ABSTRACT
Jacques Lacan argued that the Japanese writing system, in which most characters (kanji) can be read in two ways, grants the Japanese subject a fundamentally different relationship to the signifier. Although Lacan believed that the Japanese subject was divided by language like everyone else, he also thought that there is no masking the repressed for the Japanese subject because the repressed can find its lodging in the letter in kanji. However, kanji is a transporter for the Japanese speaking subject between on-yomi and kun-yomi, China and Japan. Japanese origin myths position these subjects at the boundary between sea and mountain, or the Lacanian littoral, as a place where life emerges out of death. Here on the littoral of ancient seas where the Chinese culture would come to penetrate into the Japanese archipelago, the Chinese and Japanese signifiers were connected to each other. The Japanese subject of speech was thus formed in the littoral between death and life. Such a history of the Japanese subject is reflected in this chapter in the poems and dreams of a Japanese analysand. Despite Lacan’s reading of the Japanese unconscious as unrepressed in language, it is the complex melding of on-yomi and kun-yomi that the analysis must unravel to access the unconscious of this Japanese subject caught at the littoral between life and death.
