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"Cather, Kirsten"
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Noting Suicide with a Vague Sense of Anxiety
This essay examines Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s 1927 suicide note, “Aru kyūyū e okuru shuki” (A note to a certain old friend), against the host of other works he left behind. These texts and their many intertexts have been largely overshadowed by the fame of this note and its infamous phrase: “a vague sense of anxiety.” Rather than probing these works to explain Akutagawa’s motive for suicide in retrospect, this essay considers how they also worked prospectively for the author. Their tangled publication and distribution histories suggest a complex relationship between bodies of literature and bodies of artists, between the corpus and the corpse.
Journal Article
The Dying Art of Japanese Cinema
This chapter looks at examples from postwar and contemporary Japanese cinema that revive the dead in order to explore the relationship between death and cinema. It focuses on narrative films that focus on re‐presenting the bodies of the dead in death's wake. The chapter begins with a look back at earlier classics, Kurosawa Akira's 1952
Ikiru
and Ozu Yasujiro's 1953
Tokyo monogatari
(
Tokyo Story
). The films reflect our contradictory desires to preserve the dead and to put them to rest in a medium that itself is often lamented as a dying art. In his 1951 essay “Death Every Afternoon,” Bazin claims cinema possesses a privileged relationship with death. Bazin is troubled by cinema's power to re‐present the ultimate change: death. The chapter concludes with more recent films:
Ososhiki
(
The Funeral
, Itami Juzo, 1984),
Okuribito
(
Departures
, Takita Yojiro, 2008), and
Wandafuru raifu
(
After Life
, Kore'eda Hirokazu, 1998).
Book Chapter
The great censorship trials of literature and film in postwar Japan, 1950–1983
Images of evil, scissor-wielding censors lurk in most narratives of literary and film history. Japan has had its own share of artists being persecuted by the official censors and their self-appointed minions. The brutal murders of proletariat writer Kobayashi Takiji by police in 1933 and of the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie by a Muslim extremist in 1991 are perhaps the most notorious cases of this. Such incidents, and other less spectacular acts of censorship, are often cited to prove that art in modern Japan has been at the mercy of draconian censorship. This story fails to account for the complexity of the interactions between censor and artist. It depicts the censor as having the power to exercise a political or legal judgment on a work of art, and the artist as being able to respond only by being either admirably subversive or unscrupulously complicit. This approach reduces art to the status of mere political indicator used to gauge the ideological affiliations of artists. In other words, censorship has often been used to write political, rather than artistic, history. In this study, I examine literary and film censorship in Japan by focusing on the most celebrated censorship trials of the post World War II period. I organize my dissertation around the artistic issues raised in the trials to show how the trials influenced and were influenced by artistic theories of authorship and reception, as well as by the notions of aesthetic value that define a canon. I draw from the seven postwar censorship trials that were prosecuted under obscenity laws and reached the appellate courts, with particular focus on the precedent-setting trials of the translation of Lady Chatterley's Lover in the 1950s and on the 1970s trials of Oshima Nagisa's book version of his infamous film In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no koriida, 1976) and Nagai Kafū's story “Behind the papering of the four-and-a half mat room” (“Yojō¯han fusuma no shitabari,” 1924). By considering how legal and artistic discourses often collided, but sometimes colluded, with one another in these trials, I illustrate the dynamic relationship of censor, artist, and text in modern Japanese literary and film history.
Dissertation
Japan's most famous writer committed suicide after a failed coup attempt - now, new photos add more layers to the haunting act
After the country's defeat in World War II, both institutions, he lamented, had been rendered impotent by a U.S.-imposed postwar constitution that reduced the emperor to a symbolic figurehead and renounced Japan's right to wage war. In one, he's dressed as a sailor who's been whipped to death on board a ship; in another, he's a garage mechanic in an unbuttoned jumpsuit stabbed by a screwdriver in the abdomen. With its generic and repetitive titles - \"The Death of a Sailor,\" \"The Death of a Mechanic,\" \"The Death of Gymnast,\" \"Drowned Man,\" \"Hanged Man\" and so forth - the \"dead\" body of Mishima is the only element that unites the variety of occupations and methods of dying. In Yasuzō Masumura's 1960 feature film \"Afraid to Die,\" he plays a punk yakuza gangster who's shot in the back, and he performs another seppuku as a samurai in Hideo Gosha's 1969 film \"Hitokiri.\"
Newspaper Article