ABSTRACT
The subject of this final chapter is Shinoda Masahiro’s 1969 filmic adaptation of the 1721 puppet play (bunraku) by Chikamatsu Monzaemon (16531724), ShinjE ten no amijima (Love Suicides at Amijima, English title: Double Suicide). Like Teshigahara, Shinoda was affiliated with the Japanese Art Theater Guild, a group of young filmmakers attempting to create political-aesthetical films in opposition to the dominant studio productions of the 1960s, that they viewed as commercial, inartistic, and uninteresting.2
Released in the year before Mishima’s suicide, Double Suicide makes its own comment on the future possibility for Japanese (loosely political) art. As I will elaborate, like Kawabata, Abe-Teshigahara, and Mishima, Double Suicide is interested in the problematic of desire and aesthetics in relation to “the real” (as social norm as well as simple materiality). As does Woman in the Dunes, Double Suicide highlights the cruelty (and institutionalized homosocial misogyny) of premodern Japan that is elided in purely aesthetical, posterior reconceptualizations of tradition. And like Mishima, the film gestures toward the Real in an attempt to break apart the limitations of a rigid (social) real. Unlike Mishima, however, the filmic economy of desire does not, I hope to show, collapse into a univocal, fascistic representation. Rather, as I will argue, it simultaneously epitomizes both a psychoanalytic ethics and a political one, thus evidencing the potential for the coexistence of the two ethics.
