Ghostly and Monstrous Manifestations of Women: Edo to Contemporary

Abstract

Aiming to contextualise the emerging field of Japanese Gothic, Henry J Hughes' 'Familiarity of the Strange: Japan's Gothic Tradition' directly focuses upon drawing transcultural parallels with the Western Gothic tradition while emphasising the unique cultural aspects of Japanese Gothic fictions. Hughes reminds us that 'Gothic literature is characterized by its use of a barbarous past to dramatize uncontrolled violence and passion.' The anxieties that plague and anguish human society, such as religious corruption, civil unrest and familial discord, render a distinct notion of familiarity that defies the limitations of cultural boundaries. However, these cultural boundaries are integral in the overarching social structure that produces and aims to contain the monstrous woman. Japanese societal and familial constructs are also essential in establishing its Gothic tradition - especially when pertaining to women. However, the subservient role delegated to women, and its allegorical representations within the West's Gothic past, in many ways, is strikingly different to that of Japan.

What controls a bird is the human will; what controls a wife is her husband's manliness.

Akinari Ueda (1) Tales of Moonlight and Rain

Aiming to contextualise the emerging field of Japanese Gothic, Henry J. Hughes' 'Familiarity of the Strange: Japan's Gothic Tradition' directly focuses upon drawing transcultural parallels with the Western Gothic tradition while emphasising the unique cultural aspects of Japanese Gothic fictions. Hughes reminds us that 'Gothic literature is characterized by its use of a barbarous past to dramatize uncontrolled violence and passion.'(2).The anxieties that plague and anguish human society, such as religious corruption, civil unrest and familial discord, render a distinct notion of familiarity that defies the limitations of cultural boundaries. However, these cultural boundaries are integral in the overarching social structure that produces and aims to contain the monstrous woman.

Japanese societal and familial constructs are also essential in establishing its Gothic tradition - especially when pertaining to women. Numerous early Western Gothic fictions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries showcase how, as Punter and Byron argue, 'women characters tend to be objectified victims, their bodies, like the Gothic structures, representations of the barriers between inside and outside that are to be broached by the transgressive male.'(3) Female Gothic novels, however, function on a rather problematic level. While such fictions often aim to subvert the archaic and outmoded domestic ideologies administered by the reign of tyrannical patriarchs, the completely successful execution of this theme seldom occurs. Ironically, the subversion entails the reinstatement of the protagonist's position within society. However, the subservient role delegated to women, and its allegorical representations within the West's Gothic past, in many ways, is strikingly different to that of Japan.

First published in 1776, Akinari Ueda's Tales of Moonlight and Rain, with its vividly grotesque spectral and monstrous manifestations of women and female sexuality, marks the textual inception of Japan's Gothic tradition. Although Ueda's tales are heavily influenced by Chinese lore and The Tale of Genf (4), they also showcase the wide range of folkloric anomalies unique to Japanese culture - such as tengu and shape-shifting serpents. Moreover, the figure of onryö\ or the vengeful spirit, is perhaps Japan's more persistent and enduring image of the strange. Ghostly manifestations most often appear when obligations go unfulfilled, which consequently binds the person to this world, and prevents them from transcending to the next. However, onryö is most often represented in literature and theatre as a wronged woman who has been murdered, or subjected to a traumatising event during life that has instigated her demise. The powerful and overwhelming emotions that have originated in such an instance function as the catalyst for administering vengeance upon the living. According to Iwasaka and Toelken, 'ghosts are thought to express certain dilemmas which require culturally acceptable solutions. It is the values represented by these problems and reflected in their resolutions that the legends dramatize.'(5) Iwasaka and Toelken proceed to elaborate on the concept of on, which is an essential construct in the overarching framework of Japanese society, defining it as 'the kind of obligation one assumes [...] when one has been the recipient of love, nurturance, kindness, favour, help or advice - especially from a superior in the social system.'(6) Monstrosity functions as a cultural metaphor, and serves to represent the anxieties plaguing a particular society at a particular point in time. In dramatizing the onryö's intimate interconnectedness with equating and realigning the distortion created by unpaid debts and unfulfilled obligations or executing retribution, ghosts embody and preserve the cultural value of on.

While Ueda's writings in the feudal period of the Tokugawa shogunate epitomise the cultural importance of on through ghostly representations of women and female sexuality, the early modern era, dominated by the works of Izumi Kyöka and Junichiro Tanizaki, shifts from physical monstrosity to abnormal psychology in women. As Western ideology seeps into Japanese tradition, the monstrous woman manifests in textual hauntings that afflict the narrative to represent masculine anxieties. The beautiful and alluringly dangerous women present in the texts of Kyöka and Tanizaki conceptualise the modernisation of woman's role in society under Western influence as her restricted feudal predecessor is left behind. Likewise, Japanese cultural values are also under threat of being cast aside or overshadowed.

Contemporary encounters with monstrous women are no longer confined to rural villages, but rather dwell in the vast metropolis of Tokyo in contemporary Gothic fictions. At the centre of Ryü Murakami's fiction Piercing is globalization; this overarching theme governs the actions of the objective self in polite society. Consequently, subjectivity becomes the site of monstrosity as trauma lingers beneath the surface and threatens to arise in both women and men. Gendered discourse itself is deconstructed in the work of Köji Suzuki through his use of a hermaphroditic figure. Perhaps the most notable figure of modern Japanese horror is the vengeful and hermaphroditic ghost of Sadako from Suzuki's Ring. The re-emergence of the onryö in recent years suggests the rejection of the intercultural depictions of monstrosity that manifest as a result of globalization and a return to the folkloric origins of the monstrous woman.

These progressive representations of women and monstrosity are undoubtedly the focal points that link this diverse array of authors from the Edo period to Heisei rule today. Drawing upon the wealth of uncanny Japanese mythology and folklore, each writer appropriates women, and the themes of female sexuality and sexual trauma, to reflect the cultural anxieties prominent at the respective period of time. This, therefore, allows the pattern of female monstrosity's evolutions and devolutions in Japanese Gothic literature to be mapped to convey and define a culturally specific and unique representation of the monstrous woman in Japan.

The Edo Period: Akinari Ueda's Tales of Moonlight and Rain

First published circa 1716 in the midst of the Edo period, with its authorship attributed to the moralist Ekken Kaibara, The Greater Learning for Women; or the Onna Daigaku is a cultural and familial dogma with a vague resemblance to the women's conduct books circulating in the West in the eighteenth century. (7) According to Kaibara, ' 11|hc five worst infirmities that afflict the female are indocility, discontent, slander, jealousy, and silliness.' (8) In order to govern these seemingly inherent flaws, and consequently uphold a successful marriage, the teachings of 'self-inspection and self-reproach' (9) within The Greater Learning for Women aim to endow women with the desirable qualities of 'gentle obedience, chastity, mercy, and quietness.' (10) As Shingoro Takaishi also notes, (11) it is rather unclear what Kaibara explicitly meant by feminine 'silliness.' (12) Takaishi does not argue that the guidance of The Greater Learning for Women rose out of a belief that women 'were mentally imperfect or lacking in intellect' (13) but rather that 'a woman was too apt to give way to her passion' (14), which certainly correlates with the morals at the heart of many stories in Ueda's Tales of Moonlight and Rain. Moreover, while it may seem that Kaibara's moral precepts are a portrayal of overwhelming Japanese patriarchy, it can also be suggested that the doctrine functions to equate the balance between the duties of men and women in the feudal system of the Tokugawa era. Kaibara states that '[a] woman has no particular lord' (15) unlike her husband who would follow the code of the Bushido, which encompasses virtues such as 'submission to authority, utter devotion to one's overlord, and self-sacrifice of all private interest, whether of self or family, to the common weal.'(16) Seemingly gender performativity and conforming to socially prescribed roles was central to the Edo period for both men and women as demonstrated by the prominence of the later Shingakn (Heart Learning) movement (17). Jennifer Robertson argues that '|u|nmarried women were considered anomalous and dangerous mavericks, since they were not locked into a sociopsychological framework of overlapping obediences.' (18) Thus, it proceeds that a similar belief would be upheld for married women that stray from the confines of the tenets dictated to them. The ghostly and monstrous incarnations of women in Ueda's Tales of Moonlight and Rain ultimately serve to represent male anxieties about unfettered female sexuality.

With marital piety, and the idealised wife functioning as the overarching theme of 'The Kibitsu Cauldron', Ueda vividly and grotesquely portrays how the follies of the idle husband can corrupt the dutiful wife; jealousy is manifested both upon the body and psychologically to condemn husband Shötarö doubly for his wayward lifestyle. With his habitual 'indulging in sake and sensual pleasure' (19), and his blatant disinterestedness in his father's flourishing farm, Ueda sets up Shötarö, not only as a young man with little sense of filial duty to his family, but also as an idler who is wavering from his obligations as part of the peasant class. However, the arranged marriage between Shötarö and Isora is intended to remedy his wilful behaviour; with her conduct modelled from The Greater Learning for Women, Isora 'served them all with her heart, rising early, retiring late, always ready to help her parents-in-law, and accommodating to her husband's nature.' (20) Rather than changing Shötarö through the positive influence of utmost duty, Isora's accommodating nature only exposes the gulf between their very different dispositions.

While Isora's unwavering devotion to Shötarö is undoubtedly the crux of the story, the silence of the Kibitsu cauldron, which signifies ill omen according to Shinto belief, certainly foreshadows the impending ruin of both Isora and Shötarö; ironically, it is her steadfast devotion that incites their ruin. By sympathising with her husband's concubine, and consequently being 'cruelly deceived', Isora is 'overwhelmed by resentment and distress and took to her bed, seriously ill.' (21) Seemingly, the polarising traits of Isora and Shötarö cannot coexist, and as a result, 'she weakened day by day, until finally there was no hope.' (22) Isora's death functions as a direct subversion of an aesthetic manifestation of sexual excess, which is practised by her husband, upon her own body. This, in turn, results in physical deterioration and untimely death. As if afflicted by rampant contagion, which is a theme adapted by contemporary writer Koji Suzuki in his 1991 novel Ring, concubine Sode 'seemed to come down with a cold; she began to be vaguely unwell and then appeared to have lost her mind, as though possessed by some malign spirit.' (23) With her symptoms bearing similarities to Isora's, Sode's bodily and psychological decay serves as penance for her contribution in both sexual transgression and the betrayal of Isora by none other than the jealous onryö of Isora herself. Shötarö and his immoral conduct are certainly the catalyst for this plethora of affliction, and it is only when he encounters the ghost of Isora does there rise an inclination to change. Accompanied by the ominous words "'Let me show how I repay your cruelty"', Isora's face is revealed to be 'ghastly pale, the bleary, tired eyes appalling, and a pale, wasted hand pointed horribly this way' (24); Ueda's focus upon the wasted, cadaverous visage of Isora serves to enforce a striking contrast with the sensual pleasure associated with carnality in which Shötarö so lavishly indulgences.

After being squarely confronted with the materiality and decay of the physical body through this ghostly incarnation of his wife, Shötarö "'must shut [himself] inside for forty-two more days and exercise the greatest restraint on [his] behavior during that period"' (25) as instructed by the yin-yang master. The nights of Shötarö's confinement are often defined by the 'wind in the pines [that] sounded fierce enough to topple things over, and then the rain began to fall' as 'the spirit circled the house or screamed from the ridgepole' emitting the horrid cry, "'Oh! I loathe him! '", which is accompanied by 'a crimson light [that] pierced the window-paper of Shötarö's house.' (26) Ueda's purging of Shötarö's mind is rich in allegory; as with all the stories in Tales of Moonlight and Rain, the strange encounters with spirits predominately occur during rainy, moonlit nights as implied by the title. As Inouye comments, '[t]he playwright [Monzaemon Chikamatsu] [...] saw water as a space where man meets woman, life crosses into death, and the known world merges with the world beyond.' (27) Uike Chikamatsu, Ueda's tales utilise the numerous metaphorical interpretations of water that are so deeply rooted in the oral tradition. In 'The Kibitsu Cauldron', water symbolises the process of purifying Shötarö's mind, which is tainted by sin; it also symbolises the fluidity of the continuum between the living and dead - how the spirit of Isora can survive in order to act vengeance upon her husband. Moreover, the connotation of the storm also suggests the precarious nature of the situation. Due to its association with sexual promiscuity and violence, the 'crimson light [that] pierced the window-paper of Shötarö's house' (28) is a metaphorical reversal of penetration executed by unrestrained ghost of Isora. Shötarö is ultimately at the mercy of his wife.

Shötarö's impulsive behaviour is epitomised when he leaves confinement moments too early to reveal that he has learned nothing; after a piercing scream, all that remains of Shötarö is the 'fresh blood dribbling from the wall onto the ground. And yet neither corpse or bones were to be seen.' (29) With Shötarö, we witness his passion for carnality, only to watch the corporeal withering and decaying as sexual excess culminates upon the body of both Isora and Sode, but he is, in turn, completely obliterated by his vengeful wife. Unable to realign the balance through the overwhelming influence of devotion as depicted by Isora, or purge the mind into a state of nothingness, Shötarö's body is effaced; consequently, Isora has her revenge, and also disappears. Yet the red blood remains as a reminder of how a husband 'will incite [a wife's] perverse nature and bring grief upon himself.' (30) Even in this patriarchal hierarchal society, women as onryö transcend into the dominant position as a terrifying and monstrous punisher. However, the underlying theme of Ueda's tale is to reinforce on. Shötarö's parents arrange this marriage to Isora as a positive influence. Isora fails to rectify the situation because she too becomes infected by an undesirable disposition; specifically, jealousy. Isora, however, is a wronged woman; the haunting and revenge evokes a somewhat subversive devotion to on, but still conveys its reverence and importance in Japanese culture. The subsistence of on after death, and consequently its entailing association with the onryö, stresses both the endurance and importance of this convention in Japanese culture.

The Early Twentieth Century: Kyöka & Tanizaki

The establishment of the Meiji government in 1868 ultimately incited great political and social changes within Japan; beginning with the dissolution of the feudal rule imposed by the Tokugawa Shogunate, the Meiji period is recognised as 'a time of questioning old customs and practises and of experimenting with new forms, frequently under Western influence.' (31) With the state's publication of The Meiji Greater Learning for Women (Meiji Onna Daigaku) and its accompanying slogan "Good Wife, Wise Mother" (ryösai kenbo), the model of the idealised Japanese woman was certainly under revision from her Edo predecessor. Confounding the boundary between the domestic sphere and the public domain, the Meiji period's reinstatement of the home as "'an essential building block of the national structure"' (32) is certainly another denotation of woman's position in Japanese society. Ideally, woman's service to the empire was in household management, and in raising children, consequently rendering women's suffrage or even any involvement in political activity inappropriate, and thus, prohibited. However, the establishment of the Taishö period in 1912, with its eager willingness to embrace Western culture and practises, created the "modem woman": a hybrid of Japanese tradition and Western influences that spanned all classes and infiltrated Japan's male-dominated urban workforce. This drastic redefinition of female sexuality was in constant conflict with the conservative familial role associated with previous Meiji ideologies, which survived until the end of the Second World War. Writing during these periods of political and social reformation were Izumi Kyöka and Junichiro Tanizaki. Women characters often occupy a position of centrality in both Kyôka's and Tanizaki's fictions. While embodying the polarising elements comprising of the Edo period's feudal past, and Japan's burgeoning state of modernity, both Kyôka's and Tanizaki's depictions of feminine monstrosity in such a transitional period of Japan's history challenge and confound androcentric psychology, and are deeply rooted in danger, deception and dominance.

'Again and again, there she was, resembling her Western counterparts, foregrounding in remote and liminal territories, enticing and destroying, entrapping and amorphous, polluting, terrifyingly maternal, alternately deadly and breathtakingly erotic' (33) wrote Nina Comyetz of the numerous enchantresses in Izumi Kyôka's tales. Kyôka's female characters are a polarising amalgamation of a seemingly transcultural model of feminine monstrosity in conjunction with Japanese traditions, but despite this, the cultural origins of Kyôka's creations are not obscure or overshadowed, but are rather rendered fantastically unique by their Japanese context. Deviating from Ueda's use of the female body as a source of visual abhorrence, Kyôka's women use their beauty and their paradoxically maternal and lustful dispositions to seduce, manipulate and torment their submissive male counterparts.

The power of the vampiric seductress of Kyôka's 'The Holy Man of Mount Koya' lies in her ability to confound Meiji gendered discourse, to distort what is complementary: to cause meaning to collapse. While she is typical of Kyôka's construction of female characters with the colours red and white encoded into the text as exemplified by her 'snow-white' (34) skin, and the 'flowing perspiration' that 'could only be light crimson in color, the shade of mountain flowers' (35), she is distinguished from Kyôka's archetypical woman by her strange powers, and parasitical disposition. As Charles Shirö Inouye argues, the ' [r]ed marks on pale skin are an emblem both of taboo and of transcendence, expressing the bipolarity inherent in Kyôka's depictions of women.' (36) Even though the parasitical mistress certainly embodies taboo, she is perhaps better conceptualised as a transgressive force as a result of her vampiric traits.

Heavily influenced by the folkloric allegorical interpretations of water as demonstrated by Chikamatsu and Ueda, Kyöka extensively employs this metaphorical device as the momentum for many of his stories. The focal point of 'The Holy Man of Mount Koya' is the river. With the village's contaminated stream at the beginning of the novel placed in juxtaposition with the purifying river in the isolated mountains, Kyöka establishes a distinct binary, only to distort and confound it through the use of the vampiric enchantress. Susan Napier suggests that 'the water is contaminated by modernity itself, the vulgar real world of the medicine peddler and the maid at the inn, a world from which the "old road" is both literally and psychologically a form of escape.' (37) The monk's anxiety and rejection of this water establishes his rejection of the infectious influence of the West; he desires the untainted source of the river that embodies old Japan. The beautiful vampiric woman's powers are entwined with this 'strange and mysterious stream that both seduces men and restores her beauty.' (38) The stream adopts different symbolism for the woman, and her male victims. For the woman, the stream encompasses her 'lustful nature' (39), and her deteriorating beauty - both of which are satiated by preying on men, and extracting their semen. On the other side of this dialectic relationship, the stream is the epitome of danger; undeterred by the watery barrier represented by the road that has been 'turned into a river' (40), the 'secluded mountain cottage' (41), situated far from civilisation, is reminiscent of Japan's medieval Gothic past when strange encounters could arise. The monk's entrance into the 'secluded mountain cottage' (42) itself is doubly symbolic; while it represents the prohibited act of sexual penetration, it also conceptualises the rejection of the symbolic order by returning to a semiotic state - the ultimate transgression.

The lure of the woman lies in the conglomeration of female sexuality and maternity; this effacing of definitive boundaries causes 'mothering [to] become a teleology that fused femaleness and the abject; modernity was posed as the other to an archaism rendered female/matemal.' (43) With the seductress's 'idiot husband' (44) seated on the veranda fingering his navel that 'stuck out like the stem of a pumpkin' (45) with one hand 'while waving the other in the air as if he were a ghost' (46), man's presence within the text is allegorically comprised of two progressive elements through this strange figure: with the repeated, masturbatory stroking of his protruding navel, the woman is represented as the idealised Oedipal fantasy of the abject maternal, which in turn reduces men to their 'base desires.' (47) Upon fulfilment of this fantasy, the enchantress is empowered as the man transgresses from the symbolic order into the semiotic, which ultimately entails the effacement of the self as conceptualised by the idiot husband's presence within the text as a nonentity. Embodying both temptation and penance for sexual transgression, the husband conceptualises a paradoxical continuum of the karmic wheel; this Buddhist theme is extended as the enchantress' magic transforms the degenerate male 'into an animal, just like that. No one escapes' (48), constituting a figurative rebirth in the lower Realm. However, the monk's faith nullifies the woman's powers. Instead, he is assimilated with animals in a figurative sense when 'feeling like a snail without a shell' (49) and 'as helpless as a monkey fallen from its tree.' (50) Each of these similes is representative of the effects the woman has on the monk; this is conveyed when he is bathing in the river with her, and feels 'as if the woman's body ... had enveloped [him] in the petals of its blossom.' (51) Her beauty erodes his staunch religious vows of chastity to leave him exposed to temptation. At the same time, her domineering maternal disposition dissolves his notion of selfhood and threatens to render him as part of the continuum of the maternal body by accentuating his helplessness.

However, differing drastically from the Countess Kifiine from 'The Surgery Room', and Mio Tamawaki of 'One Day in Spring', the parasitical woman of 'The Holy Man of Mount Koya' is not 'subjected to violence and death in order to qualify for the honor of providing salvation for Kyöka's [hero.]' (52) Instead, the monk must attain salvation himself by 'curbing] [his] wayward thoughts.' (53) At the Husband and Wife Falls, the monk imagines the woman 'inside the falling water [...] her skin disintegrating and scattering like flower petals amid a thousand unruly streams of water [...] and immediately she was whole again.' (54) Kyöka extends the metaphor of the flower blossom as the maternal body, but the water is doubly metaphoric. The monk regresses to the semiotic, and the water epitomises danger as he drowns himself. However, the water becomes purgatory and 'expecting to see a messenger from Hell' (55) after pulling himself out of the river, he learns of the woman's true nature from the old man. Unlike the enchantress's other victims who are transformed into animals for their sexual transgression, the monk is figuratively reborn with his mind purified of deviant thoughts. The balance between good and evil has been realigned.

Vampiric figures of the West - particularly those of the nineteenth century - portray how, as Wisker observes, 'boundaries, tested and strained, are reinforced. The evil is without, order reigns again.' (56) While Kyöka's enchantress does both invite and punish men for sexual transgression, her ability to lure men from the symbolic order and into the semiotic with her beauty and maternal care, confounds boundaries, and then proceeds to erase them. It must also be noted that this Japanese vampire need not be vanquished, but rather the monk victim must purge the evil from his mind to restore the balance between good and evil. The vampiric nature of the seductress is commenting on Meiji gendered discourse: both promiscuous and maternal, this enchantress cannot be confined to the role of "Good Wife, Wise Mother" that patriarchy has prescribed her. She is also a depraved, sexual parasite; she manipulates and uses men for her own ends. This behaviour portrays her as an idle woman, and this is certainly contrary to the constructive nature of managing household affairs, which is her duty to both her husband and the state. Kyöka's vampiric enchantress is representative of the disappearing view of old Japan; as a tremendously powerful figure, she administers revenge upon patriarchy and its doctrines through her transformative powers and deconstructive lure of the semiotic.

As Japan progresses into the Taishö period in 1912, modernisation is no longer an infectious contaminant as depicted in Kyöka's 'The Holy Man of Mount Koya', but has rather evolved into an overbearing and dominant presence. The vampiric mistress figure now inhabits the urbanised areas of Tokyo and Yokohama in Junichiro Tanizaki's 'Aguri' - as opposed to the isolated mountains of 'The Holy Man of Mount Koya'. Bearing many similarities to Tanizaki's 1924 novella Naomi, 'Aguri' also focuses on a paradoxical view of the West. Ken K. Ito asserts that while Naomi 'is the fable of a Japanese dominated by his obsession with the West, it is also the story of a "West" that can be manipulated, objectified, and even consumed.' (57) These conflicting yet complementary notions of the West originate in 'Aguri', and are the essential elements that merge to spawn the monstrous and vampiric woman.

Aguri herself often likened to a 'marble statue' (58) that Okada has sculptured and manipulated to resemble his fetishist fantasy of the Western woman. Once adorned in Western clothes, and consequently crafted to perfection, Aguri is reduced to an object that is to be cherished and adored. However, Okada's obsession with obtaining the Western woman of his dreams has its negative side; exhausted and emaciated due to his overindulgence in sexual pleasures with Aguri, Okada's physical appearance is characterised by its active process of decay. While 'his fine rich flesh slowly melted away' (59), Aguri's 'mysterious hands looked younger every year'; at the age of fourteen, her hands 'seemed yellow and dry, with tiny wrinkles' and 'at seventeen the skin was white and smooth.' (60) Sharing a similarity with vampiric qualities of Kyöka's seductress, the extraction of semen also functions as the restorative for Aguri's beauty and vitality, which consequently drains and weakens Okada in the process.

For Okada, their sexual relationship is, at first, 'the enchanting game that he was always dreaming of, that gave him his only reason for living.' (61) According to the master/slave dialogue, this seemingly places Okada in the position of dominance. However, Okada envisions Aguri as

A leopard brought up as a house pet, knowing exactly how to please its master, but one whose occasional flashes of ferocity made its master cringe. Frisking, scratching, striking, pouncing on him - finally ripping and tearing him to shreds, and trying to suck the marrow from his bones'.

The 'enchanting game' swiftly progresses into '[a] deadly game!' (62) The exclamation mark certainly emphasises Okada's delight in Aguri's occupation of the dominant role as the cunning predator that lies beneath her guise of subservience. It is also an image of violent carnal passion taken to an extreme: Okada's weakness for his idealised Western woman physically and mentally incapacitates him, and allows parasitical Aguri to feed off this product of vulnerability. Consequently, this secures her position of empowerment. Underlying the masochistic addiction of Okada and Aguri's sexual schema is the onset of cultural and social dissolution; the roles imposed by patriarchal gendered discourse have also collapsed under the weight of the West's colossal influence. With Okada and Aguri respectively representing modern Japan and the Taishö period's "modem woman", their master/slave relationship is the overarching allegory of the story: Japan is rendered impotent by the overpowering West as its traditions and societal values begin to morph into a careful constructed Western duplicate.

But what exactly is it that threatens to disappear? According to Ito, Japanese critics often analyse Naomi as a [füzokn shösetsn, or a novel of manners' (63), and similarly, this can be applied to its prototype 'Aguri'. The narrative itself is fragmented with rambling instances of Okada's exhaustion induced delirium. He imagines himself collapsing and dying on the busy street with Aguri's thoughts, which consist of the following: '[t]he poor fool was so crazy about me he couldn't possibly resent it if I take the money and buy anything I please, or flirt with any man I please.' (64) Okada's imaginings depict Aguri as a true parasite; as soon as her first host has been drained of his usefulness, she will simply move onto her next victim. She is utterly selfish, and does not conform to the social impositions such as on. Gender roles have also been subverted as we are reminded of the ''wronged woman" from the folkloric past. As the grotesque daydream continues, this notion becomes more poignant: '[i]f he tries to haunt me I won't be afraid of him - he'll listen to me whether he's alive or dead. I'll have my way...' (65) Even when the typical gender roles of onryö and victim are reversed, and woman transcends from the prevalent ghostly archetype from the Gothic past, she retains the position of power and can dictate to men by embodying their sexual fantasy. This male onryö is completely devoid of vengeance, and the concept itself is belittled by Aguri's patronising comment of '''Well, Mr. Ghost, my poor love-struck Mr. Ghost who can't rest in peace - how about a smile?"' (66) Aguri's condescending language signifies the onryö's position in the Taishö period; it is an element of mythology from a now decadent feudal past. The adoptions of Western social practises have simply rendered this cultural metaphor redundant.

In the works of Kyöka and Tanizaki, the metamorphic vampiric women evidently serve as the mirror for cultural anxiety as opposed to ghostly manifestations. As numerous critics have observed, Kyöka's seductress resembles the shamaness, which is a prevalent figure in the oral tradition. This, in conjunction with her vampiric state and her ability to lure men into the semiotic, binds her to premodem Japan. The vampiric mistress in Kyöka's story functions to preserve feudal Japan as the West seeps in like a contaminant, whereas Tanizaki subverts the function of the vampire. Aguri embodies both a Japanese woman infected by the West, and the West itself. The story itself is reliant upon conveying and reinforcing the binaries between Japan and the West. (67) The West is rendered vampiric as it drains Japan's societal and cultural beliefs, which are reduced to an archaic, outmoded ghostly image of the past. Like the metamorphic vampire, the shapes of both sides of gendered discourses begin to shift.

Tokyo Renderings: Cross-Cultural Monstrosity

The vampiric mistresses of Kyöka's and Tanizaki's stories function to emphasise the framework of the ever-changing dialectic relationships between East and West in the modern period. Often set in the vast metropolis of Tokyo, numerous Gothic fictions of the latter 20th century are propelled by the cataclysmic momentum of globalization. The definitive boundaries supporting the dialectic relationships between Japan and the rest of the world have been completely effaced as Japanese culture and mass culture merge. Glennis Byron observes that:

[Jjust as attempts to locate more nationally specific forms of gothic have begun to proliferate, the effects of globalization upon cultural production have also led to the literature and film of different countries feeding off each other to produce new cross-cultural monstrosities.' (68)

Enveloped in mass culture, modern day Tokyo renders a unique and deconstmctive effect upon female monstrosity. Monstrosity is now stripped of the cultural identity that is established through the oral tradition; on has become obsolete. Women are no longer limited to the strict confines of behavioural doctrines; the anxiety of female sexuality has seemingly been cast aside. Whether it is focused upon the self and subjectivity, gendered discourse, or Japanese culture, monstrosity now coincides with the dissolution caused by globalization. The fictions of Ryü Murakami and Koji Suzuki convey this dissolution in their respective depictions of monstrosity in many different societal and cultural aspects of Japan. Consequently, the site of monstrosity can no longer be designated a singular position, and is constantly shifting.

For Ryü Murakami, modern day Tokyo is an impassive dictator of objectivity and suppressor of the subjective self that does not coincide with the "norm". Many of the inhabitants of his numerous works do not comply with the societal constraints of Tokyo and mass culture, and are imbued with difference. Stephen Snyder conveys a correlating view of Murakami's fictions thusly:

If contemporary Japan is a place of escalating order and transparency, of unlimited and utterly promiscuous image exchange [...] then Murakami's fiction constitutes a prophylaxis of chaos and anomaly. Murakami's fiction insists on aberration, on difference, on the irreconcilable. It is replete with the very things erased by contemporary culture: desire, sexuality, terror, and art (as opposed to their ubiquitous simulated versions). (69)

This process of othering 'desire, sexuality, [and] terror' (70), which is constantly being executed by Japan's contemporary culture, consequently produces the site of monstrosity in Murakami's Piercing - namely, through suppressed trauma from the past. However, this trauma spans both parts of the gender binary, and seemingly realigns the great misbalance created by feminine-centred monstrosity of the past. The illusory notion of self-identity, which has been manipulated and held together by mass culture, becomes unstable as the dissipated, but genuine, self becomes the prevalent image. This is conceptualised by how, as Snyder observes, 'the "real" world (the world of narrative realism) fragments under the stabbing ice pick wielded by the protagonist' (71) Masayuki Kawashima. Whenever Kawashima holds the ice pick, or even contemplates upon stabbing his baby or a woman with this phallic and deadly object, Kawashima's objective and subjective selves split. This is evident when Kawashima is sweating and standing over his baby's crib with the ice pick:

'That's sickening, he thought [...] didn't even know I was sweating. Couldn't even feel it. Like it isn't me the sweat's pouring down but a wax figure of me, or some stranger who looks like me. (72)

Through the absence of personal pronouns, and the brief, fragmented sentences, Murakami successfully conveys how the ice pick sends Kawashima into an almost catatonic-like state as he feels his consciousness separating from his body, which creates a fluctuating and unstable notion of selfhood. The 'wax figure' (73) is Kawashima the family man; Kawashima the successful salaryman; it is the Kawashima that has been moulded into the confines of "ideals" perpetuated by mass culture, and trauma is excluded from such boundaries.

Kawashima's tendency to 'break out in a cold sweat at just a glimpse of that shiny, pointed tip' (74) of the ice pick rouses the dormant trauma that lies beneath the surface:

As he opened his eyes he found that his senses of sight and sound and smell were getting entangled with one another, and now came a snapping, crackling sensation and a pungent whiff of something organic burning. Yam or fingernails, something like that. (75)

Breaking out in a sweat triggers synaesthesia in Kawashima; he is forced to relive the physical abuse administered upon him as a child by his mother through an uncontrollable, mental recollection. Murakami's language is aloof, non-specific and detached; this conceptualises the spatial distance of the segregation of the undesirable, but still integral, component of society that is violence. Suffering sexual abuse during childhood, S&M sex worker Chiaki Sanada is dubbed a 'kindred spirit' (76) by Kawashima in his thoughts; they relate to each other through their difference on an unconscious level. Chiaki's 'eyes didn't seem to stay focused on anything. As if they were disconnected from her consciousness' (77); unlike Kawashima, Chiaki does not have a socially constructed role to conform to. Instead, her objective self is impassive and almost a non-entity. Chiaki does, however, have another self; she refers to her as 'What's-her-name.' (78) With 'What's-her-name lurking up there at the comer of the ceiling' (79) during sex, Chiaki loses her libido; this starts 'the cycle of terror' (80), which also reduces her to a catatonic-like state. Chiaki's fading consciousness is assimilated with 'lights going out one by one, words were whirling away, receding out of reach. AROUSE, MASTURBATE, SEX ... HUMILIATED ... it was as if neon signs in the shapes of these words were slipping off into darkness and memories were rising to take their place.' (81) Murakami's language captures Chiaki's catatonic state perfectly; the use of alliteration creates a fluid dynamic to the language, which mimics the smooth movement of her selves fragmenting. Moreover, the sharp contrast of the block capital letters captures her violent transition into unconscious self-mutilation. However, the metaphor also resonates with the Shinjuku ward of Tokyo. With the neon lights, which suggest the red light district of Kabuchikö, inextricably linked with Chiaki's memories, both the sex industry and sexual trauma have played a significant part in shaping Chiaki's identity. By working in the sex industry, Chiaki is both literally and figuratively segregated from society as a contaminant of difference.

After Kawashima's silent and gentle rejection of Chiaki's body, her romanticised memories of 'walking along arm in arm with this man, and sitting next to him in the taxi with the lights of the skyscrapers all around' (82) are now tainted. This is the pivotal moment for Chiaki, and she bears a resemblance - albeit a modernised one - to Kyöka's seductress. By overdosing Kawashima on Halcion, Chiaki has her revenge on men. While drugged, Kawashima 'was horrified to find himself being sucked inside something dark and enormous. It was as if a huge, diaphragm-shaped iron shutter were closing before his eyes.' (83) Devoid of the phallic ice pick and the ability to penetrate Chiaki's body, Kawashima has been castrated and thrust back into the semiotic. With the metallic qualities of this womb-like structure, it also represents the effacing capabilities of mass industrialization and popular culture Tokyo. As a continuum of his mother's body, he hears her 'sharp, high-pitched voice saying, Don't bother coming back! The sound of a latch being locked. A blurry silhouette on frosted glass. It's Mother, he thought. She's inside me.' (84) Kawashima has ultimately been rejected from his mother and the maternal body, and instead, the semiotic has been subverted and reversed. When Chiaki picks up 'the ice pick [...] and [places] it along with the wallet, the knife, and the notebook on top of his overnight bag' (85), she is reconstructing the many components of Kawashima's fragmented identity. Mother has been effaced, and Kawashima is whole again.

At the centre of the dramatic yet climatic foray between Chiaki and Kawashima is Chiaki's German coffee machine; when bound to the cable by her wrists, 'her skin turned a colourless, ghostly white where the cord bit into it.' (86) With the coffee machine functioning as a metaphor for globalization, we can see the vampiric effect it unleashes upon Chiaki as it drains her damaged, but nonetheless, subjective identity. Both Kawashima's and Chiaki's respective psychological disorders and violent actions do not render them monstrous, but rather as flawed, and decidedly human. The monstrous of Piercing are the ghostly cameos that are manacled to globalization and mass culture, and seamlessly blend into 'the buildings [that] look like they're alive.' (87) Monstrosity and ghostliness have finally been stripped of gender; ghostly manifestations are no longer associated with on, and are now devoid of cultural meaning and value. As the boundaries of Japan and the rest of the world are confounded almost beyond recognition, it becomes increasingly difficult to locate Piercing as a Japanese Gothic text as opposed to a Gothic text. However, upon cutting the cords of globalization, Chiaki resumes the role as the 'broken android' (88) in Tokyo, which paradoxically renders her human as she is alienated as a result of her individuality. The rejection and suppression of universal difference, such as sexuality, violence, and abuse, is central to Piercing, but this is not what makes it a uniquely Japanese Gothic fiction. However, Murakami's overwhelming bombardment of imported products and nondescript Tokyo ghosts within the text subversively draw attention to the suppression of Japanese cultural values that propagate difference in mass culture.

With Western influence altering and reconstructing Japanese cultural values from the Meiji period onwards, the onryö is thus displaced and devoid of meaning in this transitional period. However, the onryö figure finally rises from obscurity and reclaims its role in Japanese culture in Koji Suzuki's Ring (1991) - in the form of a hermaphrodite. Despite Ring's contemporary setting, Suzuki evokes many elements from Japan's Gothic past; he concentrates his focus upon primordial fear, such as a child's fear of 'a fist-sized mask, of a hannya - a female demon' (89), and protagonist Asakawa's claustrophobia. Suzuki strips away the complex anxieties that have been plaguing modern and contemporary Japan, and utilizes fear and the fear of impending death. The archaic masculine fear of female sexuality is subverted through Sadako Yamamura. Sadako Yamamura, a beautiful woman with testicular feminization syndrome, and XY chromosomes, causes the patriarchal constructions of gendered discourse to dissolve beyond recognition. Dr. Nagao's decision is to murder Sadako after raping her; at first, it is rationalized by his thought that it would have 'been a necessary trial if she were to go on living as a woman.' (90) Dr. Nagao's initial reaction to kill Sadako out of pity is instigated by the fear that she is not only excluded from the confines of androcentric gender politics, but that she is also a threat to such constructions.

Shamed and wronged by the outmoded convictions executed by a representative of patriarchal constitution, Sadako's revenge as onryö is widespread and relentless. Sadako diverts significantly from her folkloric predecessors in the sense that she does not manifest in this world in a visible ghostly form, but is immortalised in the constant circulation of her viral videotapes. The theme of the vims is pivotal to Ring: '/a] virus's instinct is to reproduce. A vims usurps living structures in order to reproduce itself.' (91) Unable to reproduce, Sakado's viral revenge is not only subversive of societal constructs of gender, but is anomalous itself by defying biological possibilities. Sadako's vims gains sustenance, and proceeds to flourish from the fear of death in its host. However, by failing to duplicate the videotape in seven days, Ryuji is confronted with brunt of Sadako's revenge. Looking into the mirror, Ryuji sees '[sjomebody else reflected there. The cheeks were yellowish, dried and cracked, and hair was falling out in clumps to reveal brown scabs.' (92) This display of bodily decay is alien to Ryuji, yet '[t]he face in the mirror was none other than his own, a hundred years in the future' (93), and it is actually an integral part of himself. With the fear of death plaguing its host, the power of Sadako's vims lies in its ability to project an external manifestation of this internal anxiety; consequently, the vims projects an image of the self in an almost cadaverous state of decay. Sadako's more unfortunate victims are literally abhorred and terrified to death in witnessing oneself 'transformed into someone else.' (94) The constant fluctuation in the boundary between self and other, in conjunction with the emphasis on the familiar and the foreign, evokes a sense of the Kristevan abjection of the corpse in a very extreme form. It epitomises Kristeva's notion of how ' [i]t is no longer I who expel, "F is expelled.' (95) After being driven by the fear of impending death, the terror of seeing oneself stripped of personal identity and reduced to unrecognisable deteriorating matter, causes boundary and order to dissolve.

Through his portrayal of Sadako, Suzuki creates a paradoxical figure of female monstrosity; Suzuki returns to the origins of the monstrous woman as depicted in the oral tradition, but Sadako's videotapes are imprinted upon the text. This connects the onryö to a globalized world; the dramatization of this enduring figure emphasises Japan's unique cultural aspects in a homogenised world. The vast metropolis Tokyo is no longer haunted by dehumanised followers of mass culture, but the onryö, which has always been synonymous with disrupting the order of Tokugawa regime and its predecessors. Like Isora from Ueda's 'The Kibitsu Cauldron', Sadako is a contaminant and spreads contagion; her contagion is rooted in the fear of death and bodily decay. However, her hermaphroditic state is also a contaminant of gendered discourse; the subversion of gendered discourse is derived from Asakawa and Ryuji's journey to her burial spot in the well. This conceptualises the retrogressive Freudian return to womb before the Oedipal Crisis into the state of bisexuality before societal and cultural influences shape gender. Gendered restrictions of monstrosity have been effaced.

Conclusion

In relation to the significance of on, Iwasaka writes that the ghostly manifestations present in Japanese folklore 'ensure the kind of behaviour which preserves the culture and its values, along with the proper relationships without which - in the Japanese view - culture would be meaningless.' (96) The onryö, and the emphasis placed upon motifs and elements from the oral tradition in Akinari Ueda's Tales of Moonlight and Rain, in conjunction with the corruption of Tokugawa era's uneducated, but fully wife modelled from the Onna Daigaku, showcases the overarching presence of Japanese culture within the text. Ueda manages to encapsulate a decadent, but uniquely Japanese form of Gothic fiction. The upholding, preservation and execution of cultural values is both tantamount and integral to Japan's Gothic tradition; when it is pertaining to gender discourse, it is the momentum. Social deviance and anomaly in women is the product of diverging from the idealistic patriarchal schema of what constitutes as femaleness. With the founding binary depictions of patriarchal denotations of womanliness, and unconstrained female sexuality established, the masculine anxieties of the effects of societal and cultural transitions upon women can be analysed through the monsters they create.

The transitional Meiji era, with its slogan "Good Wife, Wise Mother" conceptualising the Meiji Onna Daigaku, is under threat from the growing influence of the West, which creates Japan's "modem woman." The monstrosity of this period is vampirism, which is doubly allegorical. For Izumi Kyöka, the vampiric woman in 'The Holy Man of Mount Koya' represents an image of the alluring, but dangerous maternal from the archaic, fading old Japan. She offers deadly escapism from the modern world; she is untouched and free of the West. However, in Tanizaki's 'Aguri', the utilisation of vampirism renders the opposite effect that Kyöka achieves. The West's influence upon Japan is draining its cultural identity, and constructing the "modem woman." Both awed and revered, Aguri embodies the fetishistic fantasy of the Western woman; as an anomalous woman, Aguri evokes the repressed masochistic desire for submission in men. Ghostliness is no longer the figure of anxiety; whether it is the self-destmctive longing for the abject maternal, or masochistic fetishes for a Westernized woman, women who are not confined to gendered discourse, who are thus monstrous, become the figure of desire. Their allure is their exoticism.

Through Murakami's dehumanised depiction of mass culture Tokyo, and Suzuki's reconstructed, hermaphroditic onryö, the evolution and devolution of female monstrosity is ultimately dislocated from both cultural and gendered discourse in contemporary Japan. Japanese Gothic transcends into a detached and misaligned space where it is defined by what it lacks. Barren and transparent, modern day Japan is now confined to the framework of globalization, yet the mundanity of mass culture is broken by the nightmarish undesirables like Chiaki and Sadako. Monstrosity is ingrained into the very essence of Japanese cultural identity; segregation and suppression is not possible.

References

1. All Japanese names will be written in the Western format with the given name followed by the family name.

2. Henry J. Hughes 2000. 'Familiarity of the Strange: Japan's Gothic Tradition', http://fmdarticles.eom/p/articles/mi m2220/is 1 42/ai 63819091/ (accessed 30th June 2008)

3. Punter, David and Glennis Byron 2005. The Gothic. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 278.

4. This eleventh century work of Japanese literature is usually attributed to Murasaki Shikibu, and is sometimes described as the world's first novel.

5. Iwasaka, Michiko and Barre Toelken 1994. Ghosts and the Japanese: Cultural Experience in Japanese Death Legends. Logan: Utah State University Press, 16.

6. Ibid, 18-19.

7. For an example of the Western conduct books intended for women see Abbé d'Ancourt 1768. The lady's preceptor or, a letter to a young lady of distinction upon politeness. Taken from the French of the Abbé d'Ancourt, and adapted to the religion, customs, and manners of the English nation. By a gentleman of Cambridge. The sixth edition: Birmingham. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ECCO (accessed 30th June 2008)

8. Kaibara, Ekken 1905. Women and Wisdom of Japan, ed. L. Cranmer-Byng & S. A. Kapadia. London: The Orient Press, 44.

9. Ibid, 44.

10. Ibid, 34.

11. Ibid, 18.

12. Ibid, 44.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid, 38.

16. Ibid, 21.

17. For a detailed examination of the Shingaku (Heart Learning) movement incited by Baigan Ishida, Toan Tejima and other Shingaku theorists, see Robertson, Jennifer 1991, 'The Shingaku Women: Straight From the Heart' in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein. Oxford: University of California Press.

18. Robertson, Jennifer 1991. Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein. Oxford: University of California Press, 94.

19. Ueda, Akinari 2007, 'The Kibitsu Cauldron' in Tales of Moonlight and Rain trans. Anthony H. Chambers. New York: University of Columbia Press, 142.

20. Ibid, 144.

21. Ibid, 145.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid, 146.

24. Ibid, 149.

25. Ibid, 150.

26. Ibid, 151.

27. Charles Shirö Inouye 1991, 'Water Imagery in the Works of Izumi Kyoka' Monumenta Nipponica 46, 1, 43-68

28. Ueda 'The Kibitsu Cauldron', 151.

29. Ibid, 152.

30. Ibid, 142.

31. Bernstein, Gail Lee 1991. Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945, ed. Gail Lee Bernstein. Oxford: University of California Press, 7.

32. Ibid.

33. Comyetz, Nina 1999. Dangerous Women, Deadly Words: Phallic Fantasy and Modernity in Three Japanese Writers. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2.

34. Kyöka, Izumi 1996. 'The Holy Man of Mount Koya' in Japanese Gothic Tales trans. Charles Shirö Inouye. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 45.

35. Ibid, 49.

36. Ibid, 165.

37. Napier, Susan J. 1996. The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity. Uondon: Routledge, 35.

38. Kyöka 'The Holy Man of Mount Koya' 71.

39. Ibid

40. Ibid, 29.

41. Ibid, 39.

42. Ibid, 39.

43. Comyetz, Dangerous Women, Deadly Words, 26.

44. Kyöka, 'The Holy Man of Mount Koya' 65.

45. Ibid, 39.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid, 65.

48. Ibid, 71.

49. Ibid, 47.

50. Ibid, 50.

51. Ibid, 48.

52. Ibid, 165.

53. Ibid, 71.

54. Ibid, 64.

55. Ibid, 65.

56. Wisker, Gina 2006. A Companion to the Gothic Novel, ed. David Punter. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 168.

57. Ito, Ken K. 1991. Visions of Desire: Tanizaki's Fictional Worlds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 100.

58. Tanizaki, Junichiro 1981. 'Aguri' in Seven Japanese Tales trans. Howard Hibbet. New York: Perigee Books, 198.

59. Ibid, 187.

60. Ibid, 190.

61. Ibid, 192.

62. Ibid.

63. Ito, Visions of Desire, 77.

64. Tanizaki, 'Aguri' in Seven Japanese Tales, 193.

65. Ibid, 193.

66. Ibid, 194.

67. Also writing in the transitional Meiji era, the distinctly transcultural texts of Edogawa Rampo and Lafcadio Hearn offer a diverging representation of feminine monstrosity in the early modern period from that of Kyöka and Tanizaki. Rampo's short stories take the dialectic binary relationships of Westem/Japanese and feudal/modem, and causes them to merge as opposed to using the West as figure of dominance. This is exemplified in the short story 'The Caterpillar'; the role of the doting wife in the familial sphere and the concept of on are imbued with depravity, and monstrosity arises from conformity to the social impositions these aforementioned roles entail. On the contrary, Lafcadio Heam diverges from his contemporaries by resurrecting the ghost in his sensational retellings of the oral tradition. Although Hearn's revamped tales are coloured with his own Western literary aesthetic to appeal to his British and American readership, they encapsulate a somewhat romanticised depiction of the submerging Japanese cultural values.

68. Byron, Glennis 2008. Asian Gothic ed. Andrew Hock Soon Ng. Jefferson: McFarland & Co Inc, 33.

69. Snyder, Stephen 1999. Öe and Beyond ed. Stephen Snyder & Philip Gabriel. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 202.

70. Ibid.

71. Ibid, 206.

72. Murakami, Ryü 2008. Piercing trans. Ralph McCarthy. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 3-4.

73. Ibid, 4.

74. Ibid, 5

75. Ibid, 4.

76. Ibid, 127.

77. Ibid, 85.

78. Ibid, 66.

79. Ibid.

80. Ibid, 70.

81. Ibid, 89.

82. Ibid, 157.

83. Ibid, 163.

84. Ibid, 178.

85. Ibid, 182-183.

86. Ibid, 172.

87. Ibid, 150.

88. Ibid, 172.

89. Suzuki, Koji 2005. Ring trans. Robert B. Rohmer & Glynne Walley. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 65.

90. Ibid, 289.

91. Ibid, 361.

92. Ibid, 344.

93. Ibid.

94. Ibid.

95. Kristeva, Julia 1982. Powers of Horror trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 4.

96. Iwasaka, Ghosts and the Japanese, 20.