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Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan
Fusako Innami
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Fusako Innami offers the first comprehensive study of touch and skinship—relationality with the other through the skin—in modern Japanese writing. The concept of the unreachable—that is, the lack of characters' complete ability to touch what they try to reach for—provides a critical intervention on the issue of intimacy. Touch has been philosophically addressed in France, but literature is an effective—or possibly the most productive—venue for exploring touch in Japan, as literary texts depict what the characters may be concerned with but may not necessarily say out loud. Such a moment of capturing the gap between the felt and the said—the interaction between the body and language—can be effectively analyzed by paying attention to layers of verbalization, or indeed translation, by characters' utterances, authors' depictions, and readers' interpretations. Each of the writers discussed in this book—starting with Nobel prize winner Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, and Matsuura Rieko—presents a particular obsession with objects or relationality to the other constructed via the desire for touch.
In Touching the Unreachable, phenomenological and psychoanalytical approaches are cross-culturally interrogated in engaging with literary touch to constantly challenge what may seem like the limit of transferability regarding concepts, words, and practices. The book thereby not only bridges cultural gaps beyond geographic and linguistic constraints, but also aims to decentralize a Eurocentric hegemony in its production and use of theories and brings Japanese cultural and literary analyses into further productive and stimulating intellectual dialogues. Through close readings of the authors' treatment of touch, Innami develops a theoretical framework with which to examine intersensorial bodies interacting with objects and the environment through touch.
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Citations and Names
Introduction: Literary Touch to Mediate the Senses
Touch, Embodied, or Fantasized
Translating Sense Experiences into Language in Context
Toward the Unreachable
Chapter 1 Loved Object: The Unreachable
Loved Object
Ruptured Incorporation
Love of the Object and of the Self
Reciprocity in Sleep
Chapter 2 Touch in Plays of Distance, Shadow, Light
The Potentiality of an Unbridgeable Distance
Light and Darkness
Shadows Animated beyond the Surface
The Imagined through Touch
Coda
Chapter 3 Mediated Touch: Membrane, Skin, the “I”
The Membrane that Narrates
The Imaginary Membrane to Mediate the Body and Language
Mediated Construction of the Self
Giving through the Surface
Chapter 4 Renewing Relationship through the Skin
Skinship
Writing Intimate Relationships through Alternative Sensualities
Figure 2/Figure 3 Munakata Shikō, Sōhi no Zu [The Image of Two Goddesses], 1958. Two panel screen, 138.0×69.5 for each panel copyright of Munakata Shikō Memorial Museum of Art. Folding screen, painting by Munakata Shikō and calligraphy by Kaneko Ōtei to capture a part of diary entries from Tanizaki’s The Key, employing different writing systems (with the use of hiragana for the top screen, and katakana for the bottom screen to enact different writing systems employed by wife and husband-narrator, respectively, as originally written by Tanizaki) and different calligraphic styles accordingly.
Figure 2/Figure 3 Munakata Shikō, Sōhi no Zu [The Image of Two Goddesses], 1958. Two panel screen, 138.0×69.5 for each panel copyright of Munakata Shikō Memorial Museum of Art. Folding screen, painting by Munakata Shikō and calligraphy by Kaneko Ōtei to capture a part of diary entries from Tanizaki’s The Key, employing different writing systems (with the use of hiragana for the top screen, and katakana for the bottom screen to enact different writing systems employed by wife and husband-narrator, respectively, as originally written by Tanizaki) and different calligraphic styles accordingly.
Figure 4A Complicité co-production with Setagaya Public Theatre and barbicanbite09 Shun-kin, directed by Simon McBurney, inspired by A Portrait of Shunkin and In Praise of Shadows by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (First premiered in 2008 at Setagaya Public Theatre) copyright of Robbie Jack.
Figure 5A Complicité co-production with Setagaya Public Theatre and barbicanbite09 Shun-kin, directed by Simon McBurney, inspired by A Portrait of Shunkin and In Praise of Shadows by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (First premiered in 2008 at Setagaya Public Theatre) copyright of Sarah Ainslie.
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