| This dissertation considers how the physical space of the demimonde was interpreted in literary space by 20th-century Japanese writers, filmmakers, and visual artists such as Ivagai Kaffu, Koda Aya, Tanizaki Junichiro, Kuki Shuzo, Kawabata Yasunari, Mishima Yukio, Hosoe Eikoh, Tamura Taijiro, Murakami Ryu, and Matsumoto Toshio. Especially as the space of the contemporary Japanese pleasure quarters was undergoing radical changes due to the effects of rapid modernization and war, novels, short stories, essays, films, and photographs about the demimonde innovatively dealt with both historical and textual concerns with space and time, utilizing techniques such as literary montage, a synthesis of tableaux and textual progression, and shifting narrative viewpoints to represent loss, idealization, trauma, mourning, movement, and memorialization.; In works such as Aya's Nagareru, the vanishing, traditional karyukai becomes internalized in the text's narrator and in the text itself through tropes of narrowness and enclosure and meditations on boundaries and dwelling. In other renderings, particularly those written during the interwar period, the sexualized space of the demimonde, once cordoned off into officially sanctioned quarters like Yoshiwara and Edo, becomes intertwined with the domestic sphere and more diffuse public space, resulting in a chaos of confused boundaries, identities, fantasies, contagions, and addictions. This representation of public space and physical borders in demimonde literature is paralleled by a similarly strong fascination with psychological space and emotional demarcations, especially as the demimonde and its taboos are employed as a locus of and a reaction to trauma in postwar fiction and films.; Such demimonde fiction challenges state authority, structuring a place of resistance in which society's outsiders may become, through their finely cultivated tastes, insiders. The publication of this specialized knowledge of erotic aesthetics has ironic political implications in a Japan that was trying to regain its sense of identity---and perhaps a modicum of pleasure---through myths of cultural unity. On a psychological level, the texts examined in this dissertation will testify to the fact that the demimonde, often thought of as a place of pathology more than health, can at times through its very pathological representations press into a paradoxical space of healing. |
