Content area
Full Text
To write about Bluebeard in Japan during the early 1960s would have been inevitably to enter into dialogue not just with Charles Perrault's 1697 fairy tale about the wealthy man, his most recent of many wives, and the key he forbids her to use but also with the writings of Shibusawa Tatsuhiko. Shibusawa was a well-known critic and public intellectual made famous by his translations, beginning in the mid-1950s, of the Marquis de Sade and the decade-long obscenity trial that those translations provoked. After his initial work on Sade, Shibusawa wrote a four-part portrait of Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth-century French aristocrat and confessed serial killer of hundreds of children who is often cited as the basis for Perrault's fairy tale. Shibusawa inflects this assumption slightly, noting in his opening line that Gilles de Rais "became known as 'Bluebeard' via Charles Perrault's fairy tale" (2: 159).1 This series on Gilles de Rais-part of a larger project on black magic-ran in early 1961, the year after sales of his latest Sade translation had been banned, and was completed a month before his high-profile obscenity trial began in August 1961. These important events occurred just months before Terayama Shüji, then a young poet who would later emerge as a major countercultural icon, released his first of three Bluebeard narratives in December 1961.2
Shibusawa's position on the relation between folklore and history is aligned with Georges Bataille, who points out in his 1959 work on Gilles de Rais that "there is nothing in common between Perrault's Bluebeard and the Bluebeard to whom the populations of Anjou, Poitou, and Brittany later attributed the castles of Machecoul, Tiffauges, and Champtocé" but that "Gilles de Rais' castles and crimes were attributed to Bluebeard in popular imagination" (17). The pattern, in both Shibusawa's and Bataille's cases, is to springboard off the fictional tale into a much deeper and analytical treatment of history. The fairy tale becomes a catalyst for analysis of the historical events and the discourse that followed but, in so doing, tends to downplay the cultural potency of fiction itself in preference for historical discourse (riddled with fiction though it may be). Shibusawa's move from fiction to history might function as a backhanded defense of fiction (as something never as...