【by Stefan Würrer, June 2024】
The primary focus of this essay is Nanimo Shitenai (Doing Nothing), a novel published by Japanese author Shōno Yoriko in 1991, and its portrayal of the gendered body. Before delving into the analysis, I will provide a brief overview of the context in which I situate this novel and explain why I find it important to examine it today.
1. Single-Issue Alliances
In July 2022, Japanese writer Shōno Yoriko (2022a) declared in a blog post that she would vote for Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) politician Yamatani Eriko in the upcoming upper house election, forming what she termed a “single-issue alliance” (itten kyōtō). The issue at the heart of this alliance was a draft of the “Bill to Promote Understanding for LGBT People,” also known as LGBT rikai zōshinhō, which both Yamatani and Shōno opposed. They interpreted the language of the draft, as Patrick Carland-Eccavaria (2022) summarized, as legitimizing “transgender identities they deemed ‘threats’ to women” (p.17).
Since 2020, Shōno (2020a, 2020b, 2020c, 2020d, 2021, 2022a, 2022b, 2022c, 2022d) has published numerous blog posts and essays, in which, similar to Yamatani (Ibuki, 2021; “Jimin Yamatani-shi,” 2021; Nikaidō, 2021, p. 12; Okuno, 2021), she framed trans-women as a potential threat to women’s safety, denying them the right to self-identification and bodily autonomy based on a biological essentialist understanding of assigned sex as gender. Shōno, in other words, has emerged as a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF). Shōno opposes the depathologization of trans people. This idea has been purported most prominently by the World Health Organization (WHO), which in 2020 declared that it would eliminate “gender identity disorder” from its manual of diagnoses by 2022, a decision that was successfully implemented. Following the WHO, in 2020, the Science Council of Japan (2020) recommended replacing Japan’s GID Law, the Law for the Handling of Gender in the Special Cases of People with Gender Identity Disorder (Seidōitsusei Shōgaisha no Seibetsu no Atsukai no Tokurei ni Kansuru Hō; commonly and hereafter referred to as tokureihō), with legislation that allows trans people to change their legal gender without having to undergo invasive and expensive medical procedures. This development signifies a notable shift in the medical, political, and public discourse surrounding trans individuals. It reflects a movement away from the medicalized and pathologizing understanding of trans people, as codified in the tokureihō, toward a greater emphasis on the lived experiences, self-identification, and human rights of trans individuals.
Shōno (2022a, 2022b) opposes this change, arguing that it poses a significant threat to women. She believes that not requiring trans-women to undergo gender reassignment surgery before changing their legal gender could allow men to pretend to be women, enter women’s bathrooms, and assault them under the guise of being transgender. In Shōno’s view, there exist only two options regarding trans-women: either they are the pitiful, mentally ill exception, the poor patient in need of medical treatment (2022b, p. 31), or they are potential criminals, men pretending to be women with the ulterior motive of assaulting them in single-sex spaces (2022b, p. 33–34).
This view is undeniably problematic. It fails to acknowledge the existence of trans-women and non-binary individuals who for medical, financial, or ideological reasons choose not to undergo medical treatment. Such a perspective contributes to the already hostile attitudes towards transgender and non-binary individuals. In addition, this view embodies a biologically essentialist view of gender that disregards decades of feminist theory following Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). In recent essays, Shōno (2022d, p. 7) dismisses the concept of a socially constructed gender identity as “unscientific idealism” (yuishinron). For Shōno there is no becoming in being a woman. You are either born one or you aren’t. Only in the “extremely rare” (taihen kishō) cases of people suffering from “gender identity disorder” should they be allowed to live as women, given that they fulfill the conditions stipulated by the tokureihō (2022b, p. 31). Those assigned male at birth who for financial, medical, ideological, or other reasons do not undergo gender-affirming surgery but identify and live as women, as well as nonbinary persons, are potentially criminal usurpers of women’s spaces (Shōno, 2022b, pp. 33–34). Hence her opposition to the language in the aforementioned draft bill: It would legitimize their existence, which in turn would threaten the social order of Japan (Shōno, 2022b, p. 37). Recognizing trans women’s rights to self-identification would lead to the disappearance of such concepts as “the female body” or “women’s rights,” in addition to “women’s sports, women’s changing rooms, women’s toilets and, of course, in the case of Japan, women’s baths” (pp. 31–34). She decided to vote for Yamatani, because she was the only politician “who told the truth” about this “erasure of women” (Shōno, 2022a).
This support surprised many, as Shōno is considered one of Japan’s leading feminist writers, who has publicly supported the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) in the past (2022a), and Yamatani is a right-wing social conservative with a long-standing record of opposing feminist activism and gender equality legislation (A. Shimizu, 2022, p. 381). It is also surprising when we take into consideration Shōno’s fiction. Her novels have garnered acclaim for their feminist interrogations of the intersections between neoliberalism, sexism, patriarchy, and cultural representation in postindustrial, post-bubble Japan (e. g. Asano, 2018; Bouterey, 1996; Ebihara, 2012; Kotani, 2002; Nakamura, 1999; Nitta, 2007; Noguchi-Amann, 2005; Noya, 1997; Utsumi, 2006; Tierney, 2010). These tend to be performed from the perspective of socioeconomically marginalized first-person narrators whose gender identity is often ambiguous and whose relationship with their gendered bodies is characterized by an ambivalent desire to transcend it. It is their attempt to open up utopian pockets of self-affirmation and belonging in otherwise hostile environments – often through a dense and fantastic interweaving of embodied experience, memory, dreams, history, and religious and mythological motifs – that forms the central narrative thrust of Shōno’s otherwise plotless and experimental fiction
How are we to understand these seemingly non-normative characters in light of the biological essentialism and transphobia Shōno (2022d, pp. 7, 10; 2022b, pp. 35–36) exhibits in her writing about trans-women? My aim in this essay is not to provide a final answer to this question. Rather, as a preliminary step, I would like to illustrate the ambivalent and ambiguous nature of the portrayal of the gendered body in Shōno’s fiction. I want to demonstrate that while this ambivalent and ambiguous portrayal is a prominent characteristic of her later fiction – e.g., Suishōnai seido (The World Within the Crystal, 2003), Kompīra (Kompira, 2004), and Uramizumo dorei senkyo (The Uramizumo Slave Election, 2018) – we can find traces of it in her early fiction as well.
2. The Ambivalent Portrayal of the Gendered Body in Shōno Yoriko’s Fiction
As literary scholar Shimizu Yoshinori (2003, pp. 10–12) pointed out, Shōno’s novels of the 1980s feature a male third-person protagonist – such as in Gokuraku (1981), as well as Taisai (The Festival, 1981) and Kōtei (The Emperor, 1984) – or a gender-ambiguous third-person narrator – such as in Kaijū (The Sea Monster, 1984) and Yume no shitai (Dreaming of Dead Bodies, 1990). Only in Ise-shi, Haruchi (Ise City, Haruchi, 1991) does Shōno begin to use a female first-person narrator, which has since become the dominant modus operandi of her fiction. He argued that the early male protagonists can be understood as Shōno’s dis-identification with, or her rejection of, her female gender, which she then gradually overcame during the late 1980s (Shimizu Y., 2003, pp. 69–70).
This seems to echo Shōno’s own understanding of her early work. In a series of conversations with fellow writer Matsu’ura Rieko in 1994, she characterized her use of male protagonists as a kind of cross-gender performance to liberate herself from stereotypical expectations toward women’s writing, such as a focus on the female body or portrayals of romantic relationship with men. A male protagonist, she said, allowed her to freely explore more abstract issues (Matsu’ura & Shōno, 1994a, pp. 63–64; 1994b, pp. 123–125). Shōno (2022d, pp. 13–14) reiterated this interpretation over twenty years later in one of her recent trans-related essays, explaining her use of male protagonists in the early 1980s as the result of the double-bind of experiencing discrimination as a woman writer not only when rejecting, but also when complying, with these expectations.
Yet this dis-identification seems unresolved. Shōno’s novels after the 1990s repeatedly feature characters who struggle with their gender identity. Moreover, the reason for their struggle might not just be societal gender norms but also their complicated relationship with their gendered body.
In Kōtei, the unnamed male protagonist dresses as a woman when outside of his apartment (Shōno, 1984, pp. 222, 250, 256). More precisely, he dresses in clothes similar to that of an old woman that he supposedly killed and robbed earlier (Würrer, 2019, pp. 112–114). While one could, as Shimizu Yoshinori (2003) did, interpret his cross-dressing as a sign of Shōno’s “return” (fukki) to her “original” female self (p. 70), which Shōno had to kill off in order to survive as a writer, there remains one issue. Even if we accept Shimizu’s biographical reading of the cross-dressing in Kōtei as a sign for Shōno’s newfound acceptance of her female self, there are two bodies: that of the dead woman and that of the male protagonist. It is over his male body, that Kōtei’s protagonist wears women’s clothes. That is, the performance of femininity that Shimizu reads as a sign of her renewed identification as a woman is performed on a male body.
3. Nanimo shitenai (1991): Talking Bodies and the Desire for National Belonging
In Nanimo shitenai we can find traces of this bodily duality. This novel is set during a period of national holidays following the death of the Shōwa emperor and the subsequent ascension to the throne of the Heisei emperor in 1989. It portrays, as literary scholar Asano Urara (2018) showed, how watching the media spectacle surrounding the enthronement triggers a reconnection with Japanese society for the socially withdrawn female protagonist (pp. 191–192). Seeing the enthronement festivities on television, the novel’s protagonist, who up until then had retreated from society and lived secluded in her apartment, suddenly feels “the oddly palpable sensation of being a citizen of this country” (Shōno, 2007, p. 156), and the wish to go outside and see for herself what she saw on television, to “thoroughly watch in utmost normalcy the things that ordinary people watch” (futsū no hito ga futsū ni miru mono o futsūsa o tettei shite mitsukusu) (Shōno, 2007, pp. 168–169). It incites a renewed interest in the world outside of her apartment, a reconnection that she hopes will lead to her own “total [social] acceptance” (nanimo kamo ga kōtei sarete shimau) (Shōno, 2007, p. 168). However, the expression “citizen” (kokumin) is rendered not in kanji (Chinese characters), but in the phonetic script katakana used, among other things, for non-Japanese words, which hints, as Asano (2018) argued, at a simultaneous distancing from this newfound feeling of national belonging (pp. 177–178).
Subsequent events mirror this ambivalence. When boarding a train to visit her parents in the city of Ise, the protagonist realizes that some of the royal family are on the same train in order to participate in the new emperor’s first visit to Ise Shrine. She refrains from standing up to catch a glimpse of them and disavows her excitement by emphasizing that, in contrast to the other starstruck travelers, she already knows that this train connects via Nagoya to Ise (Shōno, 2007, p. 211). This attempt to differentiate herself fails, however, as soon as she reaches Nagoya, where the excessive police presence at the train station makes her feel like a “powerless commoner” (muryokuna shōshimin).
Later that day, when watching the news at her parents’ house, she worries about the foreign press not accurately reporting about the historical roots and intricate details of this ceremonial visit (Shōno, 2007, p. 222), a fear she had already shown while watching the enthronement festivities (Shōno, 2007, p. 158). As Asano (2018) emphasized, both this knowledge and fear of the protagonist indicate an interest in, if not an identification with, these events and the royal family (p. 186). Similar to the scene on the train, however, the protagonist immediately adds that what really fascinates her are simply the shoes and clothes of the royals, as if to gloss over and disavow this interest. She does realize that she is “absent-mindedly [boketa kokoro de] looking at nothing but fabrics,” “despite not knowing the first thing about sewing” (Shōno, 2007, p. 234), but can’t help watching. Nanimo shitenai’s protagonist continues to be thoroughly, if not always consciously, obsessed with royal events. The novel then follows her back home to Tokyo, where it ends with her realization that she will have to move out of her apartment because the building is being made accessible to students only.
Asano (2018) contrasted the ambivalent obsession of Nanimo shitenai’s protagonist with post-WWII discourses on the irrelevance of the Japanese emperor. She argued that whereas these discourses see indifference as the proper reaction of the modern Japanese citizen toward this merely symbolic figure, the protagonist’s self-contradictory obsession with the enthronement and the subsequent festivities exposes the limitations of such a view (Asano, 2018, pp. 191–192). Asano did not specify what kind of limitations these are, but if we take into account the reason why this ambivalent reconnection was necessary in the first place, they become clear.
As Asano (2018, pp. 174–175) has pointed out, the protagonist has withdrawn from society because of her mother constantly negating her efforts to become a writer by lambasting her for “doing nothing” – not marrying, not having children, or earning enough money (Shōno, 2007, pp. 149–150, 161–2, 172). Given the protagonist’s somewhat sarcastic characterization of her mother as a “proper citizen” (seijōna shimin) (Shōno, 2007, p. 160), this rejection is not simply an issue of a complicated mother–daughter relationship but can be understood as representative of the protagonist’s experience of Japanese society at large. By extension, her ambivalent reconnection with society via the enthronement festivities can then be read as the manifestation of her desire to belong to, and simultaneously keep a cautious distance from, a society whose continuous rejection has driven her into isolation. If anything, it exposes the display of indifference toward the symbolic emperor as a potential privilege: a rejection possible for those who already feel a certain form of social belonging, which the protagonist lacks because of her outsider status as a young aspiring woman writer.
This gendered aspect of social inclusion is further emphasized during a scene on the train from Tokyo to Ise. Having realized that the royal family might be on the same train, the protagonist is suddenly reminded of Mishima Yukio’s novel Kamen no kokuhaku (Confessions of a Mask, 1949), which she had read as a teenager in an anthology of Japanese literature. The association is, of course, not that far-fetched, considering Mishima’s nationalistic attempt to overthrow the post-WWII constitution and reinstall the emperor as a living god, which famously ended with his ritual suicide in 1970. While the protagonist of Nanimo shitenai mentions Mishima’s suicide, the reference to the anthology suggests that Mishima here functions not only as a political figure, but also as a representative of Japanese literature. As if to reject this status, the protagonist goes on to say that Mishima was a writer whom she barely read (Shōno, 2007, 208). There is only one scene in Kamen no kokuhaku that she remembers: the beginning. There, the narrator – whom she sees as an alter ego of Mishima (Shōno, 2007, p. 209) – remembers his younger self dressing up as the female magician Shōkyokusai Tenkatsu (1886–1944) (Mishima, 2017, pp. 19–21).[1]
Nanimo shitenai’s protagonist compares this scene with her own experience of wearing a petticoat and dressing up as a queen with her female cousins. She concludes that both performances of femininity are rather different and that she found the cross-dressing in Kamen no kokuhaku “sickening, cool, and horrifying” (kimochi waruku kakkoyoku osoroshī) (Shōno, 2007, p. 209). The reason for them being different, she emphasizes, is not necessarily the gender (seibetsu) of the performer. What she finds problematic is not that the narrator of Kamen no kokuhaku was a boy and she a girl, but rather the “distance between matter [busshitsu] and the human . . . the way I perceive my body [jibun no nikutai]” (Shōno, 2007, p. 210). What does she mean by this?
In the eyes of Nanimo shitenai’s protagonist, this scene from Kamen no kokuhaku is not simply the portrayal of an innocent act of a child playing dress-ups. It is the memory of a man who retrospectively draws focus away from the act of cross-dressing to the peripheral phallic objects with which he armed himself before appearing in front of his family – “a rod-shaped silver flashlight” and an “old-fashioned engraved fountain pen” (Mishima, 2017, p. 29) – in the attempt to disavow his “aversion toward dressing up as a woman” and foreground his masculinity (Shōno, 2007, p. 209). In other words, what she finds “sickening … and horrifying” is that he brings up this episode of cross-dressing only to then fetishistically distance himself from it.[2] Femininity, in other words, is shown as something to be rejected. One feels tempted to agree, given that Mishima (2017, pp. 10–16) not only places this episode right after an almost erotic explanation about the roots of the narrator’s fascination and identification with underclass masculinity and his disgust with cross-dressing women but also portrays it as a source of feelings of shame and guilt.
If this fetishistic distancing is indeed why she rejects that scene, then the protagonist of Nanimo shitenai is arguably trying to point out, via the comparison with her own memory of playing dress-up, that the narrator of Kamen no kokuhaku can retrospectively reject femininity, whereas she would like to but cannot. This is suggested by her referring to his cross-gender performance as not just “sickening” and “horrifying,” but also “cool” (Shōno, 2007, p. 209). She rejects and desires it. But why can’t she?
The text does not provide us with a conclusive answer to this question, but two hints hidden elsewhere in the text suggest that the reason might be the aforementioned “distance between matter and the human,” her own perception of “her physical body” (Shōno, 2007, p. 210). Thinking about the difficulties she had in fitting into society, she remembers taking a walk one day and being mistaken for an older man (ojisan) by elementary school girls, complaining: “I don’t know why, but children sometimes perceive me as an older man. My clothes might be a factor, but my physique [taikei] clearly is that of a woman!” (Shōno, 2007, p. 137). While her gender expression might be ambiguous and she does only speak of a womanly “physique,” not explicitly of a female body (karada, shintai), her frustration with being misgendered indicates that she understands herself as a woman and desires to be perceived as such.
This seems to be confirmed by another scene in which she talks about the physical discomfort she feels in her arms because of her allergies (Shōno, 2007, p. 213). Later in the novel she compares this ache to an “evil spirit” (akurei) running rampage in her elbow (Shōno, 2007, p. 217). The first time she mentions it, however, she calls this “evil spirit” a “male voice she is hearing from inside her elbow” and jokingly interprets it as the manifestation of her childhood desire to have been a man in her past life (zensei wa otoko da to iu, kochira no yōji no ganbō) (Shōno, 2007, p. 145). Her body’s voice, so to speak, seems to be at least partially male. However, by framing this ambiguity as a child’s dream about a previous life, the protagonist defines her present adult self, including the body that is speaking to her in this scene, as female.
Hence, on the one hand she identifies as a woman and wants to be seen as such, and on the other she desires, as the adjective “cool” suggests, – if not to be male, not anymore – a distance from the performance as woman similar to that in Kamen no kokuhaku. However, whereas such a distancing for Mishima does not jeopardize his inclusion in the Japanese literary canon (i.e., the anthology), it is more complicated for her. As she has repeatedly experienced, distance from the performance of woman, deviating from what society considers feminine, means being rejected as “doing nothing.” In that way, Nanimo shitenai hints at something similar to Shōno’s use of a male protagonist in the early 1980s: the difficulty of carving out an epistemological niche of existence for a female identity beyond societal gender norms.
But the bodily ambiguity remains. While the male body beneath the cross-gender performance in Kōtei seems to have transformed into a female one in Nanimo shitenai, it still makes itself heard. One might even argue that the protagonist of Nanimo shitenai is performing a disavowal similar to that which she accuses the narrator of Kamen no kokuhaku of: hinting toward the potential experience of her body as (partially) male, while simultaneously disavowing it as a childhood fantasy of a previous life.
(Note: This essay is a shortened and slightly reworked version of my paper “Transcending the Gendered Body? Transphobia and the Construction of the Self in the Writing of Shōno Yoriko,” which was published in the volume Beyond Diversity: Queer Politics, Activism, and Representation in Contemporary Japan (2024) and can be downloaded here: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110767995/html)
AUTHOR
Stefan Würrer, Lecturer, Musashi University, Japan
Stefan Würrer is a lecturer at Musashi University. He is also one of the editors of the volume
Beyond Diversity: Queer Politics, Activism, and Representation in Contemporary Japan (2024). His research focuses on feminist and queer readings of modern and contemporary Japanese literature.
NOTES
[1] In fact, it is only through the name Tenkatsu that the reader can discern that the novel in question is Kamen no kokuhaku, for the title is not explicitly mentioned in Nanimo shitenai.
[2] This is an argument similar to that of feminist theoretician Carol-Ann Tyler (2003), who argued that not every performance of cross-dressing necessarily questions or subverts the gender binary. Tyler pointed out that, similar to parody and pastiche, cross-dressing is context dependent and in certain cases simply re-emphasizes the ground – the body – as the “original” onto which the “fake” figure – the cross-gender performance – is added, thus reproducing the idea of non-normative gender expressions as an “inferior” copy. In addition, it can function fetishistically, as it highlights the mastery of the performer who flexibly puts on and off the masquerade as if they were not subject to, but rather exist in the beyond of the gender binary (Tyler, 2003, pp. 94–95).
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