ABSTRACT

How did nerves and neuroses take the place of ghosts and spirits in Meiji Japan? How does Natsume Soseki’s canonical novel Kokoro pervert the Freudian teleology of sexual development? What do we make of Jacques Lacan’s infamous claim that because of the nature of their language the Japanese people were unanalyzable? And how are we to understand the re-awakening of collective memory occasioned by the sudden appearance of a Japanese Imperial soldier stumbling out of the jungle in Guam in 1972?

In addressing these and other questions, the essays collected here theorize the relation of unconscious fantasy and perversion to discourses of nation, identity, and history in Japan. Against a tradition that claims that Freud’s method, as a Western discourse, makes a bad ‘fit’with Japan, this volume argues that psychoanalytic reading offers valuable insights into the ways in which ‘Japan’ itself continues to function as a psychic object.

By reading a variety of cultural productions as symptomatic elaborations of unconscious and symbolic processes rather than as indexes to cultural truths, the authors combat the truisms of modernization theory and the seductive pull of culturalism. This volume also offers a much needed psychoanalytic alternative to the area studies convention that reads narratives of all sorts as "windows" offering insights into a fetishized Japanese culture. As such, it will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese literature, history, culture, and psychoanalysis more generally.

part 1|2 pages

Introduction: Bruce Suttmeier: Speculations of murder . . .

part 2|1 pages

Introduction: Carl Cassegard: Japan’s lost decade and its two recoveries . . .

part 3|1 pages

Introduction: Yutaka Nagahara: The corporeal principles of the national polity . . .

part 4|1 pages

Introduction: Ayelet Zohar: Pelluses/Phani . . .

part 5|1 pages

Introduction: Nina Cornyetz: Penisular cartography

part 6|2 pages

Introduction: Margherita Long: Two ways to play fort-da . . .

part 7|2 pages

Introduction: Gavin Walker: The double scission of Mishima Yukio . . .

part 8|1 pages

Introduction: Dawn Lawson: Navigating the inner sea . . .

part 9|2 pages

Introduction: Irena Hayter: In the flesh . . .

part 10|1 pages

Introduction: J. Keith Vincent: Sexuality and narrative in Soseki’s Kokoro . . .

chapter 10|19 pages

Sexuality and narrative in Soseki’s Kokoro

part 11|1 pages

Introduction: Christopher Hill: Exhausted by their battles with the world . . .

part 12|2 pages

Introduction: Kazushige Shingu: Freud, Lacan and Japan

chapter 12|11 pages

Freud, Lacan and Japan

part 13|1 pages

Introduction: Jonathan E. Abel: Packaging desires . . .