ABSTRACT
I have focused in this study on the centrality of body imagery in postwar Japanese fiction. In the fiction of postwar writers a number of issues appear with obsessive consistency, all refracted through the prism of physicality. For the men, in particular, that physicality was imagined as sex with a woman, sex that offered liberating possibilities. Tamura, Noma, and Ango each imagined the liberation of the body in slightly different ways; they refracted it through a number of prisms: changing societal and gender roles, national and individual identity, the meaning of the individual and its Others. A sexually available woman, and sex workers in particular, formed the most consistent of refracting lenses. The ramifications of this body imagery and the issues propelling it are, we have seen, significantly different for male writers than for female. The flesh writers consistently placed a transcendent value on a woman’s body. The contradiction ensnared them in the end.
