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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
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 . . .
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
part 13|1 pages
Introduction: Jonathan E. Abel: Packaging desires . . .