather than indicating joy or eager anticipation of motherhood, seem in fact to reveal dread or distaste for the incipient child. At one point she remarks that whereas Nobuo was simply happy about the pregnancy, she didnt feel that way at all, and reflects that the notion of morning sickness seems perfectly natural merely knowing that a living thing was growing inside her was reason enough to want to vomit.18 While she clearly feels a very real sense of rivalry with her sister, at the same time she seems to need the illusion that they are still connected as they used to be, because only in this way can part of her remain free of the patriarchal order. At the very end of the story, when Nobuo suggests that Fujiyo may not share Shkos sense of psychic connection, the notion throws Shko completely off balance; whereas she had all along imagined herself and Fujiyo as complementary identities occupying each side of a set of scales, Nobuos suggestion that this could be all in her own imagination gives her a mental image of her side of the scales crashing down, as if weighted with some terrible burden.19 The notion of Fujiyo as a free and independent part of herself thus seems to have made Shkos confinement within the system of marriage and motherhood bearable. Though she has consoled herself with the thought that Fujiyo was jealous of her good fortune in snagging the man they both wanted, this fiction is simultaneously necessary to maintain the sense of connectedness with her sister. From Shkos perspective, the husband thus serves as a necessary (and perhaps fictive) link to her sister; only by convincing herself that they think the same thoughts and want the same things can she maintain the illusion of a second self that is free to live the life now forbidden to her by virtue of her incorporation within the heterosexual economy.

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Shiroi hikari (White Light)

Shiroi hikari (1973) is a short story composed of three separate but loosely related vignettes. I am primarily concerned here with a sequence comprising roughly the last eight pages of the section entitled A Day in the Flower Garden, in which the second woman can be understood as a younger version of the protagonist (Watashi). The story begins with Watashi wandering around a nearly deserted flower garden on a very hot day in midsummer. In the course of her walk she recalls stories of a sexual nature told to her by her boyfriend, and the plants she sees make her think of similar stories she would like to tell him about both actual experiences and fanciful thoughts she has while there. In this first section, her observations of the plants consistently suggest metaphors for human relationships, and particularly heterosexual intercourse, which reminds her frequently of the boyfriend, and so she decides to pay him a visit. The path she travels to his apartment takes her from the somewhat surreal and isolated realm of the flower garden to the bustling, urban reality of the mundane world. She notes the crowds of young women there and reflects on the gap in age and beauty that separates her from them; though she is only around thirty-five she considers herself to look ten years older than that and thinks about how she might have compared in appearance with these girls when she was their age. Her eyes fixate on one particular young girl, and the feeling of nostalgia she experiences when looking at the girl (along with numerous other clues) suggests that this represents a younger version of herself.20 She takes the girl with her to visit her boyfriend, announcing to him that she has brought him a present. The three sit down for a drink and conversation, and the stories with which Watashi and her boyfriend regale each other sound very much like verbal foreplay. The boyfriends story concerns an island called Waku-waku-jima, where beautiful young girls literally grow on trees.21 Their bodies begin to emerge slowly in early spring, fresh and young, from the fruit of a particular sort of plant, and by the middle of May they are fully grown. Yet just at the peak of their maturity, they fall from the tree and die instantly. Thus (unlike Watashi) they never age or lose their youthful beauty, and the island is resupplied every spring with crops of fresh young girls.

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While the young girl remains silent throughout, she is visibly stimulated by the stories as well, and Watashi describes the effect on herself as a kind of intoxication that far exceeds that of the alcoholic beverage she has consumed. Finally the boyfriend is ready to begin, but Watashi insists that he take the girl instead of her, thinking that she has become too old and worn-out to offer herself sexually to the man. Yet as her boyfriend has sex with the young girl in the next room, Watashi is somehow able to experience pleasure from the act as well through an apparent psychic link with the couple: The body that I experienced as a giant cell felt as though it were merging with the outside world across the thin membrane separating inside from outside. Then I felt the pleasure of scattering endlessly into the beyond. The thing that was me floated out into that which wasnt originally me, and I felt myself expanding as far as I could see. . . . In the next room, I heard the young girl cry waku waku. Even though the sound came from the room next door, as I heard it, it felt just as though it came from within me, and I could hear pleasure reverberate faintly inside my body.22 There are many ways to read the intersections of sexuality and power depicted in this story. The three-way relationship may be seen as working to the boyfriends advantage, giving him the opportunity to enjoy the intellectual stimulation that conversation with Watashi provides while simultaneously allowing him to gratify himself sexually with an attractive and nubile (and revealingly silent) young girl. Thus it is possible to read this story as an indictment of a heterosexual economy that is dominated by masculine erotic demands, which literally fragment women into body and soul. Yet Watashi is apparently complicit with this arrangement, which complicates any attempt to interpret the narrative as a straightforward critique of male-dominated regimes of sexuality; even though such sentiments are clearly expressed, this is not the whole story. We could consider the possibility that she is merely acceding to his wishes were it not the case that she suggests the scenario in the first place and takes the initiative to recruit the girl and bring her to the mans apartment. Furthermore, she clearly benefits from the arrangement as well in fact, her pleasure is all that is recorded

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in the story, and through the girl she is able to recapture the sensation of lost youth, in effect by enjoying the pleasures of sex without the messy complications of actual physical contact. It is also unclear whether the source of her pleasure comes from enjoying the boyfriends caresses through identifying herself with the girls subject position or from enjoying the girls body as a sexual object vicariously through the boyfriend as medium. In other words, the scene can be interpreted as simultaneously heterosexual and homosexual, or even autoerotic. We could also read this encounter as an example of vampirism, because she (with the cooperation of the boyfriend) uses the girl as a vessel for her (their) own gratification; the girl is treated as a passive and disposable object (a mechanical doll23). She may in fact be disposed of in the end, since her exclamation of waku waku links her to the fabled young girls who grow on trees and die at the peak of their maturity. Yet when we consider the doppelgnger effect at work in this story that the disposable girl in this story can also be interpreted as Watashis own youthful self the situation becomes even murkier. Is this a sacrifice made on the boyfriends behalf? Or on her own? Is this a gift given purely out of selfless motives? Or self-interested ones? There is no way to tell based on the information given in the story. It is even possible that the entire structure of this three-way relationship has been devised by Watashi to service her own needs and that the boyfriend might actually prefer to get his intellectual and physical stimulation from the same woman. But for whatever reason, the system does not work that way. In other words, while it is possible to read both Watashi and the young girl as victims of a heterosexual economy that uses women for their sexuality and then discards them after they lose their appeal, this is not necessarily the only way to read it. Rather, Shiroi hikari portrays a complex web of power relationships in which subject and object are indeterminate and constantly shifting.
Kesshotai (Crystal)

The short story Kesshtai (1976) offers perhaps the clearest articulation of the emotional structure of such triangular relationships. The story revolves around the convoluted relationship between the protagonist, Shizuko, her

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friend Tamako, and Tamakos husband, Takao, with whom Shizuko is openly having an affair. When the story begins Tamako has already left her husband, but the narrative consists mostly of flashbacks to the time when the couple was still together and Shizuko would often come to their house to cavort with Takao, with the apparent consent (and often in full view) of his wife. Shizuko considers this arrangement to suit her needs perfectly, comparing it to a crystal in which all parts must be arranged in perfect order (i.e., husband, wife, and mistress each performing their roles) for the whole structure to be sustainable. At the center of this crystal lies a chasm of silence that must be maintained in order to prevent it from collapse she imagines that the moment any of them really begins to consider the untenable nature of their relationship, that person would risk falling headlong into the endless pit at the center of the triangle. In other words, this is no typical story of infidelity in which the husband and his lover sneak off to consummate their passions in secret while the wife bitterly waits at home, gnashing her teeth or crying her eyes out. Japanese tradition holds that a good wife never shows jealousy, even when faced with evidence of her husbands sexual affairs, and in an almost classic (or parodic?) performance of the good wife, Tamako manages for years to remain impassive about the situation and even chat airily with her husbands mistress over tea. Yet her patience evidently reaches its limits and she eventually decides to leave, calmly asking Shizuko (who is sprawled naked on the bed with Tamakos husband at the time) to take care of him before walking quietly out the door with her belongings. Thus there is no dramatic breakup scene featuring the hurling of recriminations or throwing of objects; the triangular relationship simply comes to an end when one party (not surprisingly, the wife) decides that it is no longer sustainable. But rather than rejoice that she now has Takao all to herself, Shizuko repeatedly laments throughout the story that Tamakos departure has taken all the fun out of the affair. With the wife gone, Shizuko is now called on to perform wifely duties such as shopping and entertaining guests, and she decides that while she feels herself perfectly comfortable in the role of interloper/mistress, the job of wife does not suit her at all. She tries repeatedly to convince Tamako to return so that things will go back to the way they

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were, but the soon-to-be ex-wife politely declines, and by the end of the story, Shizuko has decided that she has no option left but to end the now unsatisfying affair. The final scene has Shizuko paying a visit to Tamako to inform her of her decision, yet rather than revealing sadness or nostalgia over the loss of the relationship with the husband, the scene reads as nothing so much as a breakup with the wife. At the very end of the story Shizuko asks for permission to look through Tamakos wardrobe before leaving, and as she lovingly strokes each outfit she remembers their outings together and what she and Tamako each wore. Takao has apparently been completely forgotten until she reaches the last piece, a sundress that Shizuko remembers not from their shared time together, but from a photograph she saw of the couple together before Shizuko knew them. In her mind she imagines herself, at first literally out of the picture, striding gradually into the frame, wielding a parasol like a weapon with which to destroy the couples happiness. Who holds the power in this three-way affair? The answer is far from simple. Shizuko insists over and over again that Takao has arranged the whole thing according to his own needs, training Tamako to be the image of the perfect wife who fulfills all his everyday requirements and herself as the bad girl (mistress) who spurs his fantasies through her erotic stories and games, stimulating him both physically and intellectually. Yet the women are hardly powerless in this arrangement, and Shizuko at least seems to relish her role as temptress and center of attention by wearing what she thinks Takao will like to see her wear and crafting fantasy scenarios that she thinks will titillate him. By contrast, though Tamako is clearly concealing her feelings so as not to appear hurt by the openly displayed affair, she shows in the end that she has the most power of all her presence is in fact crucial to keep the structure of the crystal intact, and when she leaves, it really does fall apart. Another crucial ambiguity of the text is the exact nature of the relationship between the two women, for they are far more than merely rivals for the affection of the same man. Whereas Shizuko emphasizes that she and Takao seem always on the same wavelength, sharing a keen understanding of each others characters and thoughts, Tamako is a complete mystery to her, and at times a far greater source of interest and absorption than

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her lover. Shizuko seems to take pleasure in the notion of sharing Takao with his wife because of the opportunity of intimacy with Tamako that this relationship affords her erotic games with the husband revealingly include listening to him recount every detail of his wifes body, and likewise she seems to enjoy the fact that he describes her body in equal detail to Tamako.24 The two women seem opposite in every way whereas Tamako is small in stature, soft-spoken, and even-tempered, Shizuko is described as tall, blunt, and aggressive. This bipolar schematic again seems to represent the two as functionally complementary types within the heterosexual economy the good woman whose sexuality has been safely contained within the structure of the family versus the bad woman whose sexuality has been harnessed to serve the fantasies and desires of men. In separate conversations between the two women when Takao is not present, one at the beginning of the story and one at the end, Shizuko insists on discussing her relationship with Tamakos husband, yet this does not seem motivated by a crude desire to rub her rivals nose in the unpleasantness of the situation. Rather Shizuko seems genuinely frustrated by what she sees as Tamakos expressionless and unfathomable countenance and curious to probe what lies beneath the veil of composure.25 She appears to see Tamako as a kind of inscrutable other who alone can provide the key to understanding herself. The questions she asks Why is it that when Im lying in your bed I feel like Im turning into you?26 I would never have thought of breaking up with him if you two were still together; why am I like that?27 seem to posit Tamako as a mirror of her own troubled soul. By provoking a reaction in her interlocutor, she attempts to get to the bottom of her own murky motivations, as if Tamako represents a side of herself that has been pared away or suppressed in order to perform the role designated for her within this particular relationship structure. As mentioned above, Shizuko intimates that the two womens opposite natures are constructed through the complementary roles of wife/mistress that Takao would have them play. Thus Tamakos sudden departure puts Shizuko out of a job or rather into the default position of wife, since as Shizuko notes, you cant be a mistress if the man has no wife.28 Though she has not been trained for wifely duty, she finds herself slipping into Tama-

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kos role and even appropriating (or being appropriated by) her identity lying in the bed that used to belong to the wife, Shizuko even imagines the dimensions of her body shrinking to conform to Tamakos short stature. 29 In other words, the subject positions in this narrative, and by extension the power dynamics as well, are explicitly fluid and mutable. Furthermore, an intriguing gender-switching scene in the beginning of the story reveals that this shifting of subject position can even take place across the sexual divide. Waking up in Takaos apartment, Tamako having already moved out, Shizuko looks out the window to find it raining heavily and fears that going out into the rain in last nights kimono would ruin the fabric. She hits upon the solution of borrowing Takaos clothes, and after donning his sweater and pants, she observes her transformation in the mirror: Shizuko thought about the power of a costume. She stood there, feeling it on her skin. Takaos character was infusing into her body by way of the sweater and pants. When she squinted, it really looked as though Takao were standing there. Leaving the apartment, she revels in the freedom that this new gender identity gives her: The self that had worried about ruining her best kimono had completely disappeared, and the self that had become like a man walked fast through the rain. It was as if she had slipped off the woman inside her along with that pink kimono and left it in Takaos room. . . . It was odd that even though she had only borrowed Takaos shell, she wound up putting on the contents too.30 This incident begins as a playful yet practically motivated appropriation of the outer trappings (the costume) of masculinity. In true ladylike fashion, Shizuko simply does not want to ruin her good kimono, and Takaos clothing offers itself as a temporary expedient. Yet when she puts the clothing on, the effect is more than she had bargained for the change of costume alters the appearance of features that should be intrinsic markers of identity, as her hairstyle and build now begin to suggest themselves as masculine, and even her face looks like it could belong to someone else. Furthermore, the change of costume has a curious effect on her behavior as well. No longer restrained by the feminine injunction not to soil her outfit (or even to wear clothing that is so delicate that it needs special care), she strides boldly through the rain like a man. Where does the shell end and the contents begin? This scene illustrates beautifully Judith Butlers

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notion that drag fully subverts the distinction between inner and outer psychic space and effectively mocks both the expressive model of gender and the notion of a true gender identity.31 If clothing can be seen as one of the disciplinary mechanisms used to produce the docile bodies necessary to modern regimes of authority and power, as Michel Foucault suggests in his study Discipline and Punish, then we can see Shizuko in this scene as creating the opportunity to express a differently constructed version of self than that of the role of mistress that had been sculpted for her. This is dramatically underscored by a fantasy she has of Takao putting on her feminine self (the kimono she left behind), allowing the lovers to touch each other from an oppositely gendered subject position. She touches him from a masculine subject position by touching the self that has become Takao, and Takao touches her from a feminine subject position by touching himself, who has become Shizuko.32 Again, this scene operates as an expression of a desire that is simultaneously hetero- and autoerotic, blurring the boundaries not only of the categories of sexuality but also of the very nature of gendered subjectivity. The contingency of these gendered subjectivities is further underscored in the scene directly following this, when Shizuko returns home excited to call Takao in order to talk to him about this fantasy. Yet when she picks up the phone she inexplicably calls Tamako instead, again raising the question of which member of this couple is her real object of desire. Significantly, she first takes off her masculine costume and changes into appropriately feminine attire, emphasizing this point by specifying that the one calling Tamako was the Shizuko who had reclaimed her female self.33 It is at this point in the story that we discover that the experience of feeling transformed into Takao has reminded her of another transformation she has experienced recently the sense of becoming Tamako when she sleeps in her bed, right down to the change in stature mentioned above. For whatever reason, Shizuko needs to talk to Tamako about the experience in order to understand it herself. The relationship between the two women is thus unavoidably mediated by their relationship with Takao and the crystalline structure that binds the three together. In order to talk to Tamako, Shizuko has to revert to her proper role as mistress, because the triangular schematic of man, wife, and

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mistress has from the start formed the ground on which their association is predicated. We could perhaps read this as an allegory of the way bonds between women are irrevocably mediated by the exigencies of the heterosexual economy. It is impossible on some level for women to connect with one another independently of the interference of their relationships with men, even though this heterosexual structure can simultaneously be seen as leaky in the sense that it fails to contain the totality of human desires or ways of relating to one another.
Conclusion

If the relationships depicted in these stories are inevitably structured according to a heterosexual matrix, then in what sense can we consider these stories to be queer? We have established that through blurring the consciousnesses of her characters, Takahashi allows her protagonists to effectively try on alternate sexualities, both within and across gender boundaries. In Kysei kkan, the unmarried sister is thus able to experience sexual gratification without actually becoming soiled through physical contact, whereas the married sister gets a brief taste of femininity unfettered by the demands of motherhood or the family system. In Shiroi hikari, the older woman similarly experiences sexual pleasure without the messy complications of actual sex, regaining a reminder of her own youthful beauty in the process. And in Kesshtai, the crystalline structure of this triangular relationship affords the protagonist, Shizuko, all the fun of heterosexual play minus the domestic responsibilities inherent in the marital contract. And yet this queering of ostensibly heterosexual relationship structures is evidently a temporary and contingent sort of disruption. While momentarily subverting these norms, such fantasies pose no real threat to the heteronormatively structured family system. Rather the very process of queering in this sense requires that such norms be retained on some level, given that the pleasure of perversion itself is produced through the tension generated between role compliance and role subversion. Recall the cross-dressing episode in Kesshtai, in which Shizuko dons her male lovers clothing as a means of appropriating his masculine role and then fantasizes about having a sexual encounter with him in this cos-

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tume. Revealingly, her fantasy requires that he also switch gender by dressing in her own discarded femininity, thus preserving the style of heteronormativity while (temporarily) altering its substance. Adopting her lovers masculine subject position thereby allows her to desire him as a man desiring a woman. Yet curiously, this does not translate into a similar experience with Tamako; even as she clearly desires her, too, while dressed in the trappings of masculinity (which is evident by her urge to call the wife rather than the husband), she seems obligated to reclaim her feminine persona before making contact with the other woman. It would seem that the roles the women must play vis--vis each other (mistress versus wife), roles that require the mediation of the man who structures them, override the obvious homoerotic attraction at work in this scene. In fact, as we have seen, the matrix of heteronormativity that structures this triangular relationship is in fact crucial to its survival; when Tamako opts out, the crystalline structure itself collapses. These stories further underscore the paucity of any model of sexual subjectivity predicated on a monolithic understanding of gender roles, for in these narratives, the specificity of the roles played by each woman, vis--vis men and other women, trumps their femininity in determining the kinds of sexual experiences available to them. That is to say, Shko in Kysei kkan is far more constrained by the specific role of wife/mother that she plays within the context of the family than she is by the mere fact that she is female a point that is driven home by the freedom enjoyed by her older sister. The protagonist in Shiroi hikari finds the possibility of sex itself foreclosed to her by virtue of her perception of herself as too old and unattractive to be a viable sexual subject (whether encouraged or not in this assessment by her male partner), although she finds a creative yet temporary solution to the dilemma in the sacrifice of a younger version of herself. In other words, the problem is not that she is a woman, but that she is an older woman. And in Kesshtai the position (and identity) of the mistress is predicated on the continued cooperation of the wife. Loving the man is thus subordinated in importance to playing the role of his lover. It is not enough for Shizuko as a woman (feminine or not) to have Takao as a man (masculine or not); she must have him within the circumscribed position created for (or by?) her as mistress.

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Obviously these roles are gendered in the sense that one cannot separate the woman from the role of wife, mother, or mistress that she plays. But it seems clear from the relationship dynamics explored in these stories that both womens bodies and their femininity (as an expression of gender) are in some sense subordinated to the roles they play in determining the types of sexual subjectivity available to them. If this is the case, then what do these stories say with regard to the corporeal feminine self? Takahashis narratives are not mute on this subject, but it is interesting that in these stories the other womans body is so frequently articulated as a privileged site of knowledge. In both Kysei kkan and Shiroi hikari, one woman is explicitly articulated as a substitute body for the other, that is, as a locus of opportunity for unusual types of intimacies and experiences. While these relationships are characterized as expressions of heteroauto-homoerotic desire and attraction, there is a significant undercurrent of aggression toward the other woman as well. In both cases one womans body is treated as a disposable substitute, even a floodwall, to protect the other from being soiled through use in the heterosexual economy. The desire for sexual experience through a differently feminine subject position here translates into a desire for knowledge of self that is routed through another or more precisely, the desire for knowledge of a different possibility of selfhood. Similarly, in Kesshtai Shizuko cannot resist using Tamako as a sounding board for her monologue of self-scrutiny and is evidently frustrated when the other woman cannot (or will not) provide the answers she requires to understand her own motivations. Furthermore, Shizukos loquacious desire to know the body of the other woman, and to have her own body known to Tamako, through a volubly erotic sort of foreplay with their common (heterosexual) love object also indicates a marked fascination with the body of the other woman as a site of knowledge of self. Shizuko even experiences the illusion of physical transformation into the other woman, imagining the contours of her body shrinking to match the size of her rival, which gives her the (rather unpleasant) sensation of adopting the other womans subject position both physically and in terms of the role she plays vis--vis Takao.

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In other words, while in each case there is an obvious pleasure to be had in this kind of fusion with the other woman, this is bound up with a significant amount of fear and loathing as well. It is for this reason that the triangular dynamic that structures these relationships must be kept intact. The male in each story serves simultaneously as a medium for intimacy between the women and as a protective barrier that prevents complete fusion, a fusion that would entail a dissolution of self rather than a blurring of its boundaries. The role that each woman plays with respect to the male, and with respect to the other woman, in the heterosexual economy thus becomes a crucial structuring component of these obviously queer fantasies of heteronormativity narratives that are, to borrow a term from Calvin Thomas, straight with a twist.34 It would seem here that Takahashi is making Sedgwicks point that the structure of the heterosexual economy is foundationally dependent on (a disavowal of) the idea of homoerotic desire from the opposite side of the fence.35 Perhaps this is what happens when straight people write queer.
Notes

An early version of the ideas presented in this essay was delivered in 2003 at the Takahashi Takako Symposium, sponsored by Jsai International University (JIU) and Rim: Pacific Rim Womens Studies Association Journal, in Tokyo. For that opportunity I must thank Mizuta Noriko, president of JIU, and Professor Kitada Sachie, whose support and enthusiasm were invaluable to my work there. The material was revised once and included in chapter 3 of my PhD dissertation, A Single Drop of Crimson: Takahashi Takako and the Narration of Liminality (Stanford University, 2004) before taking final form as the essay printed here. Additional thanks go to Professor Jim Reichert of Stanford University, Professor Juliette Apkarian of Emory University, Ridwan Khan, and two anonymous reviewers, whose excellent advice and suggestions at various stages of editing should be credited for any improvements to the manuscript. All translations of literature by Takahashi cited in this essay are my own. 1 On the development of the ideal of good wife and wise mother in modern Japan, see for example Kathleen S. Uno, The Death of Good Wife, Wise Mother? in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 293 322. While the specific implications of this term changed somewhat over the course of the twentieth century, in the period of time under discussion here (the 1960s and 1970s) it essentially referred to women who devoted themselves wholeheartedly to the domestic sphere (especially child care) while their husbands supported the family through work outside the home.

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2 Kurahashi was short-listed for the Akutagawa prize in 1960 for Parutai (The Party) but did not win. Kno won in 1963 for Kani (Crabs), and ba won in 1968 with Sanbiki no kani (The Three Crabs). Kanai was nominated in 1970 for Yume no jikan (Time of Dreams) but did not win. Takahashi Takako, whose works form the subject of analysis of this essay, was a finalist in 1971 for Kanata no mizu oto (The Distant Sound of Water) but also did not win. 3 Women were granted the right to vote in 1945, and in the following year (the first postwar general election) thirty-nine women were elected to the national Diet. The public educational system was made coeducational during the first few years of the occupation. For a variety of articles detailing how these reforms affected Japanese womens lives, see Kumiko Fujimura-Fanselow and Atsuko Kameda, eds., Japanese Women: New Feminist Perspectives on the Past, Present, and Future (New York: The Feminist Press, 1995). 4 Interestingly, thanks in large part to the diversity of critically acclaimed work produced by women writers in the 1960s and 1970s, Kawamura Jir was able to claim in a 1980 roundtable discussion with Takahashi Takako and Tsushima Yko that this category had effectively ceased to signify as a distinct genre of literature. See Jory o tsukiugokasu mono (What Motivates Womens Literature), Kokubungaku kaishaku to kyzai no kenky (National Literature: Interpretation and Textual Studies) 25 (1980): 6 25. 5 See Jory o tsukiugokasu mono, particularly the section entitled Women and Work. 6 Michael Warner, as quoted in Calvin Thomas, Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 13. 7 When female homoeroticism is discussed, it is typically in the context of authors explicitly identified or assumed to be lesbian. See for example Peichen Wu, Performing Gender along the Lesbian Continuum: The Politics of Sexual Identity in the Seit Society, U.S.Japan Womens Journal English Supplement, no. 22 (2002): 64 105. On the author Yoshiya Nobuko, see for example Motoko Ezaki, Yoshiyas Yaneura no ni shojo: A New Landscape shjo in the Popular Literature of Taisho Japan (masters thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1993); and Sarah Frederick, Sisters and Lovers: Women Magazine Readers and Sexuality in Yoshiya Nobukos Romance Fiction, PMAJLS 5 (1999): 311 20. On Miyamoto Yuriko, see for example Iwabuchi Hiroko, Rezubianizumu no yuragi (Lesbianism Wavers) in Feminizumu hihy e no shtai (Invitation to Feminist Criticism), ed. Iwabuchi Hiroko, Kitada Sachie, and Kra Rumiko (Tokyo: Gakugei shorin, 1995), 149 74. On the other hand, Maryellen Mori has done several intriguing studies of other perverse themes in Takahashis work; see for example her article on the theme of semi-incestuous relationships between older women and young boys, The Quest for Jouissance in Takahashi Takakos Texts, in The Womans Hand: Gender and Theory in Japanese Womens Writing, ed. Paul Gordon Schalow and Janet A. Walker (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 205 35. 8 For one autobiographical account, see Takahashi Takako, Watakushi no tootta michi (The

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10 11 12 13

14 15

16

Road I Have Traveled) (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1999). For stories by other writers that feature similar themes, see for example Kurahashi Yumiko, Natsu no owari (The End of Summer; 1960) and Kno Taeko, Gekij (Theater; 1962). For an analysis of additional Takahashi stories that deal with female homoerotic themes articulated differently from the triangular relationships discussed in this article, see chapter 3 of A Single Drop of Crimson: Takahashi Takako and the Narration of Liminality (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2004). See for example Gregory Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600 1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Wim Lunsing, Beyond Common Sense: Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary Japan (London: Kegan Paul, 2001). I use the term perverse (hentai) here, as Mark McLelland does, to denote roughly the same meaning as queer. See his Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). McLelland, Queer Japan, 23. Sharon Chalmers, Emerging Lesbian Voices from Japan (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), 25. McLelland, Queer Japan, 71. As McLelland and Chalmers both note, there was a distinct gender gap in the availability and type of homoerotic discourse available to men and women during this period. Because the industry was primarily in the hands of male editors and publishers, even so-called lesbian pornography was infused with a heavy dose of sadomasochism and was tailored to appeal to male fantasies, and thus it tended not to reflect the experiences of actual lesbians (McLelland, Queer Japan, 168; Chalmers, Emerging Lesbian Voices from Japan, 38 39). However, the purpose of this essay is not to address straightforward or confessional expressions of lesbian desire but rather to explore the uses of female homoeroticism as a literary trope by ostensibly heterosexual women writers. I do not mean to discount the possibility that some of these writers might in fact have lesbian or bisexual desires, but I find the question of their sexual orientation less interesting than the queering effect that such narratives have on the field of normative sexualities and gender roles they depict. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 26 (original emphasis). See Masami Ohinata, The Mystique of Motherhood: A Key to Understanding Social Change and Family Problems in Japan, in Fujimura-Fanselow and Kameda, Japanese Women, 199 211. This triangular structure is reminiscent of the kind of homosocial relationships between men that Eve Sedgwick posits in English literature, but Takahashi gives them a differently gendered and contextually distinct texture. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

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17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Takahashi Takako, Kysei kkan, Gunz, December 1971, 19. Ibid., 9, 15. Ibid., 32. Takahashi Takako, Shiroi hikari, in Ushinawareta e (Tokyo: Kawade shob shinsha, 1981), 158. That this is another case of a doppelgnger motif is confirmed at the very end when Watashi returns home and searches for a picture of herself taken at the same age as the young girl is now. The image in the photograph and the description of the girl are identical (163 64). Takahashi, Shiroi hikari, 156. Ibid., 162 63. Ibid., 161. Takahashi Takako, Kesshtai, in Takahashi Takako jisen shsetsu, vol. 2 (Tokyo: Kdansha, 1994), 233. Ibid., 214. Ibid., 215 16. Ibid., 249. Ibid., 226. Ibid., 215. Ibid., 210 11. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), 174. Takahashi, Kesshtai, 213. Ibid., 215. See Thomas, Straight with a Twist. See Sedgwick, Between Men.