Doppelgängers, Misogyny, and The San Francisco System The Occupation Narratives of ŌeKenzaburō

The Society for Japanese Studies
Doppelgängers, Misogyny, and the San Francisco System: The Occupation Narratives of Ōe
Kenzaburō
Author(s): Margaret Hillenbrand
Source: The Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Summer, 2007), pp. 383-414
Published by: The Society for Japanese Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25064725
Accessed: 04-05-2018 02:27 UTC
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MARGARET HILLENBRAND
Doppelg?ngers, Misogyny, and the

San Francisco System: The Occupation
Narratives of ?e Kenzabur?
Abstract: ?e Kenzabur?'s status as the left-wing conscience of postwar Japan

was consolidated long before his Nobel prize of 1994. Several works dating from
the late 1950s, however, give the lie to this radicalism and suggest instead a ten
dency toward the reactionary. In particular, ?e's politico-sexual series on occu
pied Japan?five narratives that center on a love triangle between a Japanese
youth, his prostitute mistress, and her Euro-American patron?veer noticeably
toward misogyny in their representation of Japan under Pax Americana. Al
though this series of texts purports to be a call to arms to Japanese male youth
during the intense debates over the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, a closer inspec
tion reveals that ?e's hidden preoccupation is with his female characters, who
become scapegoats for "crimes" of complicity with Japan's conquerors that were,
in fact, extremely widespread.
?e Kenzabur? 's status as the left-wing conscience of postwar Japan is now

something of a tmism both at home and abroad. In the course of his politico
intellectual life, ?e has championed pacifism and democracy, resisted
Japan's revisionist right wing, critiqued an ambient society glutted on con
sumerism, and campaigned for causes as varied as pan-Asian understand
ing, Hiroshima victims, Korean comfort women, and Japan's stigmatized
disabled community. These signifiers of "left-wing conscience" also drive
and define his prolific fictional oeuvre, from radically politicized texts such
as "Sevuntiin" (Seventeen, 1961), through the offbeat humanism of Kojin
teki na taiken (A personal matter, 1964), to the meditation on Aum Shin
riky? that we find in Ch?gaeri (Somersault, 1999).
I would like to thank the anonymous readers for their extremely insightful and constructive
comments.
383
Journal of Japanese Studies, 33:2
? 2007 Society for Japanese Studies
384 Journal of Japanese Studies 33:2 (2007)
Yet ?e is very far from an open-and-shut ideologue. His works provide

a home for ambiguity, layered nuance, and unresolvable tension, and those
who trawl his work for sureties often find that only a slippery hold on such
"truths" is possible. Some scholars have gone so far as to suggest that ?e
has, in fact, a split personality, a fissured self that wavers between ideologi
cal poles to the point that his own express mission is paradoxically thwarted,
and actual narrative praxis sometimes slips the leash of stated authorial in
tention. Both Kataoka Keiji and Susan Napier have written directly of this
schizophrenia, arguing that ?e the adult writer is a composite of a "patriotic
boy" (aikoku sh?nen) who imbibed the wartime ideology of tenn?sei and a
"democratic boy" (minsh?shugi sh?nen) who embraced the postwar order of
constitutionalism U.S.-style.1
?e himself has spoken of this duality, drawing attention to the "right
wing tendency"2 identified by several commentators in the wake of "Sev
vuntiin," a deeply riven text which often seems to undercut its own critique
of fascist extremism. Up to a point, of course, this sense of rivenness is noth
ing other than a working out of the dilemmas that besiege any committed
public intellectual. Thus, war guilt can rub along with an intense anger at the
atrocity of Hiroshima, and there is no reason for ?e's self-professed "Asian
ness" to jar with his quasi-nationalistic focus on what it means to be Japan
ese. On other occasions, however, patriotism and democracy, left and right,
and?most important?the radical and the reactionary do indeed collide
head-on in ?e's work. Examples include the hints of homophobia that un
dercut his famously libertarian approach to sexuality; the color stereotyping
which can attend his apparently progressive depiction of other races; and the
misogynistic tendencies that sometimes insinuate themselves into texts
which, ostensibly at least, do not treat the politics of gender.
This notion of ?e-as-misogynist is by no means a novel one. ?e's work
has always manifested an androcentric thrust; and the delineation of female
characters in famous works such as "Waganamida o nuguitamau hi" (The
day he himself shall wipe my tears away, 1972) and Man'en gannen nofut
tob?ru (The silent cry, 1967) has drawn occasional fire from critics.3 The
present article pursues this theme of gender bias but does so through close
analysis of an often overlooked corner of ?e's oeuvre?and one, moreover,
that is generally interpreted in rather different ways. The focus of this essay
is a cluster of intimately interlinked texts that ?e wrote during 1958-59,
1. Kataoka Keiji, ?e Kenzabur? ron: Seishin no jigoku o yuku mono (Tokyo: Rippu
Shob?, 1973), pp. 210-16; and Susan Napier, Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and
Realism in the Fiction ofMishima Yukio and Oe Kenzabur? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni
versity Press, 1991), p. 5.
2. Quoted in James Ryan, "The Split Personality of Oe Kenzabur?," Japan Quarterly,
Vol. 50, No. 4 (1993), p. 450.
3. See, for example, Napier, Escape from the Wasteland, pp. 98-103.
Hillenbrand: ?e Kenzabur? 385
which will be referred to henceforth as his "occupation" narratives.4 The

series consists of five texts: the short stories "Ningen no hitsuji" (The hu
man sheep, February 1958), "Miru mae ni tobe" (Leap before you look, June
1958), "Kurai kawa, omoi kai" (Dark river, heavy oars, July 1958), and
"Kassai" (Cheers, September 1958), and the novel tarera nojidai (Our era,
1959). Each narrative in the set pivots on an identical constellation of prem
ise, character, emplotment, and motif. At the core of all five texts is a young
Japanese male (usually an intellectual), embroiled in a love triangle with an
older prostitute and a foreign patron (usually American)?a tripartite liai
son that is intended to function, almost cmdely, as a metaphoric reconfigur
ing of contemporary geopolitical realities. This article seeks to show, how
ever, that the sexual paradigm ?e devises in these texts to illuminate and
lambaste Japan's status as a U.S. protectorate follows its own internal logic.
Thus, the series, which is designed as a radical critique of Japan's relation
ship with hegemonic American power, ends up reading just as fluently as a
reactionary denunciation of those female sex workers who inhabited the
grey zone between occupiers and occupied. In the process, it provides telling
corroboration of K. K. Ruthven's claim that "the business of a literary critic
is to examine a literary work for traces of the ideologies which shape it...
and to point to discrepancies between what the work purports to tell and
what a careful reading of it shows."5
This essay begins by sketching the two parallel histories that gave rise to
?e's set of narratives: on the one hand, the mounting popular opposition to the
San Francisco system and the supine posture that it forced Japan to assume
vis-?-vis its American ally6; and on the other, the complex attitudes toward
female sexual labor and the "servicing" of Allied troops that prevailed during
the occupation period and its long aftermath. ?e locates his set of narratives
at the interface between these two contemporary realities. In ways that were
soon to prove startlingly prescient, his texts seek to create a metaphor in
which the potential for popular opposition (symbolized by the young Japan
ese male) is emasculated by a craven nation (symbolized by the faded prosti
tute) that has surrendered itself to the United States (no symbol necessary).
The essay then provides a brief summary of these texts, both to illustrate the
ostensible workings of ?e's paradigm and to demonstrate the process
whereby the strongest force of his invective comes to rest on the figure of the
4. Although the American occupation of mainland Japan came to an official end in 1952,
its effects were still palpable during the late 1950s?indeed, a core premise of ?e's series is
that the occupation was, in many ways, still ongoing.
5. K. K. Ruthven, Feminist Literary Studies: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984), p. 32.
6. For an extended analysis of the San Francisco Peace Settlement and the so-called "San
Francisco system" it inaugurated, see Michael M. Yoshitsu, Japan and the San Francisco Peace
Settlement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
female sex worker. Indeed, the essay goes on to argue that ?e's commitment
to depicting the plight of Japanese male youth under Pax Americana assumes
powerful narrative energies of its own and leads him, almost inadvertently
perhaps, to focus less on the macrocosmic dynamics of Japan's relationship
with the United States than on the easier, more immediate target of the sex
workers who symbolized the quotidian lures of compliance with the nation's
new masters. While the foibles of male youth do not escape ?e's censure, the
more forceful driver of these texts is a scapegoating process whereby the fig
ure of the prostitute becomes a dark doppelg?nger for constituencies right
across the social weal who were engaged in the inevitable but distasteful
business of "collaboration" with the occupying forces. Finally, the essay pres
ents a close reading of one of the lesser-known narratives in the set?"Kurai
kawa, omoi kai"?in order to explore these points in sharper focus.
Before proceeding, however, some brief qualifying remarks are in
order. First of all, it may seem cavalier in the wake of W. K. Wimsatt and
M. C. Beardsley's "intentional fallacy" and Roland Barthes's even more de
fiant "death of the author" to conjecture about authorial intention in any sus
tained way.7 After all, texts are entities in and of themselves, and their effects
on readers are arguably a more legitimate object of study than the half
guessed-at motivations of their writers. That said, it should be remembered
that ?e's series on occupied Japan is highly unusual for the straight invitation
it proffers to the critic to engage in precisely this kind of speculative en
deavor. This "invitation" consists of a sizable body of nonfictional works?
essays, prefaces, postscripts, and so on?that coexists alongside the occupa
tion narratives and provides a complementary space in which ?e either
dissects his series directly or meditates on the nexus of social, political, and
diplomatic conditions that inspired it. The result is a twin corpus of texts that
were published in tandem with one another and ask to be assessed in their
very considerable conjunction. Not surprisingly, various critics?including
Michiko N. Wilson, Hosea Hirata, and Yoshio Iwamoto8?have picked up
this gauntlet; and Iwamoto, in particular, has identified some of the para
doxes that ensue when intention and practice part company, and "essayist and
novelist sometimes [find themselves] working at cross-purposes." 9 So far en
7. See W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 1954), pp. 3-18; and Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Au
thor," in Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977),
pp. 142-48.
8. See Michiko N. Wilson, The Marginal World ofOe Kenzabur?: A Study in Themes and
Techniques (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1986), pp. 22-32; Hosea Hirata, "Masturbation, the
Emperor and the Language of the Sublime in Oe Kenzabur?," positions: east asia cultures cri
tique, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1994), pp. 91-112; and Yoshio Iwamoto, "Oe Kenzabur? 's Warera nojidai
(Our Generation). Sex, Power, and the Other in Occupied Japan," World Literature Today, Vol.
76, No. 2 (2002), pp. 43-51.
9. Iwamoto, "Sex, Power, and the Other," p. 45.
Hillenbrand: ?e Kenzaburo 387
tirely unremarked, however, is the degree to which gender acts as the catalyst
for this parting of ways, clouding the clarity of ?e's intellectual purpose and
bringing forth narratives that take on an emotional autonomy of their own.
Closely connected to this notion of gender-as-catalyst is the broader
question of feminism and the degree to which a concern for women's
rights?or, at the very least, a disavowal of misogyny?can be taken for
granted in the thought and work of a self-professed "left-wing" writer such
as ?e. Certainly, it would be rash to pretend that a feminist manifesto has
always loomed large on the agenda of Japanese male literati who espoused
the socialist cause. Many women active within the prewar proletarian liter
ary movement?such as Sata Ineko, Miyamoto Yuriko, and Hayashi Fu
miko?regularly impeached the hypocrisy of their male counterparts, who
preached equality in public but practiced rather more patriarchal habits in
their private conduct with women.10 ?e and his work offer intriguing echoes
of this contradictory stance. On the one hand, his public championing of
the rights of the comfort women?those earlier brokers of politico-sexual
space?suggests a certain commitment to feminist goals.11 What is more, a
perusal of ?e's rich oeuvre refutes the idea of writer as consistent, dyed-in
the-wool chauvinist: earthy and empowered representations of women recur
across his fiction, from Bird's sexual savior, Himiko, in Kojinteki na taiken
to the empathetic female characters in Rein tsuri o kiku onnatachi (The
women who hear the rain tree, 1982). Yet Napier is surely also correct in
noting that "a sort of prostitute, or at least highly submissive, mentality on
the part of women" can be traced throughout ?e's work12; and while it may
be na?ve to set up a seamless equation between left-wing politics and a pro
gressive attitude to women, the "prostitute mentality" to which ?e consigns
many of his female characters remains an intriguing anomaly. This article
investigates this anomaly in its earliest manifestations and argues that?at
this stage in ?e's writing at least?it found its roots in the gender politics
of the colonized nation.
10. Sata Ineko writes compellingly of the difficulties she encountered in sustaining a mar
riage of equals with her husband, Kubokawa Tsurujir??a prominent leftist activist?in her
autobiography Nenpu no gy?kan (Tokyo: Ch?? K?ronsha, 1983). Over the last few years, more
over, feminist historians such as Murakami Nobuhiko have drawn attention to the often shock
ing behavior of men in the Communist Party, a number of whom kept "housekeepers": women
sympathetic to the cause who were made to service party members in professional, domestic,
and sexual ways. See Vera Mackie, Creating Socialist Women in Japan: Gender, Labour, and
Activism, 1900-1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 220.
11. See, for example, ?e Kenzabur? and Kim Chi-ha, "An Autonomous Subject's Long
Waiting, Coexistence,"positions: eastasia cultures critique, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1997), pp. 286-87.
In this conversation with the dissident South Korean poet Kim Chi-ha, ?e admits Japan's diffi
culty in accepting its war guilt and cites the issue of the comfort women as one of the key ar
eas that require honest discussion.
12. Napier, Escape from the Wasteland, p. 99.
Immediate Contexts
?e wrote his interlinked narratives at a key crossroads in Japan's journey

from defeat through occupation to the hard-and-fast alliance with the United
States that would underpin its later economic miracle. By the mid- to late
1950s, political and popular forces of various stripes had begun to voice dis
satisfaction with the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Nichibei Anzen Hosh?
J?yaku, or Anpo for short), which had been promulgated as part of the San
Francisco peace settlement of 1951. Opposition parties, with the socialists
and communists at their activist core, sought the outright abolition of the
treaty (which they saw as codified subservience to the United States on the
one hand and dangerous contravention of Japan's postwar pacifist ethos on
the other) and the adoption of a policy of neutrality instead. The conservative
cabinet, meanwhile, was simultaneously pursuing a slew of face-saving revi
sions to the treaty, which would enable Japan to conduct bilateral relations on
a more equal footing and also manage its own security with a slightly lever
aged degree of autonomy. By June 1959, agreement had been reached be
tween Japan and the United States on the details of revision, and the resulting
treaty was signed in January 1960. The outpouring of impassioned popular
protest that followed as Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke rammed the rati
fication of the new treaty through the Diet and the massed ranks of his oppo
nents is now remembered wistfully as a high point in postwar participatory
politics. With as much as a third of the electorate signing petitions against the
ratification of the treaty, its eventual passage into law caused a crisis in Japan's
democracy and a galvanization of the nation's famously apathetic populace.
But despite his forced resignation not long after, Kishi's will prevailed, and
the nexus of policies enshrined at the beginning of the 1950s as the "Yoshida
doctrine" continued to shape Japanese political life for years to come.
The fact that the Anpo movement has become history?and that the pro
testers lost?should not, however, blind us to the fact that there was still
everything to play for as ?e put pen to paper in the late 1950s. More specific
ally, a string of tension-ridden incidents relating to the U.S. presence in Japan
serves as the immediate historical backdrop to his quintet of narratives.
From September 1955 onward, the so-called "Sunagawa struggle" (Suna
gawa t?s?), an opposition movement formed in reaction to the proposed ex
pansion of the U.S. base in Tachikawa, began to gather steam and soon
sparked confrontations between the police force and local citizens. This was
followed in January 1957 by the fatal shooting of a female farm worker by a
U.S. soldier and then, in July of the same year, by the forcible suppression by
police of farmers, workers, and students (?e himself among them)13 taking
13. For a discussion of Oe's involvement in the demonstrations and its possible influence
on his fiction of the time, see Ichij? Takao, ?e Kenzabur?: Sono bungaku sekai to haikei (Osa
ka: Izumi Shoin, 1997), p. 22.
Hillenbrand: Oe Kenzaburo 389
part in the Sunagawa struggle. Finally, in November 1957, the popularly

elected mayor of Naha, president of the Okinawa People's Party and a well
known communist, was removed from office after a dirty-tricks campaign
masterminded by American officials and backed up by money from the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency.14 These various incidents contributed to a sense
that bilateral relations were conducted on American terms, with Japan's
rights and interests lagging far behind. Popular opposition to the U.S.-Japan
Security Treaty was patently intensifying, and ?e's texts, together with the
spate of essays he wrote at the same time, provide both direct and implicit
commentary on the debate.
Just as ?e selected the interchangeable male protagonist of the occupa
tion narratives for his symbolic value as a signifier of this mounting protest,
so too do the women in the series carry intense emblematic meaning. Here,
however, ?e's use of metaphor takes fewer cues from recent history?
despite the signal importance of prostitution to that history. Indeed, while it
is something of a historical truism that the brunt of colonial lust is borne by
workers in the sex industry, the Japanese government proved unusually at
tuned to the importance of this dictum as it prepared for the erotic assault of
tens of thousands of Allied servicemen in the aftermath of defeat. The aptly
named Recreation and Amusement Association (RAA) was swiftly formed,
which rounded up women of "dubious virtue" (geisha, prostitutes, bargirls,
and waitresses) and proceeded to organize them into a battalion of sex work
ers who would form the first line of defense against sexually transmitted
disease and unwanted GI attentions.15 And even after the administration
of General Douglas Mac Arthur abolished the RAA in 1946, servicing the
needs of the occupying forces remained a lucrative niche market that lured
many employed in the flesh trade. In fact, from the end of the war right up
until the time that ?e was writing (and, of course, in subsequent years across
the base towns of postwar Japan), the figure of the prostitute who catered
more or less exclusively to American servicemen had become something of
a fixture on the social landscape.16
These marginal women entered the public imagination in a number of
ways. Most obviously, perhaps, GI prostitutes were victims.17 Within a colo
nial rubric that often configures the conquered body politic as the body of a
woman, and that describes imperialist incursion in terms of sexual foray and
14. For a more detailed account of the historical background to these texts, see Nakamura
Yasuyuki, ?e Kenzabur?: Bungaku no kiseki (Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1995), p. 70.
15. Sheldon Garon provides a thorough study of the RAA in his Molding Japanese Minds:
The State in Everyday Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 88-114.
16. For a study of these women, see Saundra Pollock Sturdevant and Brenda Stoltzfus, Let
the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military in Asia (New York: New Press, 1992).
17. This is not to argue, of course, that the connection between prostitution and victim
hood was axiomatic, as a brief excursus into well-known films of the time demonstrates. Just
as Mizoguchi Kenji's Yoru no onnatachi (Women of the night, 1948) and Akasen chitai (Street
subjugation, prostitutes occupy an unenviable position in the trenches of

the front line. To underscore the point, a good number of these women had
been sent into the fray at the behest of the state program mentioned above; and
the fact that many had been orphaned or left fatherless by the war, and had
turned to prostitution as a last-ditch means of providing for destitute younger
siblings, contributed to a sense that the authorities were making casualties of
the very people most needy of their protection. In this respect, the panpan (as
they were known) could be glossed as a symbol of the spirit of sacrifice that
an unworthy government continued to demand from its subjects, even now
that the war was over. (Other terms for female sex workers included y?pan [a
prostitute who specialized in GIs] and onrii [wan] or "only one" [a prostitute
involved in a fixed relationship with a single patron].) At the same time, of
course, moral outrage at government-sanctioned prostitution combined with
secret gratitude that one's own daughters, wives, and sisters were being
shielded from the occupiers' lust. After all, the issue of fraternization carried
a particular resonance in postwar Japan, where it was inseparable in the minds
of many from the charged history of the ianfu (comfort women). Indeed, al
though the sexual rampages of the Imperial Army were not the stuff of din
nertime conversation en famille, many demobilized men remembered them
all too well?and many therefore feared that U.S. troops would behave in
kind. Given this context, the combination o? goman (stoicism) and giri (duty)
that GI prostitutes seemed to embody might well have shielded their lost
chastity from the harshest stigma and turned it, at least partially perhaps, into
a badge of courage.18 As they walked the streets of burnt-out urban Japan in
search of a livelihood, these women gave graphic public expression to count
less struggles that were being waged in the private sphere and?in their
way?were emblematic of the spirit of the Japanese people in the aftermath
of defeat.
Moreover, even those women who willingly pursued work as prostitutes
were not automatically pariahs. On the contrary, insofar as their free
wheeling, free-flowing sexuality offered an antidote to the repression of the
militarist era, these women even radiated an aura of glamor.19 The ry?sai
of shame, 1956) and Naruse Mikio's Onna ga kaidan o agaru toki (When a woman ascends the
stairs, 1960) present the sex worker as a victim deserving of intense empathy, so does the hero
ine of Imamura Sh?hei's Nippon konch?ki (The insect woman, 1963) heartily debunk any no
tion of female self-sacrifice and stoicism.
18. In his study of the RAA, Yuki Tanaka cites the emotively patriotic strategies used by
the Hokkaido prefectural police division as it responded to the government injunction to recruit
"comfort women" for the Allied troops. Officers charged with enlisting these women "asked
their cooperation by persuading them to work again for the sake of the nation and for the
[safety] of the Japanese people." See Tanaka, Japan's Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery and
Prostitution during World War II and the US Occupation (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 135.
19. Determined as this repression was, however, pockets of licentiousness continued to
linger. Of particular note was the so-called "caf? culture" that thrived in parts of Tokyo during
kenbo (good wife, wise mother) mold into which Japanese women had been
squeezed by the prewar propagandists now carried the unmistakable taint of
the nation's militarist past, and its fall from favor opened up a space for dif
ferent forms of femininity.20 For some, of course, the relative wealth and os
tentation of the panpan were a source of resentment; but for others, their
painted fingernails, stockinged legs, and demimonde allure brought joie de
vivre to the bombed-out urban scene. John Dower goes so far as to argue that
these women
became associated with the liberation of repressed sexuality?a world of

erotic indulgence that had found earlier expression not merely in the pleas
ure quarters of the late feudal period, but in the bawdy relationships and
amorous dalliances celebrated in popular tales and courtly romances of
ancient times . . . [the prostitute] was seen, in her way, as a modern-day
counterpart of "the woman who loved love," the promiscuous heroine of
[the] famous work by .. . Ihara Saikaku.21
And while the existence of such linkages in the popular mind may be more
speculative than substantiated, for many postwar writers at least the panpan
was an iconic figure whose amorous adventures placed her on an artistic
continuum with the floating world of earlier eras.22
More specifically, ?e's series on occupied Japan?and the central place
it accords the theme of sexual labor?takes some of its cues from the cor
pus of fictional works produced in the immediate aftermath of war that are
known collectively as nikutai bungaku (literature of the flesh). The chief
practitioners of this school?namely, Tamura Taijir?, Sakaguchi Ango, and
Noma Hiroshi?wrote repeatedly of the panpan and her complex appeal,
blazing the psycho-sexual trail that ?e would follow and also bend in dif
ferent directions. These writers exalted the body of the prostitute as the ves
sel through which liberation of the male might be attained, and they made a
fetish out of female sexual availability. Nishikawa Nagao even argues that a
"warm, sympathy-filled take on the prostitute is one of the hallmarks" of
the 1920s and 1930s despite concerted official efforts to clean up urban morals. See Garon,
Molding Japanese Minds, pp. 106-8.
20. See Kathleen S. Uno, "The Death of 'Good Wife, Wise Mother,'" in Andrew Gordon,
ed., Postwar Japan as History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 294.
21. John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Aftermath of World War II (Har
mondsworth: Penguin, 1999), p. 133.
22. This, at least, is the interpretation favored by a number of Western critics. In his study
of Sakaguchi Ango, Tamura Taijir?, and Noma Hiroshi, Douglas Slaymaker quotes Ann
Sherif's observation that a "voyeuristic fascination with the women of the quarter?as objects
of desire and consumption" was commonplace in earlier Japanese literature and goes on to ar
gue that the "attributes ascribed to women?immanent identity, sexual liberation, sensuality
based not on rational principles but natural ones?draw from this lineage." See Slaymaker, The
Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 35.
such fiction23; and while the role played by women in this libidinal economy
is a long way from feminist, there can be little doubt that nikutai represen
tations of the panpan seem rosy in comparison to ?e's dark hostility. ?e's
treatment of the postwar prostitute distances itself still more dramatically
from fictional representations of panpan penned by female authors such as
Sono Ayako, Hiroike Akiko, and Saegusa Kazuko. These texts, as Douglas
Slaymaker has noted, focus on the dreary sameness of patriarchal oppres
sion, in which the masters may change (Japanese men, American GIs) but
the fate of women remains depressingly constant.24 As will become clear,
?e's series on occupied Japan shows a similar preoccupation with the pan
pan, but here celebration and pathos have been replaced by a palpable fear
of female sexuality.
?e's Intention: A Metaphoric Reality for Japanese Youth
As stated earlier, ?e situates his occupation narratives between these

two postwar realities?the San Francisco system and the sexual servicing
of Allied troops?and mines them both as sources of metaphor in his at
tempt to find fictionalized form for Japan's troubling new order. The result
is his recurrent triangular metaphor (comprising a foreign patron, a Japan
ese prostitute, and a young Japanese male) in which these two parallel pres
ents meet in powerfully political fashion. Yet, rooted as the series and its
three-way paradigm are in these twin realities, ?e's stated preoccupation
right across the set is unquestionably with Nihon no seinen, best glossed as
"Japanese youth," although with a suggestively male connotation. At the
core of each story in the set is an exemplar o? Nihon no seinen, either a boku
I-narrator or a male protagonist who is sometimes left unnamed. This young
man stands at the center of the text, commandeering the reader's attention
and directing the flow of identification toward himself, even when an om
niscient third-person narrator is charged with telling his story. And if any
residual doubts about the intended focus of ?e's energies remained, they are
surely dispelled when we cross-reference the occupation narratives with the
politically charged essays he produced during the preamble to the Anpo
demonstrations. The figure of Nihon no seinen haunts these writings like a
spectral talisman, elusive but eternally present; indeed, it is plausibly be
cause ?e so fretted about his increasing invisibility in real political life that
he created so many avatars of this youth in his fiction.
Underlying ?e's obsession with Nihon no seinen during the late 1950s
was, of course, his fear that bilateral relations with the United States exercised
a castrating function on the nation's young men. This motif of emasculation
23. See Nishikawa Nagao, Nihon no sengo sh?setsu: Haikyo no hikari (Tokyo: Iwanami
Shoten, 1988), p. 66.
24. See Slaymaker, The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction, pp. 131-59.
captured his imagination powerfully and led him, for a time at least, to rewrite
the broad political reality he observed around him in the language of sexual
ity. ?e stakes out this process of rewriting in an essay of 1959, "Warera no sei
no sekai" (Our world of sex). In this piece, he sets up a distinction between
seiteki ningen (sexual beings) and seijiteki ningen (political beings), and ar
gues that the traumas of defeat and occupation had caused a pall of louche en
nui to settle over contemporary Japan, thus driving the "political being" into
semi-exile.25 The courage of those rare seijiteki ningen who remained fasci
nated ?e and imbued his writings with an evangelizing mission. In another
essay, entitled "Ky?ken ni kakushitsu o kamosu kokorozashi" (The resolve to
foment strife with state power, 1961), ?e describes the emotion that gripped
him as he watched news footage of the Anpo demonstrations, in which a
young student dove from a gatepost outside the prime ministerial residence
into a "dark swamp" (kurai numa) of densely packed policemen.26 More than
anything else, it was the "desperately courageous" (zetsub?teki ni y?kan na)
conduct of the youth as he leapt from his high perch that transfixed ?e; and
it is not difficult to see this seijiteki ningen as an inverse template of the
I-narrator in "Mini mae ni tobe," who resists the exhortation of the story's ti
tle (borrowed from W. H. Auden) and despairingly recoils from such plunges
into bravery. Numerous other contemporary essays?such as "Sengo seinen
no Nihon fukki" (The rehabilitation of Japan for postwar youth, 1960),
"Nij?ssai no Nihonjin" (Japanese 20 year olds, 1960), and "Minsh?shugi wa
fuminijirareta" (Democracy has been trampled underfoot, 1960)?oscillate
between these same themes of apathy/sex and action/politics, vaunting hero
ism at the same time as they recognize its constraints in a nation that has
played fast and loose with its own sovereignty.27
More or less simultaneously, ?e's fictional series on occupied Japan pro
vided him with an arena within which to explore these notions of a politico
sexual world with more license and imagination than the rationality of the es
say form would permit. In particular, the sexual triangle that dominates these
narratives offered exegesis on the higher plane of metaphor for the kind of
spineless lethargy that ?e feared was taking hold of the nation's young men.
The core logic of ?e's fictional love triangle rests on the way it invokes the
ancient link between the conquest of territory and the conquest of local
women?and, more pertinently, the debilitating effects this axiomatic tie has
on indigenous male morale. After all, there can be little doubt that fraterniza
tion in occupied territory is deeply injurious to this morale. Such liaisons
threaten to rob the local man of what he might once have seen as his guaran
25. See ?e, "Warera no sei no sekai," in ?e Kenzabur?, Genshuku na tsunawatari:

Gendai Nihon no essei (Tokyo: K?dansha, 1991), p. 317.
26. See ?e, "Ky?ken ni kakushitsu o kamosu kokorozashi," in ibid., p. 111.
27. See "Sengo seinen no Nihon fukki," "Nij?sai no Nihonjin," and "Minsh?shugi wa
fuminijirareta," in Genshuku na tsunawatari, pp. 118-37, 69-73, and 99-102, respectively.
teed right of access to female sexuality at the very moment that he is also
being deprived of the political mandate, thus creating a double bind of dis
empowerment from which there is little retreat.28 In a two-directional move
ment, the cleavage between public and private that exists before occupation
is breached, with politics blurring into sexuality and sexuality into politics.
In these circumstances, the emasculation of the indigenous male takes on a
nightmarish visibility. And to drive this visibility home, permanent, physical
signifiers of his lost control follow quickly in the form of mixed-race chil
dren, who worsen his plight by dismpting the masculinist myth of pure blood
lines and ethnic homogeneity. All in all, it is easy to see the allure that the tri
partite paradigm exerted over ?e as he observed, and participated in, the
escalating drama of popular outcry against the San Francisco system. Post
war history, the lore of imperialism, and the thrill of an eternal triangle com
bine in this topos to create a potent representational outlet for ?e's fears and
hopes. What is rather more surprising, however, is the degree to which the di
mensions of the paradigm change their shape, and, moreover, the rather less
than "democratic" directions in which they lead their architect.
The Texts: From Authorial Intention to Narrative Practice
This point becomes clearer when we scmtinize the progression of the

series more closely. The point of narrative departure for each text is a
middle-aged Japanese prostitute who caters to GIs or expatriate foreigners,
often as an onrii involved in a long-term arrangement with one particular
client. Into this liaison is drawn an impressionable Japanese youth, symbol
of the fledging postwar nation, and the d?nouement of each text reveals
the process by which he is almost literally unmanned by the encounter with
U.S. power. As this skeletal summary makes clear, the textual role of the
woman is as agent, go-between, and broker of this emasculation. In an ironic
inversion of terms, she "procures" young bodies to satisfy the autocratic,
empire-building desires of her American masters. "Ningen no hitsuji,"29 the
first story in the series, adheres closely to this paradigm of victim, victim
izer, and agent provocateur. Set on a crowded bus, the narrative describes
28. In many ways, this crisis of confidence may belong more to the realm of paranoia than
bald historical truth?after all, occupied Japan suffered the dearth of marriageable males that
typically afflicts societies in the aftermath of war, and access to female sex workers was by no
means limited to the occupying powers. At the same time, however, Mark McLelland argues
that "in the immediate postwar years, it was members of the occupation forces who had privi
leged access to women's . . . bodies," and it is difficult to dispute that the material and mone
tary advantages enjoyed by the GIs made them clients of choice for many female sex workers.
See Mark J. McLelland, Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age (Lanham, Md.:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), pp. 59-100.
29. See ?e, "Ningen no hitsuji," in ?e Kenzabur?, Shisha no ogori: Shiiku (Tokyo:
Shinch?sha, 1959), pp. 143-69.
Hillenbrand: Oe Kenzabur? 395
a three-way encounter between a group of drunken GIs, their prostitute

companion, and the Japanese male passengers. An altercation breaks out
between the GIs and the prostitute, who deliberately implicates the young
man sitting next to her. The GIs turn on the youth and, tearing down his
trousers, force him at knifepoint to crouch down on all fours and expose his
naked buttocks to public view. Soon a number of other male passengers are
coerced into joining the game of "sheep," as the soldiers term it, while those
passengers not handpicked for humiliation either look on impassively or
avert their eyes. Through the eyes of his petrified narrator, ?e reveals both
the freakish animalism of the GIs and the prostitute's status as a bruised and
blowzy piece of merchandise. Duplicitous as she is, in her battered state the
agent provocateur implores a protection from her male compatriots that is
never forthcoming, and her vulnerability turns her vengeful.30
By the second story of the series, "Mini mae ni tobe,"31 ?e has already
begun to tug at the seams of this basic paradigm. Although the dramatis
personae of this piece appear unchanged, their characterization has subtly
mutated, and the agency of the prostitute has become magnified just as the
U.S. serviceman grows a libertarian conscience. In this later text, the Amer
ican presence is represented by Gabriel?a former GI turned war corre
spondent?whose bluff, boorish manner and contempt for Japan coexists
alongside an avuncular desire to stir his seinen love rival out of apathy and
into action. The prostitute Yoshie, on the other hand, is consistently identi
fied as the I-narrator's "bad angel": the root cause of his cowardice, the ra
tionale for his abandoning a career as a student radical, and the reason why
he has been stripped of all capacity for independent action ever since. The
narrator's secret affair with another woman, Tagawa Y?ko, presents the pos
sibility of exit from this impasse, particularly when Y?ko falls pregnant.
The promise of new life reconciles the narrator to the notion of Japan-as
nation, and he resolves to abandon the stultifying love triangle and start life
afresh with Y?ko and their child. But when Y?ko contracts tuberculosis and
is forced to end her pregnancy, his lonely despair draws him back to his
former mistress. Yoshie promptly taunts the narrator by observing that her
local clients are "useless little Japanese" (tsumannai chippoke na Nihonjin),
and his sexual potency deserts him. "Kurai kawai, omoi kai,"32 the third
30. For in-depth studies of "Ningen no hitsuji," the only one of the quintet of narratives
that has been translated into English, see Frederick Richter, "Circles of Shame: 'Sheep' by Oe
Kenzabur?," Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 11 (1974), pp. 409-15; and Michael S. Molasky,
The American Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory (London: Rout
ledge, 1999), pp. 159-67.
31. ?e, "Mini mae ni tobe," in ?e Kenzabur?, Miru mae ni tobe (Tokyo: Shinch? Bunko,
1974), pp. 117-81.
32. ?e, "Kurai kawa, omoi kai," in ?e Kenzabur?, ?e Kenzabur? zensakuhin 2 (Tokyo:
Shinch?sha, 1966), pp. 7-22.
text in the set, constitutes something of an early apotheosis in this narrative

movement toward gender-driven demonization. Here, the 13-year-old pro
tagonist is plied with whiskey and then seduced by the onrii who lives next
door?and who even promises to marry him?only to see her return to her
abusive giant of a GI paramour the next day. As will be discussed in greater
detail, this third story thrusts the prostitute firmly into the position of moral
felon by making both her lovers vulnerable outsiders: the boy by virtue of
his age and gaucheness, and the GI on account of his status?which ?e de
liberately plays up?as an African American dragooned into fighting a neo
colonialist war on behalf of his white "masters."
"Kassai,"33 the fourth story in the set, seems at first sight to pull the con
tours of ?e's triangle into a new and paradoxical shape. Instead of a hetero
sexual love triangle in which two men battle over the symbolic body of
Japan, this penultimate text turns the panpan into an interloper who dismpts
the gay affair between Lucien, a French diplomat, and Natsuo, a student of
French literature.34 As the narrative quickly reveals, however, Natsuo is a re
luctant partner in this liaison, a closet heterosexual whose fear of the female
form (an allegory of his fear of Japan as politico-historical burden) keeps
him immured in a life of sexual subservience to his French lover. The arrival
of Yasuko, a prostitute who services French sailors, as a temporary house
keeper in their apartment jolts the stasis of Natsuo's existence into chaos.
Yasuko wastes no time in seducing the young protagonist, who rejoices in
his unexpected "manliness" (otokorashisa), feels reborn as a Japanese and
resolves to break with Lucien. But when he informs the latter of his inten
tion to marry Yasuko, Lucien gloatingly discloses that Natsuo's new lover
is, in fact, a serial seductress who has a well-known fetish for effeminate
young men. Utterly cmshed, Natsuo finds that he can no longer perform sex
ually with women and returns in desperation to a demeaning life with Lu
cien. Pincered between these two sexual predators, Natsuo emerges as a
contemptible weakling, incapable of either choice or action; yet it is the fe
male prostitute who, once again, emerges in the darkest colors. Depicted as
a kind of sexual terrorist, armed quite literally with menacing sex toys, Ya
suko thrives on the pain of others: one memorable scene shows her tortur
ing a beetle by ripping off its mouth, while carelessly remarking that she has
a taste for cmelty (zankoku na koto suki da shi ne). While Lucien, for all his
mthlessness, feels a certain love for Natsuo, Yasuko's strategy on the
politico-sexual battlefield is simply to search and destroy.
Warera no jidai, the last narrative of the set and the most notorious,35
33. Oe, "Kassai," in ibid., pp. 51-79.

34. For a more detailed study of homosexuality and male prostitution during the occupa
tion, see McLelland, Queer Japan, pp. 59-100.
35. ?e, Warer a no jidai (Tokyo: Shinch?sha, 1959). Kono Kensuke outlines some of
the reasons for this notoriety in his "Warera no jidai: Kuriishe no mori," Kokubungaku:
presents no let-up from ?e's rising fury at the sexual go-between. In a final
variation on his theme, ?e focuses determinedly on the young male protag
onist and his prostitute mistress here, relegating his Western characters to
ancillary, allegorical roles. This fixity of focus allows for an intense and pro
tracted vision of both the seiteki ningen and, still more damningly, the sex
worker who shackles him in apathy. Yasuo, once again a young student of
French literature, is miserably engrossed in an affair with Yoriko, a prosti
tute who caters to foreigners. Yoriko repulses the antihero and, by extension,
the reader. Long passages describe her "malodorous" breath, "flabby" form,
and "poisonous" genitalia, while the unbreakable monotony of the erotic
life she shares with Yasuo?reduced to the sweaty mechanics of bodily
exchange?is designed to nauseate. More than any other woman in ?e's
series, Yoriko is made unequivocally coterminous with postwar Japan it
self, with the dank, unresisting soil of the occupied nation. Naturally, Yasuo
yearns for escape, from a motherland?and a mistress?of "ignominy and
indecency" (ojoku to waizatsu); and an opportunity for re-engagement with
life presents itself when he wins a three-year scholarship to study in France.
Here, the paradoxes between intent and practice in ?e's work make them
selves all too manifest. Unlike the author's essay-writing persona, who states
in plain terms that "in order for Japanese youth to recover their passion for
the nation, foreign bases must be eradicated from Japan,"36 ?e's fictional
narrator reveals that it is Yoriko who is the source of Yasuo's malaise and
that flight to the West will be his salvation:
In order to resuscitate himself, [Yasuo] had to seek escape from Yoriko's

genitalia. Escape, yes, I am leaving for France .... Forsaking Yoriko, that
is the most pressing task... Everything will begin from breaking decisively
with Yoriko. Right now?this is the sole chance to do it.37
Kaishaku to ky?zai no kenky?, Vol. 42, No. 3 (1997), p. 38. ?e himself has also remarked on
the widespread censure this novel received, claiming that it was "loathed by almost all the crit
ics as if it were a socially ostracized slut" (murahachibu nofushidara musume). See ?e, "Wa
rera nojidai to boku jisshin," in Genshuku na tsunawatari, p. 333. Perhaps ?e's most stringent
critic at the time was Et? Jun, who expressed his dissatisfaction at both Warera no jidai and,
to a lesser extent, "Mini mae ni tobe." See Et?, Zen bungei jihy? (Tokyo: Shinch?sha, 1989),
pp. 34, 76. To an extent, Et?'s censure of ?e takes on an ironic cast when we consider the fun
damental similarity of the stances that the two men adopted toward the American occupation
and the San Francisco system it spawned. Et?'s position, which he elaborated over many writ
ings (see, for example, Et?, Sh?wa shi: Sono isan to fusai [Tokyo: Asahi Shuppansha, 1989],
pp. 217-43), was neonationalist enough to draw fire from more liberal-minded intellectuals;
yet ?e?the darling of the left?was, in fact, just as damning in his condemnation of bilateral
relations with the United States and their impact on Japanese nationhood. Oketani Hideaki cri
tiques the false polarization of Et? and ?e that was prevalent among members of the bundan
in his "Et?, ?e ni okeru seiji ishiki," in Oketani, Gy?shi to h?k?, Vol. 2 (Tokyo: Gent?sha,
1971), p. 159.
36. ?e, "Sengo seinen no Nihon fukki," in ibid., p. 137.
37. ?e, Warera nojidai, p. 153.
Yasuo's involvement with an Arab political activist, however, causes him to

fall foul of the French embassy, and he loses the scholarship. The novel ends
inconclusively, with Yoriko more deeply involved with her American para
mour Wilson, and Yasuo mired in even greater despair.
Narrative Practice: Demonization and Doppelg?ngers
As this brief sketch of the series makes clear, ?e's occupation narratives
begin by professing one kind of target (apathetic male youth,38 and?more
elusively?the surrendering of national will that this group represents) only
to home in on another (those female sex workers who mediated the space
between occupiers and occupied). And despite the writer's stated intention
to use the interracial love triangle as an extended trope for the politics of
sovereignty and neocolonialism, it is the politics of sex and gender that ends
up dominating his textual world in this series of texts. Up to a point, of
course, ?e paves the way for this subversion of intent when he states ex
plicitly in his essays that he sought a fusion of sex and politics in these
reimaginings of Japan, a newly inaugurated U.S. protectorate and Pacific
outpost of U.S. power.39 Rather than sex and politics, however, it is sexual
politics?pitched battles between the genders, in fact?that carry the day
in the heat of composition.
But to argue from all this that ?e sets out to vilify GI prostitutes as
part of an intentionally misogynistic strategy remains a risky contention.
For a start, the occupation series is by no means devoid of compassion or
empathy for the sex worker. As described earlier, ?e's panpan are often
victims themselves, physically and mentally abused by the patrons they
serve: in some cases, their bodies bear the bruises of beatings they receive
from clients, while in others maltreatment comes in the form of a debasing
sexual sadism. Indeed, much of ?e's vocabulary for these women turns
on the trope of damaged goods or lost glory: these are women who, like
the Japanese nation itself, have had their dignity trampled upon by foreign
ers. To further the point, several of the stories show that the more craven
the conduct of the young male protagonist, the more vengeful his panpan
lover becomes; this dialectic suggests, if not outright sympathy, then at least
a certain rationale for her bitterness and cruelty. Yet ?e's anger remains, and
if intentional misogyny is not its source, how else can we explain the
increasingly hostile attention he gives the GI prostitute in this series of
stories?
38. As will become clear, this attack on male apathy is both an objective critique and a
subtle nod at self-mockery.
39. As he puts it, "I wanted to describe the stagnation that afflicts youths in modern Japan,
and my intention has been to create a realistic picture of Japanese youth by clinging to sexual
images." See ?e, "Warera no sei no sekai," p. 317.
Perhaps this subversion of stated intent makes better sense when we

read it as the symptom of a vaguely apprehended unease on ?e's part at the
perceived shift in the role and status of the native female that takes place in
occupied territory. According to this view, fraternization creates conditions
under which women's sexuality can shmg off its domestic mantle and be
come a player on the political stage. This is because?in the context of
merging public and private spheres discussed above?the sexual choices of
the native female give her a sudden and immediate access to the seminal dra
mas of the day. Through her chastity, or at least through a demonstration of
sexual loyalty to her own kind, the native female has the capacity to soothe
male angst and buttress "national" morale. On the other hand, though more
insidiously, she can consort with the enemy for profit or pleasure and thus
tacitly connive in the same unmanning of her male compatriots that the oc
cupying forces are pursuing in more outspoken fashion. In other words, the
political and sexual disempowerment that afflicts the indigenous male under
occupation is mirrored by a double-sided empowerment of the indigenous
female?with all the potential for rearguard dismay that such a role rever
sal entails. What is more, these fears?pronounced in any occupied con
text?assumed a special edge in postwar Japan, where women were taking
possession of a broad range of new powers vouchsafed to them by the oc
cupation authorities: the right to suffrage, the right to hold political office,
the right to inherit property, and the right to select their own marriage part
ners. It is this specter of female politico-sexual power mn amok that ?e,
consciously or otherwise, summons up in his stories. And GI prostitutes
take the bmnt of his attack because the figure of the panpan embodies bet
ter than any other this idea of a wayward female sexuality that defies patri
archal law, crosses the domestic line, and joins forces with the occupiers in
their program of emasculation.40
The problems of this reading in terms of both historicity and feminism
are, of course, manifold; and ?e's occupation narratives are striking in their
willingness to push these difficulties aside in the name of what the writer
deems a vital polemic. For a start, the more dismal realities of prostitution
during the Allied occupation and its long aftermath barely flicker on the
surface of ?e's stories: privation, bereavement, and coercion are never ac
knowledged as motive forces behind sexual labor, and prostitution is glossed
as a cheerfully vanguard lifestyle choice in ways that could almost be neo
feminist were they not so irredeemably judgmental. What is more, the
40. In this sense, the prostitutes of ?e's occupation narratives present a bold contrast with
the passive females who populate his earlier study of Japanese-American interaction, "Shiiku"
(The catch). ?e makes a point of virtually writing adult female figures out of this story, and
those few women villagers who do appear are a monolithic shadowy presence, consigned to the
rear of their dark houses, who wear uniform white smocks to reinforce their anonymity and do
not utter a single word during the course of the narrative.
sympathetic fascination that often colored popular perceptions of the pan

pan has given way in ?e's series to an androcentric censure that sees the na
tive intellectual youth as the chief victim of occupation. Altogether oc
cluded here is the notion that the GI prostitute who serves two masters is, far
from being doubly empowered, just as easily understood as the victim of a
twofold oppression, subject as she is to sexual exploitation by both domes
tic and foreign clients. All in all, ?e's narratives on the occupation leave
both history and feminism far behind as they adopt a take on the panpan that
is free and frank in its reductionist drive.
In this respect at least, ?e's representations of the GI prostitute share
some ground with the impressionistic views on these women that circulated
among the broad Japanese public. Whether they praised female gaman and
giri, exalted the panpan as custodians of cultural authenticity, enjoyed the
rejuvenating thrill of a very visible female sensuality, or resented sex work
ers for the wealth they flaunted among Japan's firebombed ruins, popular at
titudes were often marked by a tendency to link these marginal figures to the
state?and fate?of Japan itself.41 Needless to say, the same process is at
work in ?e's stories of occupied Japan. The only difference is that in this
latter case GI prostitutes are tried and convicted of crimes against the nation
(baikoku), whereas popular opinion sometimes allowed for the redeem
ing possibility of patriotism (aikoku) too. Either way, the basic pattern?
according to which the body of the prostitute functions as a blank text on
which the grander narrative of the nation-state is inscribed?remains un
changed. This well-worn discursive conceit, in which the prostitute's sold
and "sullied" body becomes a cipher for the wrongfully occupied nation,
cannot but write masculinity into the subject-position, with either bold
takeover or valiant defense being the favored parts to play. Femininity,
meanwhile, becomes an identity restricted to territory, turf, and the lan
guage of occupation. And just like so many other texts that compose na
tionalism and nationhood in the masculine key, ?e's series finds itself en
gaging in the exercise of steadily more strident and explicit misogyny.
This linkage between the leitmotif of sexual labor, masculinist discourse
on the nation, and misogyny by default becomes all too transparent when
we examine ?e's depiction of the panpan more closely. Physically, the
41. Michael S. Molasky makes much the same point when he writes that while "the pan
pan elicited ambivalent responses: admiration and disdain, pity and envy, fear and desire,"
many discourses of the time were united in "the desire to contain ... the threat these women
posed to Japan's social body." This metaphorical linkage between the body of the prostitute and
the nation proper was made explicit in best-selling books such as Nihon no teis? (The chastity
of Japan, 1953), a collection of "personal testimonies by pseudonymous panpan.'' See Mo
lasky, The American Occupation, pp. 103-5, 115. Nishikawa Nagao also notes the discursive
role played by the prostitute as a symbol of Japan, both in its degradation and its newfound free
doms. See Nishikawa, Nihon no sengo sh?setsu, p. 63.
prostitutes in ?e's stories of occupied Japan all have an air of fallen grandeur
to them: at first glance they appear "splendid" (rippa na) and "majestic"
(d?d? to shita), and are suggestive of Japan's former imperial glory. But on
closer inspection, their bodies are "sagging" (t?rete iru), "sterile" (fum?),
"flabby" (gunya gunya shita), covered in "superfluous flesh" (zeiniku), and
consistently prone to middle-aged spread (ch?nenbutori). This widespread
use of adjectives that suggest shapelessness, pliability, and corporeal indul
gence?all under stagily glamorous garb?hints at Japan's failure to muster
a staunch resistance against the demands of America. At the same time, per
haps, they can also be read as oblique references to the fragile shell of the
emperor system (tenn?sei) that tries, and fails, to conceal an underbelly of
rapid degeneration. Moreover, ?e takes care to reinforce the theme in coun
terpoint by portraying the GIs as giants (?otoko) with massively built frames
(gasshiri shita karada) who brim with robust good health (takamashiku
kenk? ni michite) and dwarf their Lilliputian subjects.
Repetitive analogies between Japan's female sex workers and "wild
beasts" (kemono), even "anthropoids" (ruijinen), expand this same basic
metaphoric mode in different directions. Here, bestiality is used to indicate
that Japan's basic humanity is compromised by its status as a U.S. vassal
state (Amerika no j?zokukoku), a motif that is continued through emplot
ment as the narratives unfold. All the female protagonists are victims of for
eign clients who subject them to various kinds of dehumanizing treatment:
they are battered, forced into degrading sexual acts, and publicly shamed by
their GI patrons. This suggestion that ?e's prostitutes represent the mined
state of the Japanese motherland is, moreover, rhetorically reinforced by
their maternal appearance and behavior. ?e portrays these women as quasi
mother figures, whose relationships with the young male protagonists are as
colored by maternal overtones as they are by sexual ones. Motherly endear
ments are lavished by the prostitutes on their young lovers?b?ya, a dis
tinctively intimate and familial term meaning "little boy," "sonny," or even
"my little son," is the most common. When their affection sours, however,
?e's female protagonists often exact a vicious revenge on the adolescents
who fail to protect them against the American occupiers. Japan has become
a "bad" mother, her maternal function hijacked and put to very different
service by the American occupiers, and her nurturing impulse displaced by
the desire to cormpt and destroy Japan's sons.
In other words, the representational strategy of occupied Japan-as
prostitute that ?e deploys across these texts lends itself with facility to a
highly clich?d brand of misogyny; and depressing though this is, perhaps
?e's demonization of the sex worker is nothing more than his succumbing
to the inevitable momentum of this most tendentious of metaphors. Yet
throughout his career, ?e has always been the experimentalist enemy of
clich?. As such, his gravitation toward so tried-and-tested a metaphor con
tinues to jar in much the same way as the preachy reproach to female sexu
ality displayed in the series grates with his reputation for tolerance, human
ism, and socialist compassion. Perhaps, therefore, ?e's unease at female
"empowerment" and his apparent determination to read the female body and
the nation-state as one and the same tell only part of the story; clues to the
rest of his motivation need to be sought elsewhere. Further insight into the
fear and loathing of female sexuality that surface in ?e's series can be found
in the theories expounded by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, his
seminal study of the psychopathology of the native male under colonialism.
In this text, which explores colonial society in the Antilles, Fanon takes as
his ostensible subject the relationship between racism and mental illness,
and the habits of desperate accommodation with the "master race" that en
sue in the imperialist setting. In practice, however, Fanon's text?just like
?e's?is as much about gender as it is about the colonial struggle.
To be more precise, a core subtext of Fanon's study is his conceptual
ization of the role played by the Westernized female in Antillean society.
According to Fanon, such women typically seek white men as lovers and
marriage partners, and, by dismissing local suitors as below their notice,
compound the crisis that already afflicts the colonized Antillean male as he
strives for self-respect. Although Fanon freely concedes that these women
are principally motivated by a desire for white acceptance and for the per
sonal betterment that is its corollary, their desire is described as a kind of
racial "bleaching" or "lactification" and is aggressively ridiculed. The native
male's drive to make it in the white man's world is, however, viewed as an
inescapable outcome of the colonized condition, and Fanon analyzes it with
compassion.42
A version of this same partisan attitude occurs throughout ?e's series on
occupied Japan. Most of the male protagonists in this set of narratives are
actively engaged in the study of the West (three are students of French liter
ature, ?e's own university major).43 What is more, they cultivate American
and European friends, are conversant with Occidental languages, display
distinctly Westernized traits, and to all intents and purposes behave in the
manner of what ?e himself has termed the "in-between people" (ch?kan
sha). These liminal figures?staples of fiction throughout the 1950s, as
Yoshikuni Igarashi has noted?included Japanese Americans, interpreters,
commercial third parties, and, of course, prostitutes.44 As Yoshio Iwamoto
42. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London:
Pluto Press, 1986), pp. 41-62.
43. The three are the boku-narrator in "Miru mae ni tobe," Natsuo in "Kassai," and Yasuo
in War er a no jidai.
44. Yoshikuni Igarashi, Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Cul
ture, 1945-1970 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 82-102. Prevalent as these
figures were during the occupation and early postwar period, their fictional antecedents date as
observes of Yasuo in Warera nojidai, these varied characters epitomized the

"'colonized mind' ... a mind that has thoroughly internalized the claims of
superiority by the colonizer and wants to be a part of its domain."45 But con
temptible as these craven young men are to us, ?e's readers, it is the female
sex workers who come in for still harsher treatment at the writer's hands for
surrendering to this desire and consorting with the enemy. And if that were
not crime enough, these female intermediaries also stand accused of the
even graver sin of cmshing male morale through the slurs that their sexual
choices inflict on native manhood. All the while, the fact that the young men
they damage so grievously tend to be ch?kansha themselves is left partially
eclipsed.
Quite clearly, a process of transference is at work here, in which a for
givable male attraction to the power and allure of the West is magically re
configured, once it crosses the gender divide, into an outright betrayal of
the nation by its female subjects. In other words, the prostitute who services
GIs functions as a less acceptable doppelg?nger for the many and varied
Japanese?from black-market operators to Westernized intellectuals?
who had professional dealings with the occupying forces or found them
selves increasingly enticed by Euro-American culture. This awareness that
an attitude of companionship, complicity, or even outright collaboration
with Japan's American masters was becoming increasingly inevitable under
the new postwar order provoked feelings of intense discomfort. And in this
sense, ?e's baleful depiction of GI prostitutes may be nothing other than an
exercise in tactical scapegoating. After all, the panpan, with her gutter Eng
lish, her Hollywood-inspired outfits, and her avid consumption of Ameri
can-brand cigarettes and chewing gum, represented the embrace of the West
in its most cmdely conspicuous form?and was thus an open target. This is
not to say, of course, that ?e was blind to other "crimes" of complicity. On
the contrary, in his guise as an essayist trading in the currency of ratiocina
tion, ?e shows that he was all too aware that the broad sweep of Japanese
society was succumbing to the colonized mindset. In "Sengo seinen no Ni
hon fukki," for example, he writes blisteringly of his peers and their slippery
sense of Japanese self:
the spiritual tendency of young Japanese is, generally speaking, to desire ex

ile, to desire escape from Japan and escape from the Japanese people. In fact,
I believe that many young people, even while they live here in Japan, are ac
tually enacting a kind of exile. Young Japanese have spurned Japanese films,
and they watch foreign films just as if they were foreigners watching their
far back as the Meiji period and have remained a constant of Japanese literature ever since, re
curring in the work of writers as varied as Natsume S?seki, Mori ?gai, Tanizaki Jun'ichir?, and
Mishima Yukio.
45. Iwamoto, "Sex, Power, and the Other," p. 46.
own national cinema. Young people leaving the movie theater walk like
foreigners, and their expressions are those of foreigners; they are intoxicated
by these short moments in which they are released from the fact of being
Japanese.46
Yet as soon as female sex workers enter the fray?whether in the con
text of ?e's "rational" essays or his "emotional" fiction?the heavy freight
of guilt for this lost identity can be expediently passed on. In fact, what we
observe in ?e's work is an implicit "grading" of the ch?kansha in terms of
their perfidiousness, with sex workers who fraternized with GIs occupying
the lowest rung in the hierarchy of baikoku. This is not, of course, to deny the
marked disdain that ?e displays toward Nihon no seinen across these writ
ings. His fiction, in particular, is as full of callow and cowardly young men
as it is of emasculating prostitutes, and if ?e's textual panpan are reviled,
then their paramours are often made grotesquely laughable. In both "Mini
mae ni tobe" and "Kassai," the gutless conduct of the intellectual youth is an
insistent narrative feature, at times verging on parody: the I-narrator of the
former text punches his tormentor Gabriel only when the latter's back is
turned, while Natsuo is so frightened of Lucien that he continues their ho
mosexual affair even though he prefers women. Sympathy for these male
protagonists is in short supply, as they dither, drop out, and surrender up
their masculinity with barely a fight. And although other stories in the set
(such as "Ningen no hitsuji" and "Kurai kawa, omoi kai") render Nihon no
seinen in far kinder strokes, all of ?e's young men are clearly cast in anti
heroic mold?baikokudo either by choice or by default. It is only when
women?or, more precisely, sex workers?enter the equation that the sins
of Japanese male youth start to become attenuated. Two parallel texts from
the same period make this process clear.
"Fui no oshi" (Unexpected mute),47 a short story published in 1958, pro
vides the first oblique proof of a gendered hierarchy. The text describes a fa
tal three-way encounter between a group of American servicemen, their
Japanese interpreter, and the inhabitants of a remote mountain village to
which the GIs are dispatched on a mission. Relations between the villagers
and the soldiers are smooth and warm at first, until the botched interventions
of the interpreter provoke a clash with the village head, who is then shot
dead by one of the GIs. The villagers soon take their revenge, drowning the
interpreter in a symbolic scene of catharsis and communitas. Without the in
terpreter, interaction with the American presence becomes impossible, and
the convoy of soldiers departs with their mission abandoned. At first sight,
the male ch?kansha in this narrative seems to fare far worse than his female
counterparts discussed in the rest of this article: his death is the absolute
46. Oe, "Sengo seinen no Nihon fukki," p. 122.

47. ?e, "Fui no oshi," in ?e Kenzabur? zensakuhin 2, pp. 39-50.
punishment, and it is ritually savored by the villagers as the harbinger of a

new spirit of fellowship in the mountains. But when the same basic tale of
GIs, Japanese, and ch?kansha is retold in the love triangle series of texts, the
kind of male intermediary found in "Fui no oshi"?linguist, student of the
West, and willing companion of representatives of the Allied powers domi
ciled in Japan?suddenly becomes the hapless casualty of an altogether
more dangerous kind of go-between: the female sex worker. As the "villain"
of "Fui no oshi" becomes the "victim" of the quintet of sexual narratives,
?e's gender bias begins to make itself apparent.
This bias emerges still more starkly when we cross-reference ?e's fic
tional representation of GI prostitutes with commentary that appears in his
essay "Warera no sei no sekai." Here, ?e notes how "the fear of war ... is
powerfully connected to sexuality" and cites as proof the pitiful example of
an American soldier he encountered in a Kobe bar. Rendered impotent by
his experiences of battle during the Korean War, the young veteran ex
presses his trauma by compulsively exposing himself in a dark corner of the
establishment, thereby incurring the derision of the "women of the night"
(yoru no onna) who frequent the bar in search of custom. As ?e puts it:
It is perfectly natural that the women who observed this man from their pro
fessional mentality as prostitutes could only respond by mocking him. But
I was moved and gazed at this young returnee from war?who at some ar
bitrary moment had been dragged off to the battlefield, endured the violent
deaths of his comrades, become sexually dysfunctional in an excess of
terror, and could not help but hold tightly to that abhorrent sexual organ
which had lost the power to achieve erection?with the solidarity that came
from being a young man in the modern world who might meet the same fate
himself.48
This passage discloses the moral polarities that, in ?e's politico-sexual

world, define and divide the genders in the crisis zones of combat, occupa
tion, and military furlough abroad. Despite the fact that the mood of the es
say is powerfully nationalistic?as ?e inveighs against the security treaty
and beseeches Japan's seiteki ningen to rouse themselves from apathy?the
extract quoted above explicitly draws the battle lines between men and
women rather than across sovereign states. Thus, although the jeering pros
titutes are nominally excused their disdain, in reality they are presented as
adversaries who will deny youth its manhood as mercilessly as any war.49
Clearly, their "proper" role is to offer wounded veterans the relief of R&R;
48. ?e, "Warera no sei no sekai," p. 310.

49. The incident that ?e witnesses does, of course, lend itself to alternative interpre
tations. Indeed, it is possible to read the scene in reverse and to view the soldier's exhibition
ism as the means through which he asserts a quasi-masochistic control over the prostitutes
around him.
yet when they do provide these services, as we discover in the series of narra
tives under exploration here, they are promptly demonized for their baikoku.
All the while, ?e's sympathy for the American soldier?just like the admi
ration his male protagonists offer up so blithely to the West?escapes all
critical scrutiny.
Ultimately, what we observe across ?e's series is a repetitive inscription
of the "double," the psychoanalytical phenomenon identified by Otto Rank
in 1914 and given its first literary application by Sigmund Freud in "The
Uncanny" (1919). The body of scholarship on the double in literature pro
duced since then offers a mass of differing interpretive strategies; but as
Sau-ling Cynthia Wong has noted in her study of manifestations of the mo
tif in Asian American literature, these approaches all share a common de
nominator. As she puts it,
students of the double are remarkably consistent on one point: the central
role of psychological "disowning" in the formation of the double ... all
would agree that the double is formed through repression and projection, in
a general defensive process known variously as splitting, dissociation, de
composition, or fragmentation. The double is symptomatic of a crisis in
self-acceptance and self-knowledge: part of the self, denied recognition by
the conscious ego, emerges as an external figure exerting a hold over the
protagonist that seems disproportionate to provocation or inexplicable by
everyday logic.50
This is clearly the process at work in ?e's depictions of occupied Japan.

As they consort with Japan's conquerors and emasculate the political will of
Japanese youth, ?e's panpan are carrying the can for what was a far more
pervasive trend toward complicity with the American-dominated status quo.
In high double style, the demonized prostitute is made to function as a con
venient dumping ground for the repressed emotional waste of an entire
society?a technique that works all the more smoothly since the marginal
ized status of these women allows a decent distance to be maintained be
tween them and the more respectable middle classes whose guilt and angst
they really embody.51 For a readership that was trying to come to terms with
50. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to
Extravagance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 82.
51. Furthermore, ?e's occupation narratives provide a textbook case of the double's
capacity to exert "a hold over the protagonist that seems disproportionate to provocation or
inexplicable by everyday logic." The liaisons between unattractive middle-aged prostitutes and
well-to-do young men which are the focus of these narratives appear perplexing, if not im
plausible, unless the logic of the double is applied. In particular, the inability of the male pro
tagonist to break off with his mistress despite the often intense physical revulsion he feels to
ward her constitutes a considerable aporia unless we see the two as versions of each other.
When the protagonist recoils from his prostitute mistress, what he is really recoiling from is his
own self-disgust as it is embodied in her; and, by the same token, it is the very fact that she is
defeat, occupation, and the new Pax Americana, Oe's gaily amoral sex work
ers provide an all-too-convenient means of second-order catharsis.52
"Kurai kawa, omoi kai": A Case Study in Transference
The third narrative in ?e's set offers a paradigmatic outworking of these

various points. At the core of the text is a youthful incarnation of ?e's stock
character of the period, the seiteki ningen who finds himself trapped in
erotic lassitude that arrests all meaningful action. In his early teens, and in
the toils of a troubled adolescence, the protagonist is drawn into a liaison
with a predatory onrii who steals his innocence in sadistic style. Left behind
to study at home while his parents and sisters go off on an excursion, the boy
is lured into the home of his neighbors, a prostitute and her black GI
boyfriend Peterson, both of whom are shunned by the Japanese around them.
The narrative describes how the onrii plies her 13-year-old neighbor with
whiskey, tells him stories about Peterson's violent behavior, and then subjects
him to a disturbing seduction. Before sending him on his way, she promises
to marry the boy and raise a family with him by the seaside. Yet when the
lovelorn protagonist appears the next morning to take her up on the prom
ise, the prostitute slams the door in his face; and before long the sounds of
her and Peterson passionately patching up their quarrel echo through the
partition wall. The boy finds himself vomiting uncontrollably, suffering
from both the shock of rejection and the effects of his first hangover. His
love for the woman is undiminished, however, and the story ends with his
vow to pursue her forever.
As suggested earlier, "Kurai kawa, omoi kai" conveys a palpable hard
ening of ?e's antipathy toward the panpan. In this third text in the series, ?e
tinkers with the dimensions of his triangle, realigning the positions of both
the youth and the GI in order to foreground the prostitute and her treason.
This shift is signposted first of all by a change in narrative register: instead
of the I-narration of "Mini mae ni tobe" with its intimations of subjectivity,
?e moves toward the apparent distance of the third-person in this later story.
The objectivity of his third-person narration is, however, disingenuous:
rather than remote omniscience, ?e's storyteller engages in what we might
call narrated consciousness, plumbing the boy's psyche and turning his
thoughts seamlessly into words. All the while, however, the absence of first
person markers seems to vouchsafe neutrality?with the result that ?e's
his double that makes his attempt at distance self-defeating. This paradox of interlocking iden
tities explains the "disproportionate" hold she exercises over him.
52. Nishikawa Nagao has argued that prostitutes and writers shared a similar ontological
position?as despised constituents within a closed society?from the Meiji period onward,
thus opening up the possibility that the fictional sex worker functions most tellingly as an avatar
of the writer himself. See Nishikawa, Nihon no sengo sh?setsu, p. 63.
overblown critique of the GI prostitute comes to resonate as the voice of

truth. In a related move, both the boy and the woman remain nameless
throughout the text. This studied anonymity heightens the almost allegori
cal effect that ?e strives for in this narrative: while the specific naming of
Peterson obliquely suggests the transience of the American presence, the
boy and his female tormentor become timeless representatives of what post
war Japan has become and what it will remain. And as such, of course, the
innocence of one and guilt of the other become artificially amplified.
Throughout the text, in fact, this motif of innocence betrayed becomes
the chief conduit for ?e's hostility toward the GI prostitute. Here again, an
unmistakable upping of the ante from previous texts has occurred. Whereas
in both "Ningen no hitsuji" and "Mini mae ni tobe," the male protagonist is
a university student who lives independently in the metropolis and?in the
latter case, at least?has a measure of sexual experience, ?e's third seiteki
ningen is far too young to fend for himself in what ?e refers to in his
eponymous essay as "our world of sex." By turning back the clock to ex
plore his protagonist as a boy, ?e plays on the cult of the child within the
Japanese imaginary and thereby stage-manages a volte-face from prostitute
as-victim to prostitute-as-abuser that uses sentiment to reel readers in.53 In
the opening pages of the text, particularly, ?e dwells on the intense vulner
ability of the boy. Poised on the cusp of adolescence, his changing body pro
vokes anxiety and confusion:
His penis was like a meek little bird huddled in a nest. A motionless little
bird which could only chirp softly . . . His slightly twisted spine, narrow
waist, and bandy knees looked particularly ungainly. Worrying about his
own physical awkwardness in this way, he would suddenly find that he had
an inexplicable erection .... He sat on the bed completely naked with his
head bowed. This pose made him feel effeminate and utterly defenseless.
Perhaps, as he sat like this, he would be set upon by a hairy-chested man and
forcibly violated. He felt his pulse begin to beat violently. This was a fa
vorite and frequently repeated fantasy of his. Whenever he fantasized like
this, he worried that one day he might become a homosexual.54
These descriptions of the early adolescent tentatively exploring a new

world of sex and physicality are neatly judged, conveying both the excited
curiosity of pubescence and the boy's panic as his bodily impulses begin to
53. For analysis of the emphasis on the rearing of children as social role during the 1950s,
see Merry Isaacs White, Perfectly Japanese: Making Families in an Era of Upheaval (Berke
ley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 71-72. Existing as symbolic opposites to ?e's
abusive panpan in the contemporary world were the members of Japan's Mothers' Convention
(Hahaoya Taikai), whose pacifist lobbyings became entwined with the Anpo demonstrations of
1960 and brought a politicized gloss to the sanctity of childhood. See Vera Mackie, Feminism
in Modern Japan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 135.
54. ?e, "Kurai kawa, omoi kai," ?e Kenzabur? zensakuhin 2, pp. 7-8.
steal a march on his experience. Together, they evoke a mood of the Bil
dungsroman in the early part of the story, thus priming the reader for the rite
of passage the boy will undergo when he encounters ?e's female allegory of
treason and temptation. And in a similarly symbolic vein, his nervous fan
tasies of male rape summon up what ?e saw as Japan's ignominious posture
toward the United States and its seeming desire to surrender itself up to the
greater power.
That said, ?e's third occupation narrative chooses not to pursue the
theme of America-as-hearty-conqueror that is traced in its two predecessors.
Indeed, so set is ?e on pillorying the sex worker in this piece that his GI
ends up joining the nameless protagonist in victimhood. This process is
accomplished principally through ?e's sometimes suspect exploitation of
Peterson's identity as an African American. Like all the foreigners in the
occupied Japan series, Peterson is physically intimidating ("a giant of a
man ... [with] large fingers"); yet all the while he wears the demeanor of a
slightly retarded infant. His expression is fixed in an almost permanent
smile?in fact, the narrator makes five separate references on a single page
to the grin that plays perpetually on Peterson's face, on one occasion dub
bing it the beam of a "foolish child."55 Peterson is also violent, exudes a foul
body odor, and, in the view of his mistress, would be better off mating with
a dog. In other words, ?e's delineation of Peterson's character and physical
attributes subscribes to virtually every Japanese clich? in circulation about
kokujin. As John G. Russell puts it:
A brief survey of literary and visual representation of blacks in contempo

rary Japan reveals the persistence of racial stereotypes which ascribe to
blacks the following characteristics: 1) infantilism 2) primitivism 3) hyper
sexuality, 4) bestiality, 5) natural athletic prowess or physical stamina,
6) mental inferiority, 7) psychological weakness, and 8) emotional volatil
ity [sic].56
It would be difficult to dismiss the argument that ?e is guilty of racial

prejudice in this text, even if we follow strict narratological rules and at
tribute the rampant use of clich? to ?e's storyteller rather than to the writer
himself. Indeed, ?e reveals himself as something of a moral pragmatist
when issues of national salvation are in the frame, and the exigencies of
Japan's plight seem almost to liberate him from the demands of fair play and
political correctness?whether this relates to race, gender, or sexual orien
tation. At the very least, ?e plays up to commonly held Japanese prejudices
in this text as a means of making Peterson's race an unmissable issue, so that
55. Ibid., p. 10.

56. John G. Russell, "Race and Reflexivity: The Black Other in Contemporary Japanese
Mass Culture," in John Whittier Treat, ed., Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture (Rich
mond: Curzon Press, 1996), p. 20.
he can then harness this issue to his broader polemical purpose. More pre
cisely, the story's characterization of Peterson emphasizes racial stereotype
as part of an involved impeachment of American activities in the Pacific re
gion. Peterson has served in the Korean War and killed five men in the
course of executing U.S. containment strategies. ?e's recourse to racist
clich? in his depiction of Peterson sharpens what would otherwise be a fairly
routine critique of U.S. militaristic interventionism into an indictment that
throws America's treatment of its own into the mix. Just as the black soldier
in ?e's earlier novella "Shiiku" (The catch, 1958) is captured, chained up
like an animal, and finally sacrificed for the U.S. cause, Peterson endures di
rect combat as a foot soldier in America's wars and, in the contrast between
his exaggeratedly "simple" nature and the bloodletting he is forced to com
mit, is seen almost as a casualty of battle himself. African American GIs
such as Peterson?who at one point in the story is described as mournfully
singing a Negro spiritual?are typically differentiated from the white sol
diers in ?e's prose, who swagger and brawl with all the self-assurance of the
master race and are more than happy to shoulder the "white man's burden"
as they bring their mission to less civilized climes. Seemingly unaware of
the irony that attaches to his use of ethnic stereotype to satirize race relations
in the United States, ?e makes Peterson's blackness a signifier of victim
hood and thus traces perceptible lines of affinity between the GI and the
Japanese youth whom he is supposed to subjugate.
In several other ways, too, this sense of victimhood as a shared con
stituency represents a further revisiting of the fertile symbolic territory that
?e first explored in "Shiiku." Both narratives stage the encounter between a
black GI and a local Japanese boy as a means of exploring unequal power re
lations, coming of age, and the ramifications of war, and both present the two
as companions in painful epiphany. Once again, Russell is instmctive here:
It is noteworthy that black characters often appear in Japanese stories in con
nection with children_Like his adolescent companions, the Black Other
in these narratives is a tragic man-child, and it is through their association and
identification with him that the Japanese adolescents in these narratives at
tempt to resolve some internal crisis and assume the burden of adult respon
sibilities_These narratives... would seem to borrow the American liter
ary convention of using the Black Other as a means of introducing an
adolescent non-black protagonist to an unjust world of adults, marking their
loss of innocence and na?vet?, as, for example, in Twain's Huckleberry
Finn ... on another level, these narratives depict the Black Other as him
self ... child-like, as a weak, pitiful being whose confused and impotent at
tempts to master his environment are defeated in the end by forces beyond
his control_In short, the Black Other is victim and underdog.57
57. Ibid., pp. 23-24.
Both the protagonist and his GI love rival are outsiders?the boy be
cause of his adolescent angst, Peterson because of race?whose destinies
are ruled by a distant hegemon and who function as eerie alter egos of one
another: alike in their innocence, their inability to name their sorrows, and
their estrangement from an adult world of agency and knowledge. And the
final seal on their status as interchangeable souls is, of course, the sexual
duping that both boy and soldier suffer at the hands of the prostitute.
Indeed, rather than the sins of the United States, it is the deviance of the
prostitute that ?e throws most starkly into relief through his dual emphasis
on the boy's pubescent fragility and the "tragic man-child" status of Peter
son. Throughout the text, she is "experience" to their "innocence," and her
knowing manipulations soon fascinate ?e to such an extent that the role of
the United States as a target of critique becomes increasingly vague and elu
sive. Nowhere is the prostitute's abuse of power more apparent than in her
relationship with the young protagonist, a brief encounter which unfolds as
a tense dialectic between the maternal and the erotic. It is no accident, for
example, that the prostitute introduces herself to the boy for the first time
only a few short minutes after his family leave on their trip: almost her first
words to him are a solicitous "Home alone, are you?" Her appearance hard
on the heels of his mother's departure intimates a strong sense of in loco
parentis, swiftly backed up by her reassuring statement that she and his
mother are, in fact, exactly the same age (watashi wa anta no ok?san to ona
idoshi yo). Yet moments later, she and Peterson begin a fierce argument,
accompanied by heavy thuds and whimpering noises behind the wall, to
which the boy reacts with horror: "He opened his eyes so wide that they hurt,
and stood staring at the wall. Biting his lip, he felt his chest heave violently.
His emotions were so overwrought that tears were beginning to well."58
Here, ?e captures the boy as sudden lone witness to a bewildering adult
world of violence and sexuality: now his neighbor is less the reliable mater
nal surrogate than a woman with an ambiguous erotic identity in need of
protection herself. Her subsequent reappearance on the boy's doorstep,
looking both vulnerable and vampish, reinforces this shifting persona:
There was a sound of nails scraping against the door . . . putting on a shirt
he went to open it. Peterson's mistress was standing there, wearing a kind
of black undergarment that gaped open at the neck, her face tender, her eyes
red and with tears glistening on her lower eyelids.59
The seduction scene that follows is remarkable for the way in which it
finesses the onrii's subjectivity?her right to feel pain and fear at being
beaten by her lover?and instead writes the boy into what is effectively the
sentient, suffering position. ?e's writing becomes blunt and uncomplicated
58. ?e, "Kurai kawa," p. 14.
59. Ibid.
in its representation of the vengeful transference of abuse; and the manner

in which this handing down is accomplished, again through a synthesis of
the motherly and the erotic, is made shocking in an unequivocal way. Ma
ternal mannerisms?right down to the speech patterns used by mothers to
ward their children?fuse with the very adult language of sex, as the pros
titute mixes the two codes to inveigle the boy into seeing her seduction as
part of the normal mn of things. Instmcting him to down a glass of whiskey,
for example, she uses the imperative form commonly employed by mothers
and schoolteachers when exhorting their charges to drink a wholesome
glass of milk. When she orders him to get undressed before the seduction,
she uses a similar command form, behaving to all intents and purposes like
a mother preparing a naughty child for bed. All the while, however, this
schizophrenic mother/seductress role-play coexists with the gauntlet the
prostitute throws down to the boy's "manliness," as she implicitly beseeches
him to rescue her from the bmtish Peterson. The latter she describes to the
boy in terrifying strokes: he becomes a Goliath against whom her new lover,
with his "slightly twisted spine, narrow waist, and bandy knees," cannot
possibly compete. Nevertheless, she still "makes a man" of him, even prom
ising to mn away with him, as if this battle for her affections were somehow
winnable. But by the end of the text, the woman has returned the young ini
tiate to hapless emasculation, as she switches her affections back to Peter
son and abandons the protagonist to a future of sexual self-doubt.
Up to a point, "Kurai kawa, omoi kai" presents a tableau of the wretched
ness of war and its aftermath of military occupation in which no one really
"wins" and human interaction is whittled down to petty clawings for power
in a baseline context of disenfranchisement. Each corner of the triangle?
man, woman, and boy?is a powerless victim of the postwar order; but
rather than a solidarity of the oppressed, what ?e's text recounts is, to para
phrase the poet Philip Larkin, a tale of woman handing on misery to man in
an endlessly disfiguring cycle. The boy's own surrender to this logic is ret
rospectively prefigured in the earlier narrative "Mini mae ni tobe," in which
the I-narrator (the adult version of our same protagonist) mistreats the young
girl with whom he becomes involved after his liaison with Yoshie. Yet just
as in Fanon's androcentric paradigm of the "bleached" and "lactified" An
tillean woman, the sex worker in ?e's piece is stigmatized far more severely
for her paltry efforts at self-empowerment. Moreover, ?e tmly seems a man
after Fanon's own heart?pace his dubious use of ethnic stereotype?when
he chooses to complicate the racial dynamic by making the onrifs patron an
African American serviceman instead of the interchangeable Caucasian
who features in the other narratives of the series. The onrifs desire for self
betterment (? la logic of Fanon) decrees that she should seek a lover from
the "colonialist" mling class; but ?e's prostitute would clearly prefer a
white client and is only "making do" with Peterson?hence the barrage of
racist abuse that she hurls in his direction. In this way, male victimhood be
comes redoubled in the text, since both men suffer the woman's scorn; and
?e's demonization of the female sex worker can advance along two concur
rent paths. Meanwhile?needless to say?the boy's equally color-coded re
actions to Peterson (his mesmerized attention to the man's "difference")
emerge as harmless in the text. They are nothing more than the fascination
of youth for its racial "other," a fascination that will later express itself in the
more developed ch?kansha behavior exhibited by ?e's older protagonists
elsewhere in the set.
Conclusion
When viewed as a series, it becomes clear that ?e's occupation narra

tives find themselves pulled ever more persuasively in the direction of the
panpan or onrii, a figure whom ?e viewed initially (if we can rely on the
testimony of his essays) as a structuro-symbolic conceit through which he
would convey grander themes of manhood, politics, and the nation. The de
gree to which this intention was subverted is borne out further by the last two
narratives in the set, "Kassai" and Warera no jidai, which?as suggested
earlier?depict the GI prostitute still more angrily. The question of why ?e
demonized these women has been addressed at length in this essay. What re
mains at this concluding stage is the issue of intensification, the reason why
?e's texts build up such a head of misogynistic momentum as his politico
sexual parable plays itself out over the course of 1958-59. Perhaps the most
credible rationale for this is that the vehemence of ?e's portrayals of the
panpan intensifies in direct proportion to his own gathering disillusionment
about developments in the political realm. As Kishi Nobusuke's negotia
tions with U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles over revisions to the
security treaty inched toward agreement in the late 1950s, ?e and other left
wing intellectuals must have begun to fear that the fledgling popular protests
taking flight around them might crash and burn under the artillery of the
conservative right. This fear, of course, proved entirely founded. ?e's anxi
ety and frustration over the prospect of a revised security treaty sought many
outlets: fiction, essays, and active participation in the grass-roots protest
movement. But in the manner of so many anxieties and frustrations, they also
sought the temporary relief that comes from displacement and surfaced
obliquely in his damning representations of GI prostitutes. Thus, secret erotic
disgust not only signifies, but to some extent also takes precedence over, a
wholly admissible disgust with events in the political realm. Inevitably, per
haps, the force of this displacement increased in tandem with the intensity
of ?e's disenchantment.
In these testing circumstances, it is in many ways understandable
that ?e the democratic patriot?to collapse Kataoka and Napier's earlier
dichotomy?should feel resentment at those who profiteered from the in

equities of U.S.-Japanese relations. As William Wetherall puts it:
Japanese history is full of accounts of the successes and failures of emigrants

and returnees, sojourners and immigrants, native and normative translators
and interpreters, diplomats and traders, commoners and aristocrats, mis
sionaries, soldiers, prostitutes, pirates, criminals, journalists, scholars and
students?all of whom have done something, for better or worse, to bridge
Japan with the rest of the world.60
And, unsurprisingly, these figures have often suffered for their in

betweenness, as direct envy and transferred guilt have provoked fierce re
sponses from less adaptable?or at least less honest?members of the same
society. These responses can often be disproportionate: as Kuroko Kazuo
has noted, ?e's antipathy toward the "ugly Japanese" (minikui Nihonjin)
who interceded with America was often far more pointed than his anger at
the overbearing superpower itself.61 Yet Wetherall also notes that ?e him
self possesses "all the traits of a liminal citizen in a changing Japan"62; and
given the conspicuous similarities that link writer and protagonist in these
texts, it is tempting to see ?e's critique of the GI prostitutes as an extended
apologia pro vita sua. Either way, there can be little doubt that the occupa
tion narratives sit rather awkwardly among the trademark texts of ?e's left
wing and radicalized oeuvre. So much so, in fact, that in the broad-bmsh
context of his stellar career, it seems easier to write the series off as a youth
ful aberration; and this is what many critics have done. Scant studies exist
on the set and only one has been translated into English, despite the huge
boost to the author's international fame that was provided by his 1994 No
bel prize.63 But aberration or otherwise, the occupation narratives remain
relevant for the insights they provide into the fate that can befall the best of
liberalist intentions when national pride, that vital bastion of male identity,
is imperiled. As such, they furnish further proof, if any more were needed,
of the precarious ground inhabited by women in occupied territory.
School of Oriental and African Studies,

University of London
60. William Wetherall, "Buffer Zones: Oe Kenzaburo's Marginal Creatures," Japan Quar
terly, Vol. 36, No. 1 (1989), p. 32.
61. See Kuroko Kazuo, ?e Kenzaburo ron: Mori no shis? to ikikata no genri (Tokyo:
Sairy?sha, 1989), p. 120.
62. Wetherall, "Buffer Zones," p. 33.
63. See Hirata, "Masturbation, the Emperor and the Language of the Sublime," p. 95.

Doppelgängers, Misogyny, and The San Francisco System The Occupation Narratives of ŌeKenzaburō

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The Society for Japanese Studies

Doppelg?ngers, Misogyny, and the

Abstract: ?e Kenzabur?'s status as the left-wing conscience of postwar Japan

?e Kenzabur? 's status as the left-wing conscience of postwar Japan is now

Yet ?e is very far from an open-and-shut ideologue. His works provide

which will be referred to henceforth as his "occupation" narratives.4 The

?e wrote his interlinked narratives at a key crossroads in Japan's journey

part in the Sunagawa struggle. Finally, in November 1957, the popularly

subjugation, prostitutes occupy an unenviable position in the trenches of

became associated with the liberation of repressed sexuality?a world of

?e's Intention: A Metaphoric Reality for Japanese Youth

As stated earlier, ?e situates his occupation narratives between these

25. See ?e, "Warera no sei no sekai," in ?e Kenzabur?, Genshuku na tsunawatari:

The Texts: From Authorial Intention to Narrative Practice

This point becomes clearer when we scmtinize the progression of the

a three-way encounter between a group of drunken GIs, their prostitute

text in the set, constitutes something of an early apotheosis in this narrative

33. Oe, "Kassai," in ibid., pp. 51-79.

In order to resuscitate himself, [Yasuo] had to seek escape from Yoriko's

Yasuo's involvement with an Arab political activist, however, causes him to

Narrative Practice: Demonization and Doppelg?ngers

Perhaps this subversion of stated intent makes better sense when we

sympathetic fascination that often colored popular perceptions of the pan

observes of Yasuo in Warera nojidai, these varied characters epitomized the

the spiritual tendency of young Japanese is, generally speaking, to desire ex

46. Oe, "Sengo seinen no Nihon fukki," p. 122.

punishment, and it is ritually savored by the villagers as the harbinger of a

This passage discloses the moral polarities that, in ?e's politico-sexual

48. ?e, "Warera no sei no sekai," p. 310.

This is clearly the process at work in ?e's depictions of occupied Japan.

"Kurai kawa, omoi kai": A Case Study in Transference

The third narrative in ?e's set offers a paradigmatic outworking of these

overblown critique of the GI prostitute comes to resonate as the voice of

These descriptions of the early adolescent tentatively exploring a new

A brief survey of literary and visual representation of blacks in contempo

It would be difficult to dismiss the argument that ?e is guilty of racial

55. Ibid., p. 10.

57. Ibid., pp. 23-24.

in its representation of the vengeful transference of abuse; and the manner

When viewed as a series, it becomes clear that ?e's occupation narra

dichotomy?should feel resentment at those who profiteered from the in

Japanese history is full of accounts of the successes and failures of emigrants

And, unsurprisingly, these figures have often suffered for their in

School of Oriental and African Studies,

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