【Report】Kanai Mieko's Corporeal Text and 'The Story of the Inflated Man’ Collaboration of the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Ritsumeikan University

Date: July 20, 2023

Event Summary

Lecture title: Kanai Mieko's Corporeal Text and 'The Story of the Inflated Man’

Speaker: Dr Hannah Osborne (UEA)

Discussant: Dr Yuten Sawanishi (Ryukoku University)

Chair: Dr Junko Toriyama (Ritsumeikan University)

The speaker’s bio:
Hannah Osborne is Japan Foundation Lecturer in Japanese Literature at the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and Chief Editor for the journal Japan
Forum. Her research interests include: intersections between text, illustration and the avant-garde arts; gender and the body; and women's writing and translation in modern Japanese literature. She
has recently published a number of translations and is currently working on her book manuscript The Intermedial Text: Kanai Mieko and the Japanese Avant Garde.

Lecture summary: Dr Osborne discussed a fundamental concept of Kanai Mieko’s writing, corporeal text, using the examples of her early essay and her later short story. She argued that Kanai had consciously developed this concept at the very outset of career; that it informed much of her early novellas and short stories; and, moreover, that it aimed at radically transforming the way in which we perceive and engage with texts.

Kanai Mieko’s first published essay, ‘Nikutairon e jostesu dai’ippo’ (‘Towards a Theory of Corporeality’), explores the meaning of a transgressive figure – the dancing-girl-in-pain – found in both the folk stories of Hans Christian Andersen and the butō performances of Hijikata Tatsumi. Dr Osborne described how this essay could be read as articulating an understanding of the body’s relationship with text, whereby the body (and its consciousness) serves as a model for how text operates. The two can be understood as interacting with each other through the repeated acts of reading and writing.

Such an understanding of the materiality of text and the relationship between it and the reader can then be seen to be at work in many of Kanai’s short stories. In her talk, Dr Osborne discussed its manifestation in a story ‘Kūki otoko no hanashi’ (‘The Story of the Inflated Man’, 1974). Dr Osborne’s translation of this story was published in the journal Review of Japanese Culture and Society: Photography of the Heisei Era (1989-2019): Memory and Transformation. Crises and Opportunities, vol. XXXI, Josai University Educational Corporation (2019).

The Inflated Man is a circus actor who is able to eat an obscene amount every day because, ‘[a]lthough food is something that becomes flesh and blood in normal bodies, in [his] case it becomes a kind of air, a hollow that has no substance, but that continues to expand’. The Inflated Man’s body, however, is one of many images in Kanai’s story in which a ‘void’ is described in relation to its external ‘structure’. Through its repeated association of ‘voids’ with ‘structures’, the story thus evokes the Japanese term ‘fiction’ (kyokō, lit. ‘empty structure’) to signal its own status as a piece of fiction. Although the characters for fiction in Japanese gesture towards an understanding of ‘fiction’ as the structuring of void (or that which is imaginary), Kanai’s story also directs us to an understanding that such void equates to an infinite multiplicity of texts. Moreover, through referencing literary allusions that are pictorial allusions (Disney’s Pinocchio’s pastiche of Jonah’s whale, Gustave Doré’s engraving to Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty, the manga version of the Japanese folk story ‘Momotarō’), the narrative enjoins us to do the same, thus inviting us to read it as though it were illustrated.

Dr Osborne concluded by considering how the concept of corporeal text has the potential to radically affect the manner in which we approach literature and all other art forms.

Attendance: The event was held in a hybrid mode and was attended by 25 participants both on site and online. Besides Ritsumeikan students and faculty, the lecture attracted guests from Nara, Tokyo, UK, and Australia.

Q&A: First, the audience had a chance to listen to exchanges between Dr Osborne and Dr Yuten Sawanishi from Ryukoku University who served as a discussant for the event. His insightful comments helped the attendees deepen their understanding of Kanai’s work and its relationship with a broader cultural context of the time. The questions from the audience touched upon: 1) the role of the body in Kanai’s work, 2) the intersections between Kanai’s work and other key texts of the Japanese avant-garde literature, 3) the role of the Japanese avant-garde literature of the 60s in today’s world dominated by social media with simplistic videos where the good are rewarded and the wicked are punished.