Forms of the Body in Contemporary Japanese Society, Literature, and Culture by Irina Holca;Carmen Spunaru Tma;

Author:Irina Holca;Carmen Spunaru Tma;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781793623881
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing

Chapter 9

Pricking Pain Surrounds Us

Restraining, Shaping, and Taming the Body in Hebi ni Piasu

Emerald L. King

Standing in a tattoo shop in the backstreets of Tokyo, nineteen-year-old Lui thinks about all of the body modifications that she is aware of: “There was foot-binding, waist-tightening with a corset, and neck-extension practiced by some tribes. I wondered whether or not braces counted” (Kanehara 2004a: 14; 2004b: 11). The protagonist of Kanehara Hitomi’s 2004 debut Hebi ni piasu (Snakes and Earrings 2004; trans. David James Karashima 2005), Lui is in the shop to get her tongue pierced so that she can split it (possibly making her one of the snakes of the title). She also decides that she wants a large tattooed back piece (nothing “cutesy,” but “dragons, tribal patterns,” and “wood block prints,” Kanehara 2004a: 22; 2004b: 19). For Lui, who can “only feel alive” while she’s experiencing pain (Kanehara 2004a: 45; 2004b: 43), the act of piercing, stretching, inking, and otherwise reshaping her body, is an act of survival and agency rather than one of wilful and wanton (self) destruction.

Kanehara’s work has been discussed terms of the youth of her protagonists, their lack of steady employment as freeters (part-time or itinerate workers) or NEETS, and their sexual agency (see for example Mark Driscoll 2007, De Nitto 2010, and the interview published in Bungei Shunju following her Akutagawa prize win in 2004). While this is taken into consideration, this chapter instead focuses on Kanehara’s early (arguably circa 2004–2011) protagonists’ repeated body modifications—not only those listed above but also wrist-cutting and food refusal—in order to explore the complex relationships between Kanehara’s protagonists and their bodies. In order to understand how Kanehara’s young heroines, disenfranchised and marginalized though they may be, maintain a semblance of control through modifying and altering their bodies, it is helpful to look at the text through the lens of women’s masochism. This chapter draws on the work of Deleuze and Freud in order to give a brief overview of women’s masochism in the context of Japanese women’s literature.

It is also helpful to read Kanehara in a genealogy of writers which sees her as a successor of Yamada Eimi (b. 1959), whose debut was also met with a wave of controversy in the late 1980s for its frank portrayal of women’s sexual desire and interracial relations. While the work of both authors can be viewed as products of the time in which they were published—Yamada’s early work could be seen to carry the hallmarks of glossy Bubble excess, while Kanehara’s novels are colored by the long years of the (ongoing) Lost Decade—there is more at play here. Both authors engage in themes that include sexual desire, gender power imbalances, and agency.

“So You’re Saying the Virgin Mary Was a Masochist?”

Western psychopathological terms, such as “masochism” and “sadism,” were introduced to Japan in the early twentieth century and are now part of everyday parlance. Throughout Hebi ni piasu, Lui repeatedly states that she is a masochist, using the term “M” to do so

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