D e c a de n t Li t e r at u r e i n

Tw e n t i e t h- Ce n t u ry Ja pa n
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 D ec ade n t Li t e r at u r e i n
Tw e n t i e t h- Ce n t u ry Ja pa n
Sp e c tac l e s of Idl e L a b or

I k u ho A m a no
DECADENT LITERATURE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY JAPAN
Copyright © Ikuho Amano, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-38257-3

All rights reserved.

First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
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this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
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ISBN 978-1-349-48004-3 ISBN 978-1-137-37743-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137377432
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Amano, Ikuho, 1967–
Decadent Literature in Twentieth-Century Japan : Spectacles of Idle
Labor / by Ikuho Amano.
pages cm

1. Japanese literature—20th century—History and criticism.

2. Decadence (Literary movement)—Japan. 3. Decadence in literature.
I. Title.
PL726.67.D385A43 2013
895.6⬘09357—dc23 2013027803
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: December 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Con t e n t s

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction The Making of Decadence in Japan 1

One Immature Decadents: The Waste of Useless Men in
Indulgences—Two Novellas by Oguri Fūyō and
Iwano Hōmei 37
Two The Decadent Consumption of the Self: Naturalist
Aestheticism in Morita Sōhei’s Sooty Smoke 57
Three Decadent Returnees: The Dialogic Labor of
Sensibility in Nagai Kaf ū’s Sneers and
Ueda Bin’s The Vortex 79
Four Taishō Malaise as Decadence: Self-Reclusion
and Creative Labor in Satō Haruo’s A Pastoral
Spleen and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s A Fool’s Love 103
Five Decadence Begins with Physical Labor: The
Postwar Use of the Body in Sakaguchi Ango’s
The Idiot and Tamura Taijirō’s Gateway to the Flesh 127
Six Decadence as Generosity: Squander and
Oblivion in Mishima Yukio’s Spring Snow 145
Seven Capitalist Generosity: Decadence as Giving and
Receiving in Shimada Masahiko’s Decadent Sisters 165
Conclusion Toward Japanese Decadence: The Dynamics of
Energy from Waste to Living Labor 177

Notes 181
Works Cited 219
Index 233
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 Ac k now l ed gm e n t s

This book project would not have been possible without the support of
many people. Whereas I need to limit my thanks here to just a few indi-
viduals, I am aware of the fact that innumerable people’s help and labor
enabled the completion of this book. First, my foremost gratitude goes to
the professors at Penn State who patiently supervised my dissertation, from
which this book developed into the current form. Above all, without my
thesis advisor Reiko Tachibana’s continual encouragement even after my
graduation from the university, I would never have been able to conclude
this project. Equally, I am deeply indebted to Tom Beebee, Veronique
Foti, and Maria Truglio, all of whom generously shared their expertise
and guided me to develop the foundation of this book. As the Head of
the Department of Comparative Literature, Caroline Eckhardt instilled in
me the discipline and work ethic that I would need in my chosen profes-
sion. No doubt, her invaluable teachings have nourished my work in many
ways. I am very fortunate to have all of their unwavering support for many
years.
In the course of developing this book, I received professional guid-
ance from a number of people outside my home institutions. In particu-
lar, I would like to express my gratefulness to Leith Morton of Tokyo
Institute of Technology and Maria Orsi of La Sapienza, University of
Rome, who kindly supported my research in Tokyo and Rome. Also, I
am very thankful to the encouraging reviews by Nicoletta Pireddu of
Georgetown University and Regenia Gagnier of University of Exeter.
Then, the anonymous reviewer of my manuscript offered me a wide range
of critical commentaries and suggestions; they were tremendously helpful
and inspiring in the process of revision. Also, Florin Berindeanu of Case
Western Reserve University energized me with tireless brainstormings
and dialogues. Nicola (Nick) McCarthy of Penn State deserves a special
mention here for her insightful reading of my manuscript and painstaking
copyediting.
My senior colleagues at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln provided
me with a great deal of supports and encouragements in the past several
years. In particular, I would like to thank the Chair of the Department
 viii / Acknowledgments

of Modern Languages and Literatures, Evelyn Jacobson, the Vice Chair,

Radha Balasubramanian, and the Head of the Less-Commonly-Taught
Language Section, Mila Saskova-Pierce. Our former chair, Russell Ganim
(now at the University of Iowa), has been a great inspiration for my
research, thanks to his invaluable guidance. Yaroslav Komarovski of the
Department of Classics and Religious Studies, with his energetic com-
radeship, also kept encouraging me to complete this project. Further, the
Kawasaki Reading Room for Japanese Studies allowed me to have access to
various materials. I am especially grateful to the library’s former director,
Reiko Harpending.
Funding supports played an indispensable role in advancing the proj-
ect. The Research and Graduate Studies Office at Penn State provided
me with a semester of release from teaching, along with a fund to start
up my research. In the later stage, the Office of Research and Economic
Development at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln offered me a number
of generous supports, which enabled me to complete this book.
Finally, my gratefulness goes to my mother, Amano Yoshiko, and to
my sister, Sachiho. Over the years, they have put up with my indivualistic
decadent life away from home. This book is dedicated to my late father,
Amano Minoru.
 I n t roduc t ion
Th e M a k i ng of D ec ade nc e i n Ja pa n

A Genealogy: Decadence and Useless Men in

Japanese Literary Discourse
Decadence is a concept with a historical presence in many cultures. It
designates a given historical moment as a phase of decay vis-à-vis an irre-
trievable past as the golden age. This phase is permeated by sensibilities
tinged with both nostalgia and pessimism. Nonetheless, this moment of
degeneration is part of the cycle of history that conceives of a possibility of
renewal. This perspective accords with the fact that history is not a mimetic
representation of social or cultural events, but in fact a reflection of human
sensibilities upon a certain historical moment. Likewise, decadence is not
an objective fact of history but an epistemological device that envisions the
phase of decay vis-à-vis previous epochs up to the present. “Decadence,”
a Latin loanword entered the Japanese literary vocabulary around 1905,
immediately after being imported from the French word décadent.1 As a
neologism, the term was spelled out “dekadansu” in katakana and gradu-
ally incorporated into literary discourse as well as other popular art forms.
Nevertheless, this does not mean that the Japanese had not conceived of
the sensibilities before being designated by the Latin word. Indigenous
nouns describing sensibilities roughly equal to “decadence” existed prior
to the early twentieth century. They still exist in written form, and also,
though to a lesser extent, in spoken form. These words and phrases include
馛譪 (taitō), 讍ٜ (taihai), 譡胃 (tanbi), 蛽譪 (yūtō), 脘譪 (hōto), and
ٜ统 (daraku), which respectively denote “cultural twilight,” “degenera-
tion,” “aesthetic indulgence,” “playful indulgence,” “delinquency,” and
“downfall.” These multiple meanings suggest that no single noun can
capture the meaning of decadence in its entirety. For example, taitō con-
notes the decay of a glorious past, and daraku a failure or absence of moral
decency. Despite such discursivity, both in noun and adjectival forms,
“decadence” and “decadent,” began to circulate in literary discourse even
before the second decade of the twentieth century.
 2 / decadent literature

Whereas Japan was not subject to the West’s colonization in political

reality, the ambiguous adaptation of decadence can be considered a case of
cultural translation and mimicry, as discussed by Homi K. Bhabha.2 The
process of writing and repetition, for Bhabha, makes the cultural hierarchy
between the colonizer and the colonized evident. The practice of mim-
icry conceals the colonized other’s plea for recognition and authenticity;
however, indigenous cultural factors are bound to infiltrate “normalized
knowledges and disciplinary powers,” and thereby attain only the status
of a “partial presence” describable as an object that is “almost the same,
but not quite” the same as the authentic original.3 The colonial object is
unaware that it poses “an imminent threat” to the authorial West, while
its partiality is potent in any revaluation of indigenous knowledge pertain-
ing to “the priority of race, writing, history.”4 In the context of cultural
hierarchy and the displacement of indigenous traditions since the mid-
nineteenth century, for Japan, a neology such as decadence is a notable
site of cultural power politics wherein untranslatable sensibilities bend to
the other’s linguistic sign. Here, Japan’s “pseudo”-colonial situation is in
accord with Bhabha’s theory of mimicry. Precisely because of Japan’s road-
map, which sought to achieve a drastic Westernization, the West ironi-
cally appears to be a virtual colonizer forcing Japan into colonial mimicry.
Simultaneously, as Kamishima Jirō points out, Japan’s encounter with the
West resulted in a complex acculturation process through which certain
indigenous factors were neither dismissed nor undermined, but paradoxi-
cally inspired and reinforced by foreign influence.5 Mimicking, as Bhabha
rightly states, did not transform Japan into the West but into something
almost but not quite the West. From this point of departure, the current
study addresses Japan’s ambiguous literary modernity vis-à-vis the West
through our reconsideration of the literary tradition that we tentatively call
the cultural heritage of “decadence.”
In Japan, ideas that approximate the notion of decadence have played
an integral role in shaping philosophy and culture since the classical age.
In Muōysha no keifu [The Genealogy of Useless Men] (1964), Karaki Junzō
traces decadent sensibilities in Japanese literature back to the ninth century.6
Karaki speaks from an anthropological perspective in a discussion that
draws on Ise Monogatari [ca. 950 A.D. The Ise Stories], a collection of tanka
(short poems) interwoven with a narrative in which an anonymous author
comments on the historical figure, Ariwara no Narihira (825–880). As the
grandchild of Emperor Heijō, Narihira was raised in an elegant court cul-
ture. But his paternal family’s political alliance with Fujiwara no Kusuko,7
Emperor Heijō’s highly ranked mistress, means that he is ill-fated, because
the Emperor’s coup d’état against the government failed. As a result of the
dissidence, the clan’s marginalization from the central political arena in
 introduction / 3

the Heian court is inevitable. Thus, Narihira grows up observing a sense

of resignation among his family members, including his grandfather, the
Emperor; his uncle, Crown Prince Takaoka; and his father, Prince Aho.
They intend to recuperate Heijō, the previous capital city, in order to serve
their political ambitions, yet their attempt meets neither with success
nor with public acknowledgement. As the archetypal Japanese decadent,
Narihira possesses physical elegance and has little interest in mundane
matters. Instead he is well-versed in Japanese poetry rather than Chinese,
the latter of which is the lingua franca of the East Asian elite of the time.8
These dispositions of Narihira are altogether effeminate and reflect the
values of Heian court culture and its aesthetics. As the narrator of Ise
Monogatari notes, because of Narihira’s persona, he is unable to participate
in the mainstream politics. According to Karaki, the image of Narihira
presents an aesthetics of decadence that for the first time in Japanese his-
tory centers on beauty and ethics—an aesthetics that was to become typi-
cal of Japanese decadence.9 From the narrative viewpoint, Karaki argues
that Narihira stands out from the crowd of Japanese decadents because
of his profound interiority. Karaki considers the following lines from the
three chapters known as “Narihira Azumakudari” (Narihira’s Descent to
the East) as particularly important in the formation of Narihira’s persona,
for these lines suggest the semiotic contours of archetypal decadence in
Japanese literature: “箯უႺᄂᄇძპ” [he is lonely in Kyoto] in Chapter
7; “箯ჼ褩ჷ虥Ⴣᄂ჉ჸ” [he feels dejected in Kyoto] in Chapter 8; “葌ᄊ
ჀႾტჅ螿უ艙ცტ჏პ箯უყႺᄁა” [he feels useless and leaves Kyoto]
in Chapter 9. The description of his inner life is limited to these descrip-
tions, which do not fully correspond to ideas of the self in a modern sense.
Nevertheless, according to Karaki, these references to an inner life lend
themselves to an “ontological core.”10 Narihira’s dejection announces the
germination of a subjectivity constituted by the knowledge that he is use-
less and by his subsequent resolution to remain thus.11 Not surprisingly,
this psychological routine is ubiquitous in modern literature. Yet the cen-
tral point is neither the report of nor the style of this historical persona;
the importance lies in the rendition of the man’s consciousness of his alien-
ated position in the political mainstream, in the presentation of sensibility
itself as a literary motif. This distinguishes the work from the Manyōshū
[Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves] of the eighth century, in which the
unrestrained expression of emotion dominates the poetic style.
In Japanese classical, medieval, and modern literatures, the self-knowl-
edge of being useless, together with the choice of a reclusive life, recurs
as a significant motif. According to Karaki, these points are conspicu-
ous in Narihira as the archetype, and the subsequent priest-poets such
as Ippenshōnin (?–972), Saigyō Hōshi (1118–1190), Dōgen (1200–1253),
 4 / decadent literature

Sōgi (1421–1502), and Nishiyama Sōin (1605–1682) belong to the same

psychological lineage. All renounce public life and seek to sublimate their
reclusive existence in poetry in accord with the Buddhist precept of the
impermanence of all being. The sensibility of mujō, the universal law of
transience or mutability in the phenomenal world, permeates their exis-
tence. However, their decadence neither leads them to self-indulgence nor
allows them to effect a complete escape from worldly reality. Karaki’s inter-
pretation reminds us that their lives as hermits reflect not only an aesthetic
decision but also the social environments that they chose to abandon.
During the Kamakura (1185–1333) and Muromachi (1333–1573) periods,
thousands of people drifted away from their families and lords because the
ceaseless wars forced them to live as perpetual nomads away from their
homeland. Those uprooted from their local communities included low-
ranked soldiers, members of the Imperial family, and aristocrats who faced
relentless struggles over power. Under such conditions of ongoing unrest
and change, Karaki states, people accepted the Buddhist philosophy of
impermanence and the universal law of Panta Rhei as the truth.12 Then,
around the time of the Ōnin no ran [Ōnin War] (1467–1477) in the Kyoto
region, people became highly conscious of the notion of mappō (the period
of the Decay of the Buddha’s Law). It permeated everyday life, transmit-
ting the collective fear that the world was moving relentlessly toward an
apocalypse.13 This pessimistic worldview fueled the birth of yūgyōsha (vag-
abonds), ryūrisha (drifters), hōge (renouncers [of earthly life]), and kojiki no
angyasō (begging traveling monks) who were considered to be zokuhijiri
(secular saints). They became social outcasts in order to attain freedom
and to take pleasure in wandering, and in so doing they lived in accord
with the Buddhist worldview of impermanence.14 The presence of these
outcasts reflects the harsh reality that society could not fully accommo-
date the available working population, including those who had formerly
performed political functions. However, these harsh social conditions were
benefits for art. Though ironic, those who were pushed to the margins of
society were the protagonists who could hatch a new decadent sensibility
hitherto nonexistent in Japanese literary traditions. They were useless in
terms of making material or political contributions to society but cannot
be dismissed as insignificant losers. Their decision to remain useless was
deemed an aesthetic decision, and that tacit assertiveness can be identified
as the genesis of decadent pioneers in Japan.15
The sustained period of war in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had
a profound effect on Japan, causing widespread problems such as starva-
tion and increasing numbers of orphans as people became dislocated from
their homes and social functions. Nevertheless, Karaki stresses that their
prolonged predicament, both at the material and the psychological levels,
 introduction / 5

enabled the formation of decadent sensibilities as a durable, rather than

ephemeral, pattern. Thus, the conditions brought about by the warring
periods were significant in the development of literary styles. Pathos and
solitude as trope and theme were indicative of the departure from the sty-
listic conventions embraced by court culture. Expressing a halfway state
between despair and resignation, the decadent sensibilities manifested in
the poetic tone of play were characterized by such styles as yūkyō (playful
frenzy), fūkyō (stylistic craze), and yūraku (pleasure of play).16 All these
terms are clearly related to the poetics of useless men who willfully with-
draw from a mainstream social life. The propensity to play suggests their
profound discontentment with life, calling attention to the poetic desire to
escape both from the society that marginalized them and from the restless
epoch itself. At a philosophical level, this decadence was fueled by the self-
knowledge of being useless—a realization that was, in turn, pessimistically
coupled with the Buddhist teaching of impermanence. Whereas this medi-
eval decadent model foregrounded pessimism and dejection, its poetic sen-
sibility was transmuted later into a spirit of play and lightness and passed
down to the renga and haikai poets of the Edo period (1603–1867), who
also found themselves at the margins of social life.17
In accord with Karaki’s perspective, Orikuchi Shinobu takes the view
that inja (literally “hidden men”) —those who chose a reclusive life like
priest-poet Kamono Chōmei (1155–1216) and courtesans—stand in the
line of the archetypal Japanese decadents. According to Orikuchi, inja
refers to people forced into exile and to those who willingly pursue free-
dom outside the hierarchical structure of society.18 The inja tended to be
priests and aristocrats, but the group included people from many differ-
ent backgrounds.19 Orikuchi attributes the emergence of the inja to the
harsh economic climate and the established social hierarchy within which
people could not advance in regard to status.20 Such people then found
a way to sublimate what can be understood as a conflict between desire
and reality, that is, through playful renga (linked poetry) composed by
multiple poets—a tradition that continued to the generation of Matsuo
Bashō (1644–1694), who was considered a pseudo inja poet.21 On the
other hand, from the Muromachi period onward, the townsmen (chōnin)
became a major force in the development of the narrative style known
as gesaku (literally, “trivial scribbling” or “frivolous composition”), which
can be considered related to the work of the inja literati.22 In Orikuchi’s
description, renga, haikai, and gesaku all share a single genealogy: they are
all related to the work of the socially marginalized inja. These genres make
evident the playful and erotic elements that correspond to the sad reality
as lived by the marginalized and as experienced by them through a kind
of medieval sensibility.23 Renga, haikai, and gesaku proliferated as the locus
 6 / decadent literature

of the townsmen literati’s voice, dispelling gloom by transforming the inja

aesthetics of solitude into self-indulgent play.24
In post-Meiji Restoration modernity, one of the most notable aesthetes
to inherit the spirit of the medieval decadents coupled with bunjin kishitsu
(traditional dispositions as literati) was Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) through
Narushima Ryūhoku (1837–1884). Considered Kafū’s aesthetic predeces-
sor, Ryūhoku was a man of erudition. He was well-versed in Confucianism
and had once held the Tokugawa Shogunate’s highest financial officer
position. He was also a progressive Meiji official who spent time in Europe
serving the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the period of 1872–1873.
Despite the privilege he had enjoyed in Europe, soon after returning to
Japan, Ryūhoku retired to a hermit’s life in Mukōjima, a waterfront suburb
in Tokyo. Ryūhoku rationalized his retirement from public life in part by
expressing his loyalty to a Tokugawa Shogunate that no longer existed.25 In
so doing, he aspired to be “a genuinely useless man in Heaven and Earth,”
eschewing “anything useful in society.”26 His vigorous identity as a useless
man is open to two compatible interpretations. First, he was the proud
intellectual dandy whose complex sensibility inhering in nostalgia for the
Edo period, and his resistance to the pragmatic Meiji regime was incom-
patible with contemporary social life. Second, by keeping a distance from
the social center of the literati, he hoped to challenge contemporary prag-
matism, holding that the notion of jitsugaku (practical/useful learning) as
advocated by Fukuzawa Yukichi severely degrades literature.27 Inspired by
Ryūhoku’s bunjin kishitsu, Kafū adopted a similar hermit mentality and
thereby rejected accepted moral standards to engage instead in dilettan-
tism.28 In contrast with Ryūhoku’s upright attitude, Kafū’s persona and
work offer a more complex attitude toward Meiji Japan and fin-de-siècle
Europe. As is well-known, his time in the United States (1903–1907) and
France (1907–1908), along with his passion for Zola and Maupassant’s
Naturalism, Symbolism, and Decadence, had a significant impact on his
career. Kafū’s years abroad deepened his admiration for the West and rein-
forced his affection for the bygone Edo period.29 After Kafū returned to
Tokyo, his first-hand experience of the West contributed to his frustration
with Japan, his homeland in which a feudalistic mentality and shallow
imitations of the West were ubiquitous. As a kichōsha (returner from the
West), he considered Europe to be doubly admirable for its mature civilian
society and progressive culture underpinned by rich history. On the other
hand, Japan’s frantic efforts to Westernize, Kafū felt, were so vulgar and
superficial as to evince a lack of cultural backbone. In this period of rapid
modernization and political turmoil, Kafū developed a consciousness of
being useless in Meiji Japan. His identity as a useless man was cemented by
the execution of radical socialist/anarchist Kōtoku Shūsui in the Taigyaku
 introduction / 7

Jiken (High Treason Incident) in 1910.30 Unlike Zola, who had publicly
denounced the injustice of the Dreyfus Affair, Kafū did nothing. He
remained silent, as did many other writers. It was at this time that he fully
realized his own uselessness as a writer. In fact, Kafū was haunted by his
failure to demand justice for Shūsui, who was in reality a political scape-
goat for the Imperialist government. In a short essay “Hanabi” [Fireworks]
(1919), he expresses the remorse he felt over this incident.31 There is no
doubt that the incident was a turning point in his career. After Shūsui’s
execution, the high-brow style of Kafū’s writing gave way to the gesaku
(trivial composition) style, reminiscent of popular writing flourished in the
late Edo period. Unable to engage with public issues, he drove himself into
the closure of egoism and the literary style suited to the useless man.
Whereas Kafū’s desire to retire from the social mainstream restaged the
aesthetic attitude of the useless man, the rise of Japanese Naturalism gave
birth to a new group of decadents. Critics generally do not agree on the
writers who fall into this category. However, frequently cited writers and
poets include Iwano Hōmei (1873–1920), Tokuda Shūsei (1871–1943),
Chikamatsu Shūkō (1876–1944), and Kasai Zenzō (1887–1928). Their
depictions of decadence tend to lack a clear rationale, and end up simply
depicting people indulging in sexual or material pleasure. As a modern
scientific endeavor, Naturalism was meant to present, as Katagami Tengen
states, “the truth between man’s [nature] and ethics.”32 To this extent,
Naturalism was expected to analyze people’s inner lives and to construct
a modern Japanese identity based on an objective portrayal of reality.33
Despite this agenda, as Akagi Kōhei complains, Naturalism became
a home for the subgenre called the shishōsetsu (I-novel) wherein writers
portrayed their personal experiences in a subjective manner, displaying
“childish sentimentalism and carnal desire.”34 In “Yūtōbungaku no boku-
metsu” [“The Eradication of Decadent Literature”] (1916), Akagi attacked
a number of young writers—Nagata Kimihiko (1887–1964), Yoshii Isamu
(1886–1960), Kubota Mantarō (1889–1963), Gotō Sueo (1886–1967), and
Chikamatsu Shūkō (1876–1944)—on the ground that their yūtō bungaku
(decadent literature, literature of indulgence) was not only poisonous but
also vulgar being without aesthetic merit.35 According to Akagi, their over-
use of “Saufen und Huren” (drinking and whoring) is devoid of signifi-
cance, and only exalts indulgent life styles for no purpose.36 He observes
that these Naturalist writers had bypassed the process of contemplating
their own uselessness in society, and instead used their writing as a way to
escape the moral constraints of society. Objectively speaking, their writ-
ing became a site of self-absorbing play fuelled by eroticism and idiocy.37
Therefore, for Akagi, unlike European writers such as Oscar Wilde and
Arthur Schnitzler, the writers of the yūtō bungaku were not engaged in
 8 / decadent literature

a sincere effort to observe human reality.38 Further, Akagi extended his

criticism to Japanese Aestheticism (tanbi shugi), particularly by condemn-
ing the writers, including Kubota Mantarō of the Mita Bungaku (Mita
Literature) circle.39 Their style ignores ethical questions and indulges in
superficially opulent rhetoric.40 In the conclusion to his essay, Akagi claims
that his goal is to promote the “healthy development and flourishing” of
a righteous art.41
This polemic on yūtō bungaku was later refuted by Yasunari Sadao in his
essay titled “Yūtōbungaku bokumetsu fukanōron” [On the Impossibility
of Eradicating Decadent Literature] (1917). In response to Akagi’s firm
rejection of what was passing for a Japanese decadent literature, Yasunari
vindicated it, arguing that the genre is intertwined with socio-economic
realities and offers the reader a momentary escape from the harshness
of them. In the post-Russo-Japanese War period, people were becoming
increasingly conscious of social hierarchies based on wealth and other
resources. Yūtō bungaku provided a sort of sanctuary wherein the pain and
intractability of these glaring economic inequalities could be forgotten.42
Instead of objectively portraying such reality, the genre resorts to kaihiteki
jōcho (escapist sensibilities) to help readers draw some pleasure from life.43
Yasunari argues further that the popularity of yūtō bungaku reflects the
maturity of the Japanese readership, which had become open to reading
about what are generally considered immoral human behaviors. The lib-
eral readership was fueled also by women’s economic independence and
their demand for a new popular literature.44 Readers’ interests were shift-
ing from the objective/realistic shizenshugi bungaku (Naturalist literature)
to the tsūzoku shōsetsu (popular or low-brow novel). The latter genre of
decadent motifs became popular because it is rife with imagination, affec-
tivity, and sensibilities, but places little emphasis on uptight rationality.45
Yasunari then asserts that the popularity of yūtō bungaku reveals “the psy-
chology of desires to dodge painful reality” (kaihino yōkyū no shinri), and
notes that this tendency reflects the widespread neurosis in early Taishō
Japan.46 In Yasunari’s opinion, the neurosis cannot be eradicated, as it is
rooted in the patterns pertaining to the distribution of wealth are firmly
established. The social system in all senses undermines efforts toward
effecting development and change.47 Yasunari concludes the essay stating
that yūtō bungaku will not disappear because the genre exists in response to
the demand of the readers who are highly conscious of the socio-economic
inequality.48
These critiques of decadent literature persisted through to the middle of
the twentieth century, with viewpoints based on literary realism and objec-
tivism dominating the critical landscape. Immediately after World War
II, Japanese Marxists condemned the genre and even Aestheticism, on the
 introduction / 9

basis that the styles fail to engage with social issues. In the annual report
to the Shinnihon Bungakkai (Association for New Japanese Literature)
of 1946, Miyamoto Yuriko (1899–1951) attacked Nagai Kafū for misus-
ing the motif of decadence. Kafū’s treatment of decadence, according to
Miyamoto, is entirely given over to eroticism and lasciviousness, being
far removed from scientific analysis of society as French Decadents had
intended.49 Originally interested in Zola’s and Maupassant’s Naturalist
methods, Kafū however quickly took another approach when he discov-
ered Mallarmé’s Symbolism and Baudelaire’s Decadence. Both before leav-
ing Japan and after his return, Kafū modeled the Symbolist urban ennui
in his poetic narratives such as America Monogatari [American Stories]
(1908) and Fransu Monogatari [French Stories] (1909). In the following
years, Nagai turned his back on both Naturalism and Symbolism, and
as mentioned earlier shifted his interest to a style that appropriated the
ambience of the Edo demi-monde and gesaku. In the eyes of the Marxist
Miyamoto, Kafū’s transformation was nothing but a waste of the erudition
he had gained in the West. Further, Miyamoto considered Kafū’s writing
to be highly injurious to the public because it undermined the healthy pro-
motion of democracy and social realism in literature.50 Above all, Kafū’s
dilettantism in regard to fin-de-siècle Decadence appeared to Miyamoto a
folly that insulted the ideology of the genre:

Kafū went to France in the ’40s of the Meiji period (the first decade of the
twentieth century) and learned that Decadence is a manifest form of revolt
against the worldview of the petit bourgeoisie within French literary cur-
rents. As a modern man, he aspired to embrace the same Decadentism as
the expression of a rebellious spirit.51 However, after returning to Japan,
Kafū could not find his spiritual moorings within the context of Japanese
society and the self. It was because there was an unsurpassable historical
difference between Japan’s semi-feudalistic mentality and France’s moder-
nity, as well as its social and spiritual urgency expressed by the French
Decadentism. Japan had established neither the freedom to fight against
feudalism nor the autonomy of the modern petit bourgeoisie as the arch-
enemy of Decadence. As a result, Kafū renounced the European mode of
social thinking, indulged in the privilege afforded by his own affluence,
and entered the realm of erotic literature. He, therefore, became foreign to
Decadentism, whose mission is to critique all kinds of social phenomena
including even the venomous elements of those.52

In Miyamoto’s view, Kafū deviated from the idea of fin-de-siècle Decadence

because he did not give due consideration to its socio-political undertones.
He, therefore, failed to speak against Japan’s feudalism and the oppres-
sion of the country’s laborers.53 Likewise, Miyamoto criticizes Japanese
Decadent literature as a whole, considering it a receptacle for deformed
 10 / decadent literature

bourgeois democracy. In her view, the genre at large is a perfunctory form

of entertainment that unlike scientific objectivism utterly fails to show the
correlations between individuals and society.54 Further, she maintains that,
under the vicious influence of decadent eroticism, people are uprooted from
social history and reduced to fragmented individuals without any organic
connection to society. Readers are only deluded by the genre’s fantasy that
promotes “unique individuals” at most.55 Kafū’s dilettante decadence is
the foremost antisocial enterprise that does nothing but cripple the socio-
historical foundation of Decadence in France, obscuring the genre’s mis-
sion of undermining bourgeois degeneration from within.56
Miyamoto’s limited socialist critique disregards Kafū’s decadent aes-
thetics and its psychological complexities partly derived from fin-de-siècle
Decadence. For her, the merit of modern literature lies in its autonomy
of renouncing the self (jibunkara jibun o nukedeteyuku nōdōryoku).57 This
idea implies her interest in discrediting individualism and suggests that
the purpose of literature is to represent a collective social voice. In this
light, Kafū is sinful because he abandons the French Naturalists’ auto-
critical attitude and replaces that virtue with solipsism and egoism.58
Miyamoto’s claim reveals an unbridgeable gulf between Japanese Marxism
and so-called bourgeois Decadence in Japan. She upholds objectivism
and realism as though they are a bundle of tools certain to be effective in
addressing the class struggle. On the other hand, it is true that the propo-
nents of Aestheticism (and the Naturalist writers of Decadent literature)
do not directly address Marxist concerns in their work. Nevertheless, as
Yasunari’s position makes clear, self-indulgent Decadent literature is also a
reflection of socio-economic reality, despite its distinct aesthetic approach
to the issues. The gap inheres in two radically different visions of artis-
tic production—the Marxist emphasis on collective social voice and the
Decadents’ (both the Aestheticists and the Naturalists) emphasis on indi-
viduals. When the views of Yasunari and Miyamoto are juxtaposed, it is
clear that both schools point, in one way or another, to broadly socio-
economic issues. Therefore, what vexes Miyamoto should be understood
essentially as the stylistics of non-realist/objectivist writing. She singles out
Kafū’s gesaku style for attack not because, objectively speaking, his empha-
sis on sexuality and eroticism is primitive and degrading to women,59 but
rather because she fails to consider what those motifs semantically conceal
or reveal. In fact, the absence of visible moral accountability in Kafū is
disturbing to Miyamoto. The socialist charge against Decadent literature
attests to an aesthetic aporia, revealing not exactly a failure of Japanese
literary criticism but rather the fact that the non-utilitarian disposition of
art was still the terra incognita outside the ideological concerns embraced
by Marxist writers through social realism.
 introduction / 11

As the discussion above demonstrates, Decadent literature in Japan was

continually refuted by critics who considered it incongruous to the ideol-
ogy and morality advocated by European Decadents. On this ground, as
represented by Akagi and Miyamoto, the argument was that European
writers had resorted to an aesthetics that went against the grain of con-
ventions in response to the perceived crisis of the late nineteenth century.
In reality, however, fin-de-siècle Decadence was at its peak in the period
of the 1880s–1890s, but its reception in Japan did not begin until after
the mid-1900s. This chronological difference itself suggests a problem in
regard to the relationship between European and Japanese Decadence;
that is, as Kobayashi Hideo argues, late Meiji and Taishō writers bypassed
learning about French Naturalism and the rigorous scientific objectivism
on which it is based.60 Without comprehending the methods of or the
basis for Naturalism and its social inquiry, Japanese writers were exposed
to Decadence mostly as a new literary style. At least in the first decade of
the twentieth century, the complex socio-economic issues innate to the
movement went undiscovered.61
In sum, Japanese critics rejected Japanese Decadence, considering it as
a far from righteous socio-cultural enterprise. Referring to fin-de-siècle
Decadence, the critics seem to suggest that Japanese writers should have
followed the movement as a suzerain model. However unfairly, such views
undermined the potential growth of Japanese Decadence from the literary
vein of Aestheticism. As exemplified by Kafū’s early writing, the modern
genesis of Japanese Decadence can be identified in part as an offshoot
of the European movement. It should be also noted that 1900s Japan,
lacking a full-fledged civil society like that of France and Britain, unwit-
tingly altered the semantic significance unique to fin-de-siècle Decadence.
Nevertheless, paralleling Homi Bhabha’s situating of the act of mimicry in
the context of colonial politics, Japanese critics accused their compatriot
writers who failed to meet the standards of fin-de-siècle Decadence, and
thus they ironically reinforced the bending of Japan’s culture toward the
West. This is to say that Japanese writers imitated this Western literary
genre in the hope of creating something almost the West. The result, then,
was the West but not quite.
These commentaries on Japanese Decadence are rather introverted
and negative. In response, the current study departs from these views
to consider instead the local particularity and significance of Japanese
Decadence. In this endeavor, transcultural literary influences from the
West are important points of reference, but should not be treated merely
as the transplanted factors in the Japanese counterpart. The European
influences rather brought about the instances in which Japanese writers
contemplated on socio-economic issues in their own national milieus.
 12 / decadent literature

In lieu of the maturity of the West, as Yasunari points out, the factors that
demanded the genre in Japan were, in large part, rooted in the anxiet-
ies stirred up by drastic social changes and the accompanying economic
realities. Karaki Jūzō’s Shi to dekadansu [Poetry and Decadence] (1952)
acknowledges the same point, and finds the influences from European
Decadence important because it problematized those social issues at the
philosophical level of epistemology and ontology. Referring to Paul Valéry
and Friedrich Nietzsche, Karaki states that history and social order are
essentially “a fiction” that dictates a utilitarian perspective on life.62 Then,
historical materialism fuels the production of utilitarian fiction in the form
of history and social order, as though our phenomenal world cannot exist
without meaning and purpose.63 In contrast to such fictionalized reality,
Karaki interprets Nietzsche’s decadents, as well as pessimists and her-
mits, as altogether “autonomous nihilists” (nōdōteki nihirisuto) capable of
affirming—and thus of unconditionally accepting—all the worldly phe-
nomena as they are.64 By negating any mediation by a utilitarian fiction,
decadents are not to dodge modern realities. For their absolute affirmation
of the world as it is, they must resort to an intricate psychological paradox
and take a detour via the dramatization of the self:

He grasps “a chance,” where he exhausts nihilism to the end, and where he

reaches the bottom of downfall. [ . . . ] What activates nihilism is élan vital.
It is the virtue of life at ascendance. It is the will to power. In other words,
it is prodigious passion. [ . . . ] What is prominent in Nietzsche’s thoughts
is the process through which he degrades himself and recuperates the self
from decadence.65

This detoured itinerary is important, not only because it attests to the

Japanese reception of European Decadence via Nietzsche, but also because
the mobile pattern plays out an archetype of Japanese Decadence. As
Karaki suggests, in Nietszche’s abstraction, “decadence” is always a liminal
stage, from which the phase of self-dissimulating degeneration gives way to
a process of self-recovery en route to the “will to power.” In the process of
recovery, institutionalized values are flushed away, and the bare individual
confronts the stage in which the self is to be reconstructed. Through the
intricacy of rhetoric, what occupies Nietzsche’s discourse on decadence is
not nihilism per se but the exaltation of “life, [ . . . ] vitality, the vibration,
and exuberance of life.”66 For this affirmation, any kind of institutional
precept hampers life. To this extent, Nietzsche denounces his contempo-
rary artists—above all Wagner and the French Decadents—because their
music and poetry are a kind of social institutions that mesmerize the audi-
ence, eliciting despotic energy that demolishes the human will to power.67
 introduction / 13

Fin-de-siècle Decadents are particularly harmful in this regard because

their art is meant to stifle human vitality, replacing it with an excess of
sensual artificiality. According to Nietzsche, this manifestation of art is
rooted in a weak, incomplete Roman nihilism. It rejects bourgeois society
only because its vulgarity is incompatible with the Decadents’ aesthetic
creed.68
In the formation of Japanese Decadence, Nietzsche’s will to power is no
less significant than the other general schemes of fin-de-siècle Decadence.
The semantic itinerary of the psyche, which begins with self-degradation
and shifts to upward mobility, provides Japanese Decadents with an
important philosophical template. However, in the early twentieth cen-
tury, Nietzche’s idea was largely received as a new aesthetic model rather
than as a philosophical trajectory of degeneration.69 Therefore, Karaki’s
reevaluation of Nietzsche in the postwar years is significant. In The
Genealogy of Useless Men, Karaki situates Nietzsche’s notion of decadence
as the provisional stage of identity that mediates the birth of new sensibili-
ties and self-awareness. Recuperation of the self amounts to a discovery of
the truth of humanity, ultimately signifying an affirmation of the unmedi-
ated flow of mere life (tannaru seizon, muimina seiseiruten).70 Decadence
equals “a kind of interstitial condition” that is situated outside the conven-
tional structures of society but inside the fictional space in which imagi-
nation intervenes in the bare phenomenal world.71 As Valéry also notes,
modernity is innately a fictional construct, and its utilitarian ethos holds
modern society together with a totalitarian impulse.72 In response to this
“fictionality” of the modern, Nietzsche’s decadence vehemently resists it,
holding on to the state of nil admirari, wherein “the self is represented [as]
nothingness.” 73 His will to power is an abnegation of meaning, and what
Nietzsche calls the “eternal return” is a more drastic rejection of meaning
attached to humanity. The eternal return can be likened to the process of
reincarnation in Mahayana Buddhism, through which only life recurs in
the form of consciousness, but neither will nor memory.74 For Nietzsche,
the thought is a metaphor that radically negates all ranges of fictionality, a
gesture that also accepts any fate unconditionally.75

From Sensibility to the Ideology of

Uselessness: Decadence as Creative Labor
As the above overview demonstrates, Decadent literature in Japan addresses
the sensibilities of useless men vis-à-vis the demands of collective society.
Decadent individuals tend to seclude themselves because they are highly
conscious of being persona non grata in a society where each individual is
expected to contribute to collective well-being. From antiquity to early
 14 / decadent literature

modern Japan, for those who felt unable to fulfill this social demand, tak-
ing refuge in a hermit-like life was a way out of the conflict. Such a solitary
life could protect the privacy and identity of the useless man who had
renounced active social engagement only to invest his energy in cultivating
art and philosophy. In the late Meiji period, marked by Japan’s victory in
the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, this introverted tendency on the part of
Japanese Decadents began to dissipate. In concert with the liberal social
ambience, in lieu of pessimistic anti-social hermits, what became ubiquitous
were multifarious styles of decadent life in an urban space characterized
by transition. This transition suggests, as Richard Dellamora argues, that
the phenomenon of Decadence was becoming a dissident stance against
modern urban, industrial, and commercial society. Then what nurtured
such a radical impulse was the sense of liberalism that enabled individuals’
critique of society and utopic aspirations.76
In twentieth-century Japan, the development of Decadent literature
tended to coincide ambivalently both with times of social liberation and
those of economic stagnation. Barely displaying a narcissistic solipsism,
Japanese Decadence instead shaped itself around an assertive individuality
and the pursuit of material pleasure. Fictional narrative is an instrument
to express these salient features of Decadence, which are not a priori condi-
tions as is typically so in European Decadence. In other words, in twenti-
eth-century Japanese work, Decadents are always presented in the process
of creative labor through which their antimodern dissidence is shaped into
a personal vision of liberalist utopia. What the current study concentrates
on is precisely this narrative process whereby Decadents labor to manu-
facture their own microcosm of pleasure. This “labor” is treated herein
not only as a dramaturgy or motif, but also as a paradigm for our read-
ing of Japanese Decadence. We do not consider labor as a set of precon-
ceived activities that can simply be performed. Rather, labor for Japanese
Decadents is always a new terrain to be cultivated through perseverance
and ongoing experimentation.
The Marxist theory of labor understands that under capitalism the
value of labor is measured by the production of commodities. Insofar as
labor is commodified, the worker does not produce any objects for himself
but only for the capitalist. Labor amounts to “a sacrifice of his life,” as it
does not reflect the worker’s desire but it is simply needed “in order to
live.” 77 While engaging in labor, what the worker produces are wages, but
this monetary compensation stifles “a manifestation of his life.” 78 Whether
and the extent to which the laborer is bent to the capitalist depends on
the laborer’s free will, and what enables his life outside labor (his private
domain of life) is the commodified labor itself. This triangular cycle of
capital, labor, and wage is ironic for the laborer, as his life depends on,
 introduction / 15

despite his free will, the potentially arbitrary power of capital. Then, it is
not only a circuit of ordeals that the modern capitalist economy imposes
on humanity, but also a symbolically universal regulatory model according
to which modern social life disciplines itself.
Japanese Decadent literature at large poses a challenge to this regula-
tory model of an economy governing modern society. By virtue of labor,
Decadents do not commodify their resources (physical energy, time, cre-
ativity, intellect etc.) for the sake of living, but utilize labor exclusively to
fulfill their desires. Their labor begins with the subjunctive mode of wish
fulfillment, and tends to preserve the realm of individuals from the public
domain. European Decadence surely embraced the same self-interest as the
cornerstone of its reaction against bourgeois society. On the other hand,
for Japanese Decadents, above all for those of the post-Russo-Japanese War
period, labor is significant in order to fulfill a personal interest as the pro-
cess builds their identity in production-driven society. By rejecting labor for
commodification (for wages, a regulated return), Japanese Decadents refute
the restricted use of their labor for utilitarian purposes. According to Marx
and Engels, the relation of utility and utilization presupposes individual
qualities and allows them to manifest only as a definite significance. This
category of usefulness, passed down from the enlightenment, is important
to the development of the bourgeoisie.79 Escaping from the grid of the bour-
geois economy itself was, however, not an agenda articulated by Japanese
Decadents. Rather, their discourse continues the genealogy of useless men
who are unable to conform to the norm of “use.” This rejection of utility
value is at the core of Decadent literature in twentieth-century Japan. The
Decadents not only defy what labor means to capitalism and the bourgeoi-
sie, but also steer the trajectory of their labor and uproot it from the circuit
of profit-making and the abstraction of human energy. Their ideological
negation of labor for the sake of productive outcomes tends to be subtle,
usually transmuted into an aesthetic pleasure. Without clearly expressing
despair about the pragmatic use of energy and resources, however, Japanese
Decadence is resonant with an array of anti-bourgeois positions as taken by
such thinkers as Georges Bataille, Jean-François Lyotard, Michael Hardt
and Antonio Negri, and poet Charles Baudelaire.
Another core characteristic of Japanese Decadence lies in its indiffer-
ence to realizing a return on the investment of labor. In this regard, the
operative principle of economics is the “general” rather than the “restricted”
economy. In La Part Maudite (1947) (partially translated into English as
Visions of Excess and The Accursed Share),80 Bataille endorses unconditional
expenditure, giving such examples as the sun that emits the unlimited
energy with no expectation of return.81 Though solar energy is admittedly
an extreme example, what he points to here is a necessity of consumption
 16 / decadent literature

in which the resource is excessive and cannot be used for the growth of
individuals or for any form of organization.82 On the other hand, the
bourgeois economy is the polar opposite of such abundance and generosity
meant for consumption. Instead, it is based on the principle of the “hatred
of expenditure.”83 In the pursuit of sensory pleasure, Decadents are prone
to expend energy, driven by the hedonist tendency to love fleeting plea-
sure. Their labor, often in the form of excessive consumption, produces
no commodifiable outcome with use value, but is dispensed for pleasure
as its end. Resonant with Bataille’s unproductive expenditure, Lyotard
acknowledges the surplus born out of expenditure that is devoid of use
value in his concept of a “libidinal economy.” In this economic model, the
outcome of expenditures bears no enduring use value, and remains outside
the Marxist paradigm of labor in which the commodity goes to the capital-
ist and the wages taken as compensation for the laborer. The expenditure,
in Lyotard’s libidinal economy, transmutes the intensity of labor into a
physical or metaphysical equation resulting in pure loss. The loss takes
such concrete forms as heat, smoke, and jouissance 84 —these are equally
the results of transmutation, whether thermodynamics or sexual drive,
which leads to a surplus without use value. Bataille’s general economy and
Lyotard’s transmutation model are important in our account of the labor
of the Japanese Decadents. Their obsessive engagement with any given
object of desire clearly takes the form of labor. Expenditures of energy tend
to be indifferent to a limit, and thereby lead to catastrophic consequences:
financial disaster, death, mental or physical exhaustion, and so forth. The
absence of equilibrium—a sort of cognitive balance sheet between expense
and return—and the presence of destructive expenditure also constitute
the salient features of Japanese Decadence in the twentieth century.
According to Bataille and Lyotard, the surplus out of expenditure lacks
any use, but conceives non-material social or personal values, such as glory,
honor, or sexual gratification. From the offshoot perspective of Marx and
Engels’s Manifesto of the Communist Party (1847), Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri also call our attention to the extra-material value of labor.
In their view, that unusable portion created through labor is not a passive
leftover bound to evaporate as exemplified by Lyotard’s jouissance. What
is unpacked by Hardt and Negri is the surplus embedded in the innate
characteristic of labor, which is left unaccounted for by capitalism in its
reduction of labor to purely monetary terms. Their preface to their Labor
of Dionysus (1994) postulates that “living labor” is innately social so as to
be capable of creating viable networks of cooperation:

Living labor produces life and constitutes society in a time that cuts
across the division posed by the workday, inside and outside the prisons of
 introduction / 17

capitalist work and its wage relation, in both the realm of work and that of
nonwork. It is a seed that lies waiting under the snow, or more accurately,
the life force always already active in the dynamic networks of cooperation,
in the production and reproduction of society, that courses in and out of
the time posed by capital.85

Hardt and Negri further denounce contemporary capitalism as a “subtle

yoke” that suffocates the reality of living labor.86 This stance points to the
resurgence of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, which attacks capital-
ism at its foundation that not only provokes class struggle but also relegates
labor to the capitalist’s disposal. What capitalism obscures is the surplus
value of living labor, the nature of labor not totally reducible to wages. An
underlying aspect of labor is, Hardt and Negri argue, the consciousness of
self-valorization (Selbstverwertung). Therefore, labor should be defined as
a value-creating process that involves immaterial forms of praxis such as
intellectual, affective, and techno-scientific engagement.87 At first glance,
these assertions may sound hyperbolic as a guiding principle for reading
Japanese Decadent literature. Nevertheless, their paradigm of labor is dou-
bly important to the discourse of Decadence. With an obsessive or even
fanatical degree of intensity, Decadents engage in labor not for the sake
of monetary or material gain. Their efforts are precisely the process of
constructing the self and giving credit to the self as the proactive subject
of living labor. Equally significant is that the fruits of labor are not lim-
ited to possession of the material because the process of labor involves the
non-material workings of affection, passion, or sympathy. This valence of
emotional effects in labor is, compared with the solipsism and cynicism of
the fin-de-siècle Decadents, quite prevalent and significantly motivates the
labor of the Japanese Decadents.
Further, Baudelaire’s concept of paradis artificiels is a subcategory of
labor prominent to Japanese Decadents. The primacy of artificiality over
nature in European Decadence suggests that there is a new vision of the
world at work. Going beyond the subjectivity of artists, in Decadence both
imagination and ingenuity intervene in the process of creating a private
sphere. For Baudelaire, an artificial paradise is at his disposal, a creative
scheme to enhance the self. Narcotic substances such as hashish or wine
are employed to create artificially out-of-this-world hallucinations, and
that effect literally enables an escape from the reality of mundane life.
The ultimate purpose of this method is to call forth drastic individual-
ity that can galvanize artistic potential.88 Unlike the Romantics, as Jean
Pierrot states, Decadents eagerly used narcotic substances for their aes-
thetic program in the quest for hitherto unknown sensations and plea-
sure.89 Pushing the limits of physical experience, they overtly repudiated
 18 / decadent literature

classical notions of art as an imitation of life and in turn endorsed anti-

natural views of the universe.90 Similar to fin-de-siècle Decadents under
the profound influence of Baudelaire, the Japanese Decadents, above all
the Taishō Decadents, also found potential of an artificial paradise dove-
tailing with their bitter-sweet experience of modernity. As if consoling
these artists’ disenchantment with contemporary life, this artistic para-
digm offered a way to unleash their literary imagination.

Why the Japanese Became Decadents:

The Historical Background of Their Alternative Labor
In Meiji Japan, the institution of social reforms was imperative if the
country was not to become the prey of Western superpowers. To con-
struct a full-fledged modern nation, Fukuzawa Yukichi urged Japan to
nurture a truly independent people by means of education. His influential
Gakumon no susume [Encouragement of Learning] (1887) played a crucial
role in propagating the idea that the feudalistic social premises dictated by
Confucianism should be eradicated to modernize Japanese people.91 After
more than two hundred years of the isolationist policy of the Tokugawa
Shogunate regime in the Edo period (1604–1868), the Meiji government
promoted new national slogans such as bunmei kaika (civilization in the age
of enlightenment) and fukoku kyōhei (rich nation, strong army). Whereas
Fukuzawa did not actively engage in politics,92 his philosophy, which
can be summed up as “rationalism for order,” made a great impact on
the government’s policy-making.93 From the rationalist stance, Fukuzawa
held that academic studies and politics should each be an independent
endeavor, because academia entails profound research whereas politics
requires speed and flexibility.94 This idea reflects his wish to see an appro-
priate distribution of human resources throughout society. He contended
that the division of fields is a self-evident necessity because people know
how to direct their abilities to where they are “useful” (yūyō).95 According
to Fukuzawa, in this appropriate distribution, science and technology
should be in the social forefront because it is these fields that are capable of
modernizing the country. He gave equal importance to jitsugaku (practical
learning) in such areas as medicine and engineering. There is no doubt
that these fields made significant contributions to developing the modern
nation. Nonetheless, as Maruyama Masao reminds us, Fukuzawa did not
simply encourage scientific learning for its own sake. Rather, his inten-
tion was to effect a careful separation between empirical and objective
methods of learning from the closure prevalent in the learning methods
of the ancien régime, wherein traditional ethics held an authority a priori
in regard to interpreting natural phenomena.96 Hand in hand with this
 introduction / 19

appraisal of empirical learning, Fukuzawa objected to the study of useless

arts (yūkanteki gakumon), by which he meant any study of literature or
art. He dismissed these subjects on the ground that they have nothing to
do with quotidian pragmatism (nichijōteki jitsuyōsei) and, therefore, fail to
promote the integration of realistic learning with human life.97
In late nineteenth-century Japan, the dialectics between “usefulness”
and “uselessness” became a sort of social index for gauging whether any
given endeavor (learning or work) should be regarded as meaningful. As
though endorsing Fukuzawa’s emphasis on jitsugaku, Nishi Amane (1829–
1897) introduced the utilitarian theories of John Stuart Mill and Auguste
Comte to Meiji Japan. Nishi’s Hyakugaku renkan [Links of All Sciences]
(1870) and Jinsei sampōsetsu [The Theory of the Three Human Treasures]
(1875), along with his translation of Mill’s Utilitarianism (1863), pro-
moted the utilitarian doctrine of “general happiness” based on health,
knowledge, and wealth.98 “General happiness” was overall compatible with
Confucianism, which reinforces social harmony and personal happiness,
and in keeping this traditional moral code alive, Nishi intended to pro-
pose the Meiji regime’s political direction. For collective happiness, Nishi
argued that the government should enforce the law, ensure national secu-
rity, prohibit embezzlement, and promote industry and agriculture.99 As
an enlightenment thinker, Nishi also viewed education as being of primary
importance in Meiji Japan’s efforts to build a civilized nation.100 Further,
the same line of thought appears in the discourse of political philosophy.
Journalist Tokutomi Sohō’s Dainihon bōchōron [The Expansionism of
Great Japan] (1895) was influential, as it publicly urged people to contrib-
ute their abilities to the nation. Tokutomi asserted that Japanese people
should be unified as the nation’s subjects. For a vigorous nation, it was of
great importance that the people have rational minds and provide efficient
labor. Very much in accord with the bureaucratic processes of moderniza-
tion, these utilitarian ideas were efficacious as they produced the symbolic
outcomes of Japan’s victories in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and
the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). The representative Meiji spokes-
men, Fukuzawa, Nishi, and Tokutomi, can be recalled for the fact that
all promoted utilitarian ethics for collective social ends. What is notable
here is the intervention of English empiricism in the traditional line of
Confucian ethics. Whereas the former stresses individual freedom and
independence,101 both traditions embrace the importance of the collective
well-being of the people. In this extension, useful labor by rational indi-
viduals became the cornerstone of a modern nation.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, the dialectics of “useful-
ness” and “uselessness” became a focal point of literary discourse. The
major proponent was the Naturalist School, whose ideal was to promote
 20 / decadent literature

literature produced on the bases of scientific objectivism and realism. In an

essay titled “Genmetsujidai no geijutsu” [Art in the Age of Disillusionment]
(1906), Hasegawa Tenkei (1876–1940) avers that the goal of Naturalism
is to portray “the truth by means of undecorated art.”102 Straightforward
simplicity was necessary to modernize Japan’s literary discourse, as it had
traditionally overindulged in playful elements (yūgeiteki bunshi) in oppo-
sition to the objective depiction of reality. On this basis, Hasegawa dis-
missed playfulness as useless, noting that the writer’s imagination is illusory
and injurious to truth.103 Similarly, Katagami Tengen (1884–1928) and
Shimamura Hōgetsu (1871–1918) agreed that anti-natural representations
of human life are destructive to verisimilitude and undermine fundamental
inquiries into humanity. This view is reflected in Katagami’s “Mukaiketsu
no bungaku” [Literature Without Solutions] (1907), in which he argues
that Symbolist literature provides the reader with nothing but an inef-
fectual escape from agonistic realities of modern life. Thus, he concluded
that the literary genre passively replaces ethical and philosophical solutions
with nothing more than “mystical wonder.”104
However, the Naturalists’ grievance ironically anticipates the suc-
cess of Aestheticism and Decadence. According to Noda Utarō’s Nihon
Tanbiha bungaku no tanjō [The Birth of Japan’s Aesthetic School] (1975),
the Aesthetic School was initiated by the literary group Pan no kai (The
Circle of Pan, 1908–1912),105 which adopted Théophile Gautier’s dictum,
l’art pour l’art as its central aesthetic credo.106 The Pan no kai members
opposed Naturalism, and instead they considered art to be autotelic and
purposeless in nature. Being faithful followers of European Aestheticism
and Decadence, they maintained a conscious revolt against the obstinate
feudalism and conservatism of Meiji Japan.107 In response to the social
currents, the leading figure Kinoshita Mokutarō and other members
articulated the group’s mission as the “Europeanization” of Japanese litera-
ture.108 Pan no kai’s appearance, however, was untimely. Unable to grasp
the intricate characteristics of Decadence, the group tended to equate its
aesthetic ideology with a self-indulgent life style.109 The members were
mostly infatuated with the novelty of “Decadence,” and ended up reduc-
ing their aesthetic platform to romantic exoticism.110 However, the group’s
journal Subaru [The Pleiades], published between 1909 and 1913, became
Japan’s interface with European literature and provided a space for experi-
mental work by Mori Ōgai, Kinoshita Mokutarō, Kitahara Hakushū,
Ueda Bin, Ishikawa Takuboku, and others.111 Whereas Pan no kai failed
to introduce the refined urban ambience and erudition characteristic of
European Decadence, the group should be credited with publishing such
seminal Aestheticist works as Kitahara Hakushū’s Jashūmon [Heretics],
Mori Ōgai’s Vita Sexualis, and Nagai Kafū’s Furansu monogatari [French
 introduction / 21

Stories] (all published in 1909). Their activities reflect non-utilitarian atti-

tudes toward literature in response to Naturalism and the rise of Marxist
literature.112 In the heyday of Pan no kai, Decadent literature was not the
members’ only interest, but at least they did begin to adopt the similar vein
of aesthetic ideology, art-for-art’s sake. The group explored romantic exoti-
cism, intriguingly, in tandem with nostalgia for the Edo period.113 Pan no
kai reflects the culturally interstitial phase of twentieth-century Japan, but
its role ended when some of the members put art aside in favor of hedonis-
tic pleasure of drinking.114
The subsequent Taishō period (1912–1926) inherited the spirit of art-
for-art’s sake that had germinated in the 1910s. Among various schools
of Japanese Decadence, Taishō Decadence was one of the conspicuous
offshoots of fin-de-siècle Decadence. As Ōoka Makoto states, some time
elapsed between the advent of fin-de-siècle Decadence and the Japanese
reception of the European movement. Given this time lapse, the fin-de-
siècle literary style and sensibilities were not current in Japan until the
second decade of the twentieth century.115 Compared with Pan no kai,
whose understanding of European Decadence was limited, the writers of
Taishō Decadence were far more sophisticated in their reading of themes
and motifs such as neurosis, hypochondria, fetishism, and artificiality.
This does not mean, though, that the infatuation with exoticism disap-
pears. On the contrary, such writers as Satō Haruo, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō,
and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke privileged their exoticism in respective oeu-
vres. Their texts often incorporate the styles of grotesque fantasy, the laby-
rinth-like plots of detective stories, and the pseudo images of Biedermeier,
and so on. Further, these writers exemplify the fact that Taishō Decadence
advanced the literary expression of self-consciousness, above all by their
own trope of paradis artificiels. Kawamoto Saburō sees the Taishō mental-
ity as tending toward a compartmentalization of the self that reflects the
ontology of “subtle individuals” (awai kojin), whose psychological vector
is centrifugal from pragmatic contemporary society.116 The view suggests
that the consciousness of being useless continues to govern the aesthet-
ics of Taishō Decadence. In Kawamoto’s interpretation, the writers were
highly conscious of creating an artificiality that could be animated only
in fictional space.117 Departing from realism, their work tends to be set in
an imaginative space of “wonder” and “rapture.” Such a magically artifi-
cial space gently accommodates the anti-modern mentality of descending
(kakō shikō) from a competition-oriented society.118 The leitmotif of arti-
ficial paradise, therefore, epitomizes the new value system substituted for
the upward mobility in social trends. In contrast with the Aestheticism
in the previous decade, Taishō Decadence became a distinctive recepta-
cle for reclusive individuals who could not conform to the pragmatism
 22 / decadent literature

of the social mainstream.119 Taishō Decadence tends to be in accord with

an effeminate psyche, though it maintains a subtle critique of modernity
precisely to salvage what the indomitable force of modernity left behind.
During the interwar period of the 1930s, the cultural phenomenon
known as ero guro nansensu (a term made up of abbreviated Japanese words
and translated into English as “erotic, grotesque, nonsense”) appeared
to be “the decadent pivot.”120 Ero guro nansensu was a phase of Japanese
Decadence in which consumers actively responded to the mass cultural
trend of montage.121 The leading cultural icons of the time included the
Modern Boy (mobo) and the Modern Girl (moga), café waitresses, the
vibrant Tokyo district of Asakusa, and foreign movies. Though these were
subjected to mass consumption, ero guro nansense traversed a mere reifi-
cation of modern images. In Nii Itaru’s description, the age of ero guro
nansense encompasses so wide a range of interests and commodities that it
became a kind of cultural cocktail.122 Not only did it concretize the fasci-
nation with things modern and futuristic imaginings of the West, it also
unveiled the impulse for self-reflective stimulation, abnormality, atavism,
and the uncanny.123 The media articulated the psychological darkness as
displayed primarily in theatrical performance and photography, and the
same disposition was also evident in literary discourse. Writers like Maruki
Sado (the pseudonym of Hata Toyokichi is a transliteration of Marquis de
Sade in kanji), Horiguchi Daigaku, and Yokomitsu Riichi were instru-
mental in exploring what “eroticism” could mean at the intersection of
modernity, science, and anthropology. The mass cultural form of these
aggregates, according to Yokomitsu, can be called “neo barbarism.” It exists
at the junction of modernity, opposing desires to return to “simplicity” and
expressing a longing for “decadence.”124 In sum, ero guro nansense was a
receptacle for the desire for things modern, which concurrently upheld
oxymoronic impulses inhering in, to borrow Yokomitsu’s words, “the vul-
garity to overcome vulgarity” or “the decadence to devastate decadence.”125
In sum, Ero guro nansense was primarily meant to satisfy the mass consum-
ers’ desire for a radical cultural novelty. However, as Miriam Silverberg
argues, the nonsensical and vulgar pornographic elements were precisely
what made it a highly political cultural practice. It reflected the social
climate of the pre-fascist epoch of the 1920s and 1930s, while masking its
revolutionary ethos behind a libratory outlook.126
In the Shōwa period (1926–1989), the notion of dekadansu (“deca-
dence”) turned out to be an ideological banner for a number of literary
schools and movements. The implied notion of “uselessness” was trans-
formed into “usefulness” as an ideologue. The most notable exponent at
this juncture was the Japan Romantic School, which was greatly influ-
enced by German Romanticism. The school dominated the post-Marxist
 introduction / 23

intellectual currents of Japan after the dissolution of the proletarian writ-

ers’ alliance (NALP) in 1934, and it was largely considered a proponent
of right-wing thoughts. According to Nihon Romanha hihan josetsu [The
Prolegomena to the Critique of the Japan Romantic School] (1960) by
Hashikawa Bunzō (1922–1983), the post-NALP period coincides with the
rise of Japanese fascism and with middle-class intellectuals’ disappoint-
ment with the leftist failure, which fueled their demand for a new philo-
sophico-ideological ground in order to replace their faith in Communism.
Their collective sense of loss was imbued with “anxiety, degeneration, con-
version, and emptiness,” such that intellectuals felt that the leftist develop-
ment of democratic literature had resulted in an “age of derangement.”127
Hashikawa attributes the emergence of the Japan Romantic School to this
collective sense of crisis, which manifested itself in a so-called ideological
“conversion” (tenkō) to a proto-nationalist discourse. Seeming to play a
cathartic role, the Japan Romantic School veered away from leftist issues
toward an extra-political realm of aesthetics and paradoxically refuted the
Shōwa military government’s Imperialist position. Through the drastic aes-
theticization of pre-modern Japan, the school defined itself as a proponent
of anti-Meiji Restorationism and anti-bureaucratism.128 In lieu of exalt-
ing the Imperial nation, the school sought to recuperate nativist visions of
Japanese literature unfiltered by Western theories and perspectives. In this
context, dekadansu was a self-reflexive praxis that reified the consciousness
of the epoch and became a political platform for fighting against leftist
ideology and its aesthetics. In his essay “Bunmeikaika no ronri no shūen
nitsuite” (On the Demise of the Logic of the Meiji Restoration) (1939),
Yasuda Yojūrō (1910–1981), the school’s leading figure, defines “deca-
dence” as “the passion for downfall” (botsuraku e no jōnetsu). By this inci-
sive description, Yasuda castigates the post-Meiji intellectual foundation,
which revealed its feebleness with the collapse of Marxism and truncated
the development of proletarian literature. The failure of Marxism, in his
view, presages an apocalypse for Japan that has sustained the marred mod-
ern legacy of “the intellect of the colonized nation.”129 Japanese literature,
too, had, since the age of the Meiji Restoration, deluded itself with the
“theory of veneer cosmetics” (tsukeyakiba bungakuron).130 Based on this
configuration of history, Yasuda concludes that the Japan of the 1930s
should discontinue its self-imposed enslavement to the logic of the cul-
tural other,131 which includes not only such imported theories as Marxism
but also the pretentions of nativist scholars of “Japanism” (nihon shugi).
All these isms are rooted in the Western logic of rationalization and in
the dichotomy of defining Japan (the self) against the West (the other).132
Within the parameters of Yasuda’s thought, “decadence” bears two critical
meanings: first, it is an appraisal of the awaited decay of the progressivism
 24 / decadent literature

(shinpo shugi) passed down from the Meiji Restoration and the moralism
(shūshin shugi) that saturated Japan’s intellectual traditions; second, it is
meant to be an antidote to intellectual degeneration—as Yasuda ironically
puts it, it is necessary to “discover” Japan’s domestic decadence as well as
an exigency for renouncing it (dekadansu no hakken to sono botsuraku e no
jōnetsu).133 According to Yasuda, Taishō literature needed this antidote the
most, as the writers were not cognizant of their own mimicry of the West,
being concerned only with “the theoretical unification” of multiple foreign
positions.134 Their writing shunned the raw social phenomena of “contra-
dictions and chaos,” reducing them to the “bureaucratic, temporary saw-
ing” of reality.135 Similarly, the Japanese adoption of Marxism was also a
failure that could not improve domestic reality.136 Although he denounces
Japan’s intellectual degeneration, what is intriguing to note is that Yasuda
himself engages in literary decadence through wasteful words and gram-
matical deviations. Takahashi Isao calls Yasuda’s writing style “the élan
vital of rhetoric full of compelling words and sentiments but scarcity of
substance.”137 His work offers sickening images of degeneration,138 but still
challenges Japan’s pursuit of Western intellectualism.139 That is to suggest
that his endorsement of decadence is made possible by virtue of a radically
wasted rhetoric; decadence is a tautological praxis of “irony,” which ridi-
cules those in need of self-examination.140 Here the language boasts of its
own uselessness, yet takes up usefulness as a critical speech act.
In the postwar Shōwa period (1926–1989), Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–
1960) explored the dialectics of individual usefulness and uselessness vis-
à-vis society in Porisuteki ningen no rinrigaku [The Ethics of the Man of
the Polis] (1948) and Rinrigaku [Ethics] (1949). He did not address any
discourse on decadence per se; nonetheless, his contemplation on nin-
gen revamps the modern idea of human beings in relation to an organic
structure of society, and thereby gestures a critique of overt individualism.
Borrowing the philosophical premise concerning human autonomy devel-
oped by Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, Watsuji consid-
ered mature individualism to be a precondition of Japan’s modernization.
But later he revised this position, claiming that European models of indi-
vidualism were not entirely applicable to Japan.141 According to Watsuji,
the modern European models of individualism originating in the Cartesian
cogito are abstractions of a momentary, fragmented existence of human
beings. To Watsuji, the notion of ego is foreign to “the totality of nin-
gen,” because this notion only conceptualizes an “isolated subjectivity.”142
Even if based on pragmatic legal responsibility and obligation, a society of
mutual interests (Gesellschaft) still relies on solidarity built by and among
people in a way that goes beyond mere abstraction.143 The foremost exam-
ple is the social body of the nation that realizes “the totality of ningen.” Its
 introduction / 25

organic structure encompasses each human being in the name of history

and community, and this collective human body is not reducible to an
individual subjectivity.144 In this light, such thoughts as Husserlean phe-
nomenology do nothing but reduce human beings to mere collections of
consciousness isolated from an organic structure of relations.145 Whereas
Watsuji does not entirely draw the ideal of ningen sonzai (human existence)
from Confucianism, he holds that drastic individualism implies a nega-
tive disposition that would abandon traditional social values of altruism
and communal harmony. There is an assumption in his view that human
beings have an innate sense of guilt and conscience. He, therefore, shuns
an absolutist position that presupposes an evil aspect to human nature,
as exemplified in Bentham’s pragmatism arguing that “conscience ar[i]ses
through punishment.”146 Watsuji’s formulation of human beings as a col-
lective provides a more conciliatory position according to which harmony
can be achieved through organic interactions between the individual and
society.147
During the post-World War II years, Decadence (daraku) signified
moral downfall and corruption, endorsing also a future-bound dynamism
of Japanese people. Even before the war, the word, “dekadansu” (deca-
dence), had frequently been used in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction in lieu
of the indigenous Japanese noun, “daraku” (moral degeneration, imbecile
disposition). “Dekadansu” was already being used interchangeably with
indigenous Japanese words including daraku (corruption, depravity), taihai
(degeneration), and hōtō (debauchery, dissipation). Nonetheless, Sakaguchi
Ango (1906–1955) undermined the flamboyant nuance in the words and
urged postwar Japan to awaken by returning to the “daraku” in his essays,
“Darakuron” [Discourse on Decadence], “Zoku darakuron” [“The Sequel
to ‘Discourse on Decadence’”], and “Dekadan bungakuron” [On Decadent
Literature] (all published in 1946). The other writers of the Buraiha (the
Group of Ruffians, usually translated as the School of Decadence), Dazai
Osamu (1909–1948) and Oda Sakunosuke (1913–1947), also showed an
interest in moral downfall as theme, but they did not share in Ango’s deter-
mination to engage with it as an ideological dictum. Sakaguchi was by far
the boldest and quite blatantly employed the word “daraku” as his leitmo-
tif in critiquing Japanese culture and history at large.148 Drawing on the
premise that all human beings are bound for moral corruption, he argued
that Japanese politics and history are nothing but hypocrisy and fiction.
In his view, the political powerhouse of the country had clandestinely
controlled the people by establishing and imposing institutional values on
them. This scheme is prevalent in the rigidity and harshness exemplified
by militant ethics (bushidō), forced worshipping of the Emperor, and dis-
approval of widows who engage in new sexual liaisons. These forms of
 26 / decadent literature

stipulation were, according to Sakaguchi, not only the expedient imposi-

tion of unreasonable moral codes but also a reinvented conspiracy by poli-
tics (kenbō jissū).149 What Sakaguchi loathes about the Japanese mentality
is twofold—those in power are cunning enough to control the majority of
the nation, and those subjected to that power are also abominable because
they implicitly demand pretexts that diminish their own autonomy.
Subjugation by the other allows a self-imposed yoke,150 which amounts to
a paradox of fictionality akin to the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave
wherein the slave’s identity depends on the master’s acknowledgement of
him or her as slave through servitude. Similarly, institutional moral codes
reflect the chiasmic fact that without such restrictions human beings are
all doomed to delinquency. Sakaguchi states thus: “the system of prohibi-
tion is inhuman, but very insightful for human reality.”151 In accord with
the statement, he maintains that human beings are innately depraved; in
this sense, his appraisal of “decadence” should be as read as a speech act
that intends to recuperate the truth of human beings suppressed especially
by the wartime ideologues. By his radical shift of perspective, the recogni-
tion (and appraisal) of depravity in human nature centers on Sakaguchi’s
postwar discourse.
Subsequent to the postwar chaos of the 1950s, the 1960s was a time
when Japanese writers revived their interest in Europe’s fin-de-siècle
Decadence. This occurred when the concept of eroticism and empirical
sciences such as biology and sexology brought about a new interdisciplin-
ary vision to literature. In 1968, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, critic and translator
of Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade, formed Chi to bara (Blood
and Roses), an avant-garde group comprised writers, photographers, and
painters. The members included such leading artists as Mishima Yukio,
Tanemura Suehiro, Yoko’o Tadanori, Haniya Yutaka, Inagaki Taruho, and
Hosoe Eikoh. Claiming sympathy for de Sade, fin-de-siècle Decadence,
and Bataille’s eroticism, these members propagated their cultural values
through translation, original fiction, and criticism in their short-lived
eponymous magazine (1968–1969). As the title suggests, the members
were particularly fascinated with post-Romantic agonies and works by
Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Algernon
Charles Swinburne, and Gabriele D’Annunzio. The writers of Blood and
Roses understood eroticism not simply as a portrayal of sexuality per se
but as a metaphysical construct independent of the biological objective of
reproductive function.152 According to Shibusawa, eroticism constitutes a
metaphysical excess and play that are irreducible to physiological notions
of sexuality.153 Underscoring this view, the first issue of Blood and Roses
included the contributors’ manifesto in praise of amorality, eroticism, and
anti-scientific dogmatism.154 Allied with Bataille’s eroticism, Blood and
 introduction / 27

Roses contests the hegemony of scientific positivism and elitist culturalism

that permeated twentieth-century Japan. For the group, eroticism was a
new epistemic model in which the physical world reveals the amorphous
dynamics of “individuals” (kotai) and their break-through to individu-
ation.155 Considering this line of interest in eroticism, it is inaccurate to
equate Blood and Roses with the offspring of European Decadence. Rather,
the group’s view has much to do with Bataille and above all his idea of
unrestricted economy as mentioned earlier—though Shibusawa and the
others were seemingly unaware of this. In Bataille’s formulation of eroti-
cism, eros and sexual practices are a radical form of excess that goes beyond
the biological phenomenon of coitus.156 To delve into the structure of eroti-
cism, Blood and Roses published a wide range of works that are convention-
ally regarded as obscene, so much so that the presence of the group itself
has been taken as one of the radical excesses of twentieth-century Japan. Its
bold editorial stance evinced its rejection of an a priori judgment of what
constitutes normality and what abnormality. In such a way, the members
sought to combat what they saw as the Japanese masses’ blind worship of
science and technology in which eros was relegated to mere objective facts.
Blood and Roses is considered to be Decadent in nature precisely because
of the group’s unapologetic endorsement of the eroticism devoid of any
pragmatic use.

Decadence at the Periphery of Modernity:

Italian and Japanese Parallels
The cultural phenomena related to decadence are ubiquitous, though each
case is a sui generis conditioned by the historical moment and by local
socio-cultural situations. It goes without saying that the so-called Decadent
literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries do not comprise a
unified movement. Nevertheless, twentieth-century Decadence in Japan
is not completely foreign to that of its European counterpart as the two
share a common denominator in regard to what constitutes decadence.
Though the excess of self-consciousness in fin-de-siècle Decadence trig-
gered Japanese writers’ insatiable desire to explore the artistic terra incog-
nita, one of the most significant variants of the European movement—but
less often referenced—for Japan was Italian Decadentism (il decadentismo
italiano). Post-Resurgent Italy in the 1890s, paralleling Japan in the post-
Restoration period, was still paving the way to the creation of a modern
nation. The discursive formation of Italian Decadentism is in part attrib-
utable to the vigorous promotion of scientific positivism by the nation.
Unlike the proponents of Baudelairean artificiality, the Italian Decadents
endeavored to shake off the influence of Classicism and, therefore, wrestled
 28 / decadent literature

simultaneously with positivism and literary realism.157 Their experience is

parallel with that of the members of Pan no kai who attempted to mod-
ernize Japanese literature. In Italy however, the reactions of conservative
intellectuals such as Benedetto Croce were harsh. He condemned the
Decadents for what he saw as their abusive use of intuition, mysticism, and
irrationalism, arguing that these clearly go against the scientific objectiv-
ism promoted by the nation.158
It is not easy to find anything wholesome in Italian Decadentism. As an
arguably discursive literary phenomenon passed down from Romanticism,
however, a socio-cultural agenda pursued by the body of works differed
from those of French and English Decadence, as well as those from the
tradition of German Romanticism.159 For Mario Praz, morbidity, ago-
nistic pleasure, and cruel impulses are the salient features of fin-de-siècle
Decadence as an offspring of Romanticism.160 On the other hand, Walter
Binni takes a different view, pointing out that Italian Decadentism is built
on the traits distinctively different from those of Romanticism. Before
the 1890s when Gabriele D’Annunzio arrived on the literary scene, post-
Romantic Italian poetics were utterly provincial, only repeating pre-
Romantic motifs and an archaic poetics garnished by sentimentalism.161
To break through the stagnant literary scene, Italian Decadentism played
the vanguard role in modernizing the country’s poetics, which went a long
way in regard to “Europeaniz[ing]” indigenous Italian literature.162 During
the seminal years, the Italian Decadents, including Giosuè Carducci,
D’Annunzio, and Giovanni Pascoli, were exposed to Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche, Wagner, Symbolism, and post-Baudelairean French poetry.
These “European” influences opened the eyes of Italian writers to the
poetics of self-consciousness.163
Being in the vanguard of modern literature, Italian Decadentism has a
lot in common with the Japanese Decadent literature of the post-Russo-
Japanese War period. Italy and Japan reformed their socio-political struc-
tures in the 1860s, in the name of the Resurgence (il Risorgimento) and
the Meiji Restoration (Meiji ishin), respectively. To catch up with Britain,
France, and Germany, both Italy and Japan chose to tread the same paths
as these developed countries had taken, readily copying their infrastruc-
ture and institutions. In the advent of modernity, Italy and Japan each
stressed the value of positivism in advancing science and technology. In
Italy, this emphasis culminated in the emergence of criminologist Cesare
Lombroso who demonstrated the correlation between skull deformation
and criminal behavior. His determinist method was passed down to his
student Max Nordau, who “diagnosed” European Decadents as delin-
quents who misrepresent reality and deviate from standard work ethics in
a collective society.164 Nordau’s antagonism toward the Decadents—a side
 introduction / 29

effect of Italy’s scientific positivism—parallels the aforementioned cases

of polemic against Japanese Decadent literature. Naturalist critic Akagi
also criticized the genre and its proponents, attacking their indifference to
moralistic worldviews through objective realism.
In sum, both Italy and Japan developed their respective styles of
Decadence and the discourses as an excess that could not be molded to the
double standard of positivism and moral convention. However, in reality,
compared with the fin-de-siècle Decadents of Britain and France, Italian
and Japanese Decadents were not exactly prone to uninhibited pleasure.
Instead, they tried to pursue pleasure within the limits of patriarchal
norms and closed local conventions. In Britain and France, Decadents
“refashion[ed] the ego,” employing it as a poetic foundation for the spec-
tacle of performativity.165 This interplay between the subject and art was
not prominent in Italy and Japan; rather, dramatic motifs were derived
from the dialectics between the ego and a conservative social life. The
Baudelairean dandy, J. K. Huysmans’s Des Esseintes of Against Nature
(1884) and Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1891) are equally the embodiments of
a vigorous ego who is capable of playing out the foremost spirit of fin-
de-siècle Decadence. They all live in the microcosm of solipsism, which
allows them to discard the presence of the external world. Further, their
aesthetics of artificiality is enabled precisely by the absence of a social real-
ity to wrestle with. In stark contrast, in Italian and Japanese Decadence,
a strong ego is not a priori dramaturgy, but rather it is conditioned by a
negotiation between self-consciousness and contemporary social realities.
In Italian Decadentism and Japanese Decadence, the ego appears to be
an outcome of conscious labor. The labor in this case does not refer to
efforts to gain material or monetary wealth, but in fact to efforts to dis-
regard it. The idea of labor is no doubt subversive, pointing to an idleness
that necessarily contradicts any capitalist endeavor. As in Bataille’s general
economy acknowledges the extra-material significance of expenditure in
pre-modern society, Decadence also operates on the primacy of dispending
or renouncing resources. Without a profit-making motivation, the repeti-
tion of expenditure becomes labor, and it is precisely this performativity
that consolidates the consciousness of being useless to a form of subjectiv-
ity. We propose to consider this process as an archetypal model wherein
“Decadents” are ontologically forged in narrative. This model of Decadence
seems in particular prevalent at cultural peripheries—such as fin-de-siècle
Italy and Japan as the latecomers to Western modernity—where society was
still young enough to have faith in what Mill calls utilitarianism that prom-
ises collective happiness by virtue of productive labor and frugality.
To consider how Japanese Decadence diverges from the European matrix,
the orthodox view of decadence provides us with good counterpoints.
 30 / decadent literature

Most notably, the notion of “decadence” is firmly tied to the historical

consciousness of time. Matei Calinescu reminds us that “decadence” is
not a phenomenon but a collective awareness that the present world is
approaching an apocalypse. This psychological unrest underpinned by a
sense of imminent danger causes people to engage in an attempt of self-
examination.166 Decadence lends itself to this irreversibility of history,
and a nostalgia for a golden age fuels people’s steriological imaginings of
a messiah and the coming of a new world. Widespread since the Middle
Ages, this Judeo-Christian worldview offers an epistemic model of civi-
lization in a cyclic routine.167 Other critics, such as Charles Bernheimer,
Richard Gilman, and R. K. R. Thornton, agree that decadence resists a
unified definition but remains contingent upon particular environments
and historical contexts. Though acknowledging the non-referential nature
of “decadence,” they conceptualize it vis-à-vis the historical past as the
final phase of growth and decay.168 The same deterministic approach to
history has played a central role in studies of decadence (and Decadence).
Indeed, this worldview appeals to Greco-Roman history, Judeo-Christian
eschatology, and non-Western civilizations such as ancient Mesopotamian,
Mayan, and Aztec cultures.169
Fin-de-siècle Europe, indeed, was fascinated with the idea of an apoc-
alypse, imagining that such a fate was imminent. Nonetheless, Italian
Decadentism and Japanese Decadence were exceptions, as the literary
phenomena did not clearly adhere to the epistemic worldview of the con-
temporary world. Compared with French and British Decadence, Italian
Decadentism was ideologically secular, as it was far less influenced by
Christian moral codes. Both Italian and Japanese writers of Decadence
were neither overly concerned with the cosmology of decay nor tinged
with pessimism or fatalism. They tried to emulate the major currents of
Decadence and Symbolist aesthetics, but their underlying themes reflect
contemporary social issues and the zeitgeist of the respective countries en
route to modernity. In other words, Japanese Decadence in the seminal
phase, so akin to Italian Decadentism, subverted the canonical concepts of
“decadence” by postulating the present as decay in an age of new develop-
ment and growth. Even though Italy and Japan followed paths that dif-
fered from those of other developed countries, their engagement with the
European cultural movement was no less important than the local social
and cultural conditions. Japanese writers of the time, such as Ueda Bin and
Nagai Kafū, were deeply fascinated with fin-de-siècle Decadence, primar-
ily for its exaltation of beauty through linguistic sensation. Since Anatole
Baju’s journal, Le Décadent (1886–1889), was first published, the pejo-
rative connotation of “decadence” was set aside, and the concept began
to be known as a proactive aesthetic rebellion.170 With its proximity to
 introduction / 31

Romanticism, Antiquarianism, Parnassianism, and Naturalism, Decadence

held a distinct position. A central trait was, as Jean Pierrot stresses, a new
impulse of labor to create paradis artificiels, a conscious refashioning of
the artist’s self.171 Part of Baudelaire’s aesthetic program, artificial paradise
was meant to explore the unconscious realm of individuality through the
use of narcotic substances such as wine and hashish. Such recourse was
eagerly sought, precisely to secure one’s private realm from the commotion
of social realities.
In regard to the private sphere, we can trace the interplay between
society and the individual in European Decadence at large. The aesthetic
impulse suggests not only an opposition to cultural orthodoxy but also
the presence of entropic energies that are useless in any productive cycle of
society. Paul Bourget (1852–1935) was one of the earliest figures to see such
disequilibrium between a mature society and the individual. In an analysis
of Bourget’s Théorie de la Décadence in Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine
(1885), Haverlock Ellis states that:

Bourget uses [decadence] as it is generally used (but, as Gautier pointed

out, rather unfortunately) to express the literary methods of a society which
has reached its limits of expansion and maturity—“the state of society,”
in his own words, “which produce too large a number of individuals who
are unsuited to the labours of common life. A society should be like an
organism. Like an organism, in fact, it may be resolved into a federation
of smaller organisms, which may themselves be resolved into a federation
of cells. The individual is the social cell. In order that the organism should
perform its functions with energy it is necessary that the organisms compos-
ing it should perform their functions with energy, but with a subordinated
energy, and in order that these lesser organisms should themselves perform
their functions with energy. If the energy of the cells becomes independent,
the lesser organisms will likewise cease to subordinate their energy to the
total energy and the anarchy which is established constitutes the decadence
of the whole. The social organism does not escape this law and enters into
decadence as soon as the individual life becomes exaggerated beneath the
influence of acquired well-being, and of heredity.172

The concept of “decadence” outlined by Bourget and Ellis is a sort of

symbiosis, coupling Nordau’s positivist critique of egomania and Mill’s
utilitarian ethics for a collective society.173 Individuals, who are incapable
of contributing to society through their labor, are the ringleaders of deca-
dence; in terms of labor, those entropic “cells” fling their energy away from
a collective good, but do not keep it in inertia. The trajectory of their
“labor” is not for a productive Gesellschaft, but for the solemn goal of ful-
filling individuality. According to Bourget, these nonconforming “cells”
result from the “expansion and maturity” of society.174 If we follow this
 32 / decadent literature

argument, in fin-de-siècle Europe, only a few societies, among them Third

Republic France and Victorian England, were achieving a citizen-centered
social structure, and therefore only these countries possessed milieus in
which “decadence” could legitimately germinate. The nonconformist
model of decadence is obviously a ramification of the aforementioned
model based on the epistemic view of history, which considers present
decay an inevitable result of growth. However, this latter idea of temporal-
ity problematizes Japanese Decadence (and certainly Italian Decadentism)
because at the turn of the century, Meiji Japan was still groping for the
way to (Western) modernity though it had by no means dispensed with
feudalism. Insofar as we follow Bourget, who attributes decadence to the
over-maturity of given society, we are sure to face a theoretical impasse in
our reading of Japanese Decadent literature.

Problems and Arguments in the Subsequent Chapters

The current study is, in summary, a proposal to read Decadent literature in
a way that differs from the method based on the aforementioned chrono-
logical model of historical consciousness. We have briefly overviewed some
major ideas of Decadence in Japan and Europe so far; nonetheless, our
purpose is not to sail on to the vast sea of criticism and theory, but to shed
light on the function of “labor” as a leitmotif in the literary genre. Labor in
Japanese Decadent literature is, we tentatively argue, meant to engage the
private inner life in a larger social context. Therefore, labor here does not
fall into a pitfall of solipsism, but has certain social implications. Precisely
speaking, Japanese literary circles and writers have never proclaimed a col-
lective movement of “Decadence” in its own right. In other words, such
formality is tautological in the history of Japanese literature in that it
would provide only a veneer for what has been present since antiquity.
In the ninth century, Japan had already witnessed an incipient decadent
sensibility, and to put it hyperbolically, the development of Decadent lit-
erature is almost tantamount to literary history itself. A rupture between
antiquity and modernity may not be discernible unless we propose an epis-
temological index for interpreting this body of work. Therefore, our analy-
sis will concentrate on the ways in which the sensibility of the useless man
manifests itself in the praxis of labor. Concretely, the following chapters
survey numerous kinds of subversive labor—wasting, squandering, wager-
ing, exchanging, sharing, bidding, renouncing, and gifting—in economic
terms. From an anthropological viewpoint, these economic behaviors are
neither subversive nor perverse. As Marcel Mauss interprets them, these
acts of giving, receiving, and reciprocating at a self-destructive level con-
stitute the core of a pre-capitalist social foundation, and therefore are fully
 introduction / 33

legitimate in some social settings.175 Similarly, the subversive consump-

tion of wealth can be equated to what Roger Caillois identifies with the
mentality of alea in the theory of play. Unlike the spirit of agôn, which is
characterized by skills and training for game playing, alea presupposes that
winning is a matter of chance and that adversaries are beyond our con-
trol.176 Alea is related to a passive yet optimistic acceptance of risk, a pos-
sibility of self-destruction innate in expending resources, whether money
or physical energy. There is no doubt that Japanese Decadent literature—
and mentality under the rubric of “decadence” in general—belongs to the
mindset of alea.
Subsequent chapters examine Japanese Decadent literature from the late
Meiji period (1908) to the Shōwa postwar period (1967), concluding the
study with a prognostic work of the Heisei era (2005).177 Representative
works from each era reveal unsettled responses to the pragmatism of mod-
ern society and to a capitalist-driven mentality. Chapter 1, “Immature
Decadents: The Waste of Useless Men in Indulgences—Two Novellas
by Oguri Fūyō and Iwano Hōmei,” explicates the implications of non-
productive economic behaviors. The subversion of productivity and dili-
gent labor stems from a psychological gap between the Meiji slogan of
“ fukoku kyōhei” (the enrichment of the nation and vigorous military force)
and the intellectual labor population alienated from overall national cur-
rents. The focus is two Naturalist novellas, both titled by chance Tandeki
[Indulgences] and published in 1908. Each novella, one of which is by
Oguri Fūyō and the other by Iwano Hōmei, depicts superfluous men in
the field of letters who find themselves out of place in an economically
thriving Japan after the Russo-Japanese War. Both novellas attest to the
early reception of European Decadent literature. They also show the ways
in which Japanese writers tried to emulate the European predecessors but
came up against the limits imposed on the patriarchal structure of the
Japanese family.
Chapter 2, “The Decadent Consumption of the Self: Naturalist
Aestheticism in Morita Sōhei’s Sooty Smoke” examines the implications of
labor in his 1909 novel influenced by Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il trionfo della
morte [The Triumph of Death] (1894). Similar to the concerns of Oguri and
Iwano in Indulgences, Morita also depicts a man of letters who is trapped
by patriarchal duties, being tormented by a sense of guilt for not fulfill-
ing social expectations. As though seeking a way to resolve this dilemma,
the protagonist tries to refashion himself by borrowing the image of the
Nietzschean Übermensch, a transmission from the D’Annunzian novel.
Nevertheless, he is helplessly tied to the closure of rural feudalism and
patriarchy. Unable to overcome the psychological barriers, the protagonist
comes to perceive urban modernity ironically as an abyss. Drawing on the
 34 / decadent literature

intertextual relationship between Sooty Smoke and Triumph of Death, the

chapter reads the former as a reflection of the epoch following the Russo-
Japanese War, the time when the rise of individualism began to dissolve
the collective consciousness of Japan as the unified nation. The novel is
considered a naturalist record of changes in class, gender, and cultural sen-
sibilities, as well as a genesis of Japanese Decadent and Symbolist fiction
under the European influence.
Chapter 3, “Decadent Returnees: The Dialogic Labor of Sensibility in
Nagai Kafū’s Sneers and Ueda Bin’s The Vortex,” reorients Paul Bourget’s
theory that deviant individualism leads to the decay of collective society.
These semi-autobiographical fictions published in 1910 are considered rep-
resentative decadent kichōsha (returnees from the West) stories of the time.
Drawing on the returnee sensibilities in both works, the chapter disentan-
gles what being “decadent” means in the epochal context and the psycho-
logical labor dispensed by the writers means likewise. Feeling despair for
contemporary Japan, returnees Ueda and Kafū are drawn to the aesthetics
of dilettantism, a flirtatious attitude to savoring art and indulging in the
culturally interstitial epoch. Embracing the socially useless aesthetic phi-
losophy, the returnee protagonists contend with their introspection from
the bourgeois intellectuals’ viewpoints. Together with the pure enjoyment
of art and social life, their communications build an amicable network
within which contemporary socio-cultural consciousness is shared and
consolidated. Viewing this dialogic process as a kind of self-renouncing
labor, the chapter details their nuanced commentaries on modernity and
their conciliatory attitudes in the second decade of the twentieth century.
Chapter 4, “Taishō Malaise as Decadence: Self-Reclusion and Creative
Labor in Satō Haruo’s A Pastoral Spleen and Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s A Fool’s
Love,” examines variations in the presentation of a neurotic psyche in
Taishō Decadence. To take refuge from busy urban life, the protagonists
of both stories resort to creating their own versions of “artificial paradise.”
By reading Satō Haruo’s Den’en no yūutsu [A Pastoral Spleen] (1919) and
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s Chijin no ai [A Fool’s Love] (1924), the chapter situ-
ates the outcomes of creative labor in the context of Japan’s transcultura-
tion and its impact on individuals. We consider both cases of material
ingenuity within the parameters of unproductive economy and in the light
of Japan’s continuing Westernization.
Chapter 5, “Decadence Begins with Physical Labor: The Postwar Use
of the Body in Sakaguchi Ango’s The Idiot and Tamura Taijirō’s Gateway
to the Flesh,” examines the the body as the significant matrix of labor
in relation to the issue of postwar subjectivity as raised in Sakaguchi’s
“Darakuron” [On Decadence] (1946). Two novellas, Sakaguchi’s
“Hakuchi” [The Idiot] (1946) and Tamura’s Nikutai no mon [Gateway to
 introduction / 35

the Flesh] (1946), showcases the spectrum of postwar vita nova, by means
of a radical portrayal of female sexuality that refutes wartime morality.
The chapter disentangles the operative idea of “decadence” in the novellas,
where the body plays an antidotic role of rejecting the repressed humanity
under the totalitarian national regime.
Chapter 6, “Decadence as Generosity: Squander and Oblivion in
Mishima Yukio’s Spring Snow,” examines the novel Haru no yuki [Spring
Snow] (1967) in the tetralogy Hōjō no umi [The Sea of Fertility] (1965–
1970). Centering on a forbidden love between a parvenu aristocrat’s son
and a noble girl betrothed to a royal prince, the novel re-imagines the
threshold of the Meiji and Taishō periods as the eminent moment of deca-
dence. The novel interweaves an epistemic frame of history and a poignant
critique of modernity, while reviving pre-capitalist economic values in the
plot. By virtue of Mishima’s exquisite aesthetics, which holds history and
a culture of generosity together, Spring Snow represents the culmination of
twentieth-century Japanese Decadent literature.
Chapter 7, “Capitalist Generosity: Decadence as Giving and Receiving
in Shimada Masahiko’s Decadent Sisters,” introduces the reader to a resur-
gence of the general economy presented in Shimada Masahiko’s recent
novel, Taihai shimai [Decadent Sisters] (2005). The novel is a signifi-
cant achievement for two reasons. First, it is an intrepid explication of
Sakaguchi’s “Discourse on Decadence,” conjoining the moral-free will
to survive with the capitalistic mentality widespread in postwar Japan.
Second, the theme of collective prostitution revisits the legacy of Tamura
Taijirō’s nikutai bungaku (literature of flesh) with a new perspective on
labor and the economy. Stepping out of Ango and Tamura’s compelling
voice translated into the rejection of female chastity, Decadent Sisters
addresses the extra-material dimensions of prostitution, by portraying the
labor as an affective effort that potentially creates a new network of global
communication. Further, the labor in the novel is read as a viable process
through which laboring individuals construct his or her social identity.
The conclusion briefly overviews the theme of labor in Japanese
Decadent literature, and revisits its significance as a narrative trope in the
context of the turbulent twentieth century. Ultimately, this study covers
only a tip of the genre’s iceberg so that we do not intend to offer a com-
prehensive view of Japanese Decadent literature. Nevertheless, the study
does sketch the salient features of the literary discourse in which Japanese
writers engage, postulating that the genre constitutes a force that resists
the value systems sustaining an arithmetically conceived modernity based
on labor, production, and a restricted economy. The sensibility and poetics
of Decadence began to emerge nearly a millennium before Japan’s belated
reception of European fin-de-siècle Decadence in the early twentieth
 36 / decadent literature

century. In front of the historical grandeur, our purpose in this study is

not simply to subsume the body of literary works under the umbrella of
Decadent literature. In the nebulous body of modern fiction, the cate-
gorical label of the genre ambiguously hovers, having failed to propose a
solid line that holds Japanese Decadence together. This study, however,
throws a stone there, and least it attempts to go beyond the nomenclature
of “decadence,” by exploring the epistemic play between individuals and
their labor.
 Ch a p t e r O n e
I m m at u r e D e c ade n t s : Th e Wa st e
of Use l e s s M e n i n I N D U L G E N C E S —Two
Nov e ll a s b y O g u r i Fūyō a n d
Iwa no Hōm e i

Japan’s modernity begins with a dramatic shift from the ancien régime of
the Pax Tokugawa to the Meiji regime that readily adopted institutions
and infrastructures modeled on Western predecessors. What followed the
establishment of the new state form was a series of economic reforms. For
example, in 1872, a new Western-style banking system was introduced,
shortly after ryō had been dispensed in favor of yen the previous year.1
Various taxes and financial systems were also modified in order to align
them with their Western counterparts. Hand in glove with these bureau-
cratic policies, the economy underwent a gradual paradigm shift sometime
after 1885, evident above all in the increased nonagricultural labor popula-
tion and increased industrial productivity.2 As reflected in Japan’s victo-
ries in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the Russo-Japanese War
(1904–1905), the nation strategically consolidated its infrastructure and
its heavy industry.3 Inhering in this progress, though, there was a conflict
between the old and the new industrial sectors. In contrast to the immedi-
ate post-Restoration decades when government-led industries had dictated
the direction of the national economy, Meiji Japan after the two wars saw
the rise of private enterprises—a rise that was backed by the advent of
laissez-faire approaches to a market economy.4 Given these rapid changes,
a new work ethic began to revolutionize people’s ideas about labor, pro-
ductivity, and competition. Thus, the first decade of the twentieth century
can be considered a second phase of restoration that propelled autonomous
private enterprises, which, in turn, paved the road to capitalism.
The Meiji Civil Code instituted in 1898 was a pillar of the restoration.
Together with the Family Registry System of 1871, the administrative law
established patriarchal authority and the ie system of households centering
 38 / decadent literature

on kachō, the male master responsible for managing the family’s property
and other assets.5 In this reorganized frame of family, social and economic
tasks were integrated into the now all-too-familiar division of labor based
on gender, wherein the husband functions as the breadwinner and the wife
as a domestic manager and the moral educator of the couple’s children.6
The foremost purpose of this reformation was to endow family members
with defined roles in the domestic space thereby transforming the family
unit into a production-oriented social institution. In the process of rein-
vention, family structures were gradually reduced to a nuclear form based
on the conjugal core. On the other hand, in pre-Meiji households, the
domestic space was more inclusive, taking in a couple’s children, adopted
children, parents in-law, other in-laws, concubines, apprentices, servants,
and lodgers.7
In contrast to the ideal of a productive nation, members of the eru-
dite literati found themselves out of place in the post-Russo-Japanese War
period, and Decadent literature provided a sort of refuge where these
superfluous men could portray their failed relationships with an increas-
ingly pragmatic social life. Two novellas, coincidentally bearing the same
title, Tandeki [Indulgences], reflect this tendency quite clearly. Oguri Fūyō
(1875–1926) and Iwano Hōmei (1873–1920) published their works respec-
tively in 1908 and 1909. Soon after the latter’s publication, critics compared
the novellas and concluded that Hōmei’s work depicts the psychology of
modern times more successfully than Fūyō’s does.8 The two novellas have
much more in common than their shared title: their stories rest on nearly
identical plots that focus on the lives of the decadent literati who are in
their 30s and unable to break out of lives characterized by dissipation. The
novels evince the general register of the I-novel narrative style inasmuch
as each—in the framework of a semi-autobiographical third-person narra-
tive—illustrates a conflict between an indulgent life style and an ambition
to become artistically fulfilled. In reality, though Oguri was a member of
Ozaki Kōyō’s Kenyūsha, as the fame and cachet of this group declined, he
began to incline toward Naturalism. In this process, he developed a friend-
ship with Kunikida Doppo9 and acknowledged the significance of Tayama
Katai’s Futon [The Quilt].10 On the other hand, Iwano Hōmei was a rising
Naturalist writer, considered something of a black sheep for his audacious
view that Naturalism taken together with Symbolism constituted a unified
picture of human reality. Hōmei lacked insight into the nexus between
humanity and modern society, and critics tended to consider his work as
expressing enthusiasm for the élan vital despite the absence of profundity.11
Overall, the narratives of both novellas chronicle a dissipated life, tracing
a downward process wherein the literati succumbs to a fate defined by the
loss of money, health, and talent. Socially speaking, neither protagonist is
 immature decadents / 39

able to cope with modern standards of labor and frugality, failing to meet
his patriarchal responsibilities.

Oguri Fūyō’s Indulgences

Fūyō published Indulgences in Chūōkōron in January 1908. At the time,
he was already a well-known author with the novels Seishun [The Youth]
(1906) and Koizame [Awakening from Love] (1908) to his credit. Though
well-received among fellow writers, soon after its publication, Koizame was
banned for its depiction of a married man’s love for a young female stu-
dent. As Fūyō admits, the plot is influenced by Tayama Katai’s Futon [The
Quilt] (1907) and reflects his gradual transition to Naturalism.12 Around
this time, unlike other writers associated with Kenyūsha, Fūyō began to
pay close attention to foreign literature, keeping abreast of newly translated
Western works.13 His Indulgences depicts a life of indolence by hinting at
the protagonist’s refusal to accept the patriarchal burdens that he sees as
undermining his freedom.
Fūyō’s Indulgences narrates the life of the debt-laden protagonist
Yamada, who is deeply unhappy with his life that centers on an extended
family consisting of his wife, their young children, their siblings, a cousin,
a maid, and a shosei (resident apprentice). In addition to Yamada’s psycho-
logical fatigue, the narrative is driven by explicit details about the immi-
nent financial catastrophe he is facing. From the outset, the third-person
narrator reports that Yamada is in debt to the tune of 300 yen (approxi-
mately $30,000 in the twenty-first century)—a debt he had accumulated
during the previous four years spent in debauchery at Kimuraya, an inn in
the Bōsō region.14 Yamada has managed to dodge his creditors by pretend-
ing not to be at home whenever the debt collector pays a visit. Even the due
dates for paying his debts to the inn, his rent, and his bills from the local
liquor and rice shops have come and gone, and yet Yamada has failed to
settle them.15 The owner of Kimuraya waits for Yamada at his house with a
dunning letter. But instead of going home, the protagonist takes refuge at
a local lodge where alcohol and prostitutes are available on request. Unable
to leave the locus of indulgence, Yamada finds himself in a vicious circle of
dissipation that only puts him deeper in debt. Without a plan to clear his
bills, he has no idea how to deal with the little money he has left. The only
solution he can come up with is to dodge making payments once again. As
a result, he falls into a routine of drinking and whoring because these sup-
ply a temporary psychological escape. Even when he does make an effort
to pay, the gesture is weirdly half-hearted and self-deceptive at best, and
to avoid confrontation with the lodge’s owner, he leaves 20 yen in the care
of Kiyo, a prostitute who works there. He is ambiguous as to how much
 40 / decadent literature

he intends to pay of the billed amount, and instead tips the girl without
specifying how much is for her: “Take whatever amount you want, and
take the rest to the counter.”16 Furthermore, despite his debts, he dreamily
imagines emancipating her from the brothel by subrogating her debt of 60
or 70 yen.17
Yamada’s financial dealings throughout the story underscore his abne-
gation of his responsibility as a patron of business. His incompetence in
regard to financial matters stems from the chains of paternalism that are
shared by creditors and debtors in Japanese society.18 Though Yamada’s
debt only worsens during his extended sojourn, the owner of the brothel
never urges payment. Instead, he lends Yamada money and even encour-
ages him to go out on a date with Kiyo.19 Kimuraya, the creditor who visits
him to collect the debt, also leaves room for negotiation, asking for only
150 yen as a first installment on the entire debt of 300 yen.20 In response
to the concession, Yamada begs for an extension of a day or two. Hearing
this, Kimuraya expresses sympathy for the hard-working wife and sick son
whom Yamada is neglecting.21 In addition, the editor who comes to col-
lect Yamada’s manuscript offers to extend the deadline. Not only is the
editor patient, but also he offers to pay half the manuscript fee in advance,
in exchange for Yamada’s promise that he will complete the work within
three days.22 Finally, Yamada’s wife displays the utmost patience and gen-
erosity in supporting her husband. Making no complaint, she assumes the
role of household master instead of her husband. In fact, she publishes
her own work—novels and articles about her frustration with domestic
life—to make some money.23
Such leniency reflects traditional business practices based on the mutual
acceptance of others as a miuchi (insider), a protégé or beneficiary who has
the support of a benefactor. All the episodes in Indulgences illustrate the
reality that Japanese society still stands on the traditional norms intersub-
jectively shared among the collective community. The constant exchange
of ninjō (emotional reactivity), on (a debt of gratitude ), and giri (a sense of
obligation ) saves Yamada from bankruptcy. However, it should be noted
that the lenders also live off the interdependent relationship with this faith-
ful customer. The dependency affirms that the logic operative here is not a
modern economic precept but a traditional obligation to reciprocate, that is,
a circuit of seeking and returning favor.24 The complicity between Yamada
and his creditors (the business owners, the editor as employer, his wife as
guarantor) reflects the pre-industrial business economy, which, to some
extent, survives even now in Japan’s late capitalist society. In the system of
leniency, although Yamada has accumulated unpaid bills at a number of
business establishments, he is still considered a faithful client, a benefactor
for their business. Yamada consciously takes advantage of their speculations
 immature decadents / 41

about his future ability and intention to pay, and the business owners in not
insisting on payment hope to maintain his favor. Though Yamada is aware
that one day he may lose credibility entirely, for the time being his strategy
is to tread water.25 At last, he pays off 100 yen of his debt to Kimuraya. Even
for this very partial payment, the master is grateful so that he treats Yamada
to dinner at a restaurant.26 The mutual dependency of the parties thus
results in the repeated postponement of complete payment. Nevertheless,
such implicit agreements are surely precarious. As time elapses, instead of
offering Yamada genuine relief, the series of grace periods only puts him
further in debt and heightens his sense of uneasiness and personal inef-
fectiveness. Even worse, because of the creditors’ forbearance, Yamada is
pushed to continue his decadent lifestyle because the creditors’ leniency
deprives him of the chance to confront the reality of financial adversity.
Though acutely conscious of his unproductiveness,27 Yamada justi-
fies his degenerate life as a necessary escape from his large family.28 His
sentiment can be considered a backrush to the legal system of ie. Given
his housing situation and large family group, Yamada is apparently torn
apart between the pre-Meiji style of habitation and his responsibilities as
male head of household imposed on him by civil practice. Nonetheless,
his insolvent life style is itself at the bottom of his problems. His liaison
with the prostitute at the lodge enlarges his family, suggesting his uncon-
scious longing for the pre-Meiji mode of fluid communal life. The ideal of
a production-oriented household alienates Yamada, pushing him toward
habitual drinking and whoring. Far from the aesthetic self-presentation
enjoyed by European Decadents, Yamada cannot forge any life with style,
and instead his indulgences continue ad infinitum:

He is the type who cannot wrap up any delight half way through. He tends
to exploit all his interests until he is disillusioned by pleasure. At times, he
wittingly reaches for a pleasure that does not even exist, and consciously
sustains that effort—in that way, again last night he ended up drunk and
slept over [at the lodge where Kiyo works ].29

Therefore, Yamada cannot become totally engrossed in pleasure. As typi-

cally observed in Naturalist I-novels of the time, he oscillates between dis-
cipline and pleasure, labor and pastime, and individual self and patriarchal
responsibility. At the cost of others’ sympathy and mercy, he develops a
vicious habit of pleasure seeking, but it is dull and lacks refinement. He
falls into the broad category of decadents yet apparently in a negative light.
Such a brand of indulgence defies the notion of labor, not because of his
aversion to work but because of the absence of any commensurate conse-
quences. Baudelaire, for example, endorsed artificial means of indulgence,
 42 / decadent literature

and that measure was meant to be an ingenuous detour for artistic creativ-
ity. Without any significant outcome, Yamada only escalates his regret for
a life spent indulging in transient pleasures of dubious value.
The novella illustrates Yamada’s wasteful expenditures, contrasting these
with the Meiji ideal of productive labor. He is portrayed as not only incom-
petent in regard to efficient work but also as unable to generate money from
his profession as a creative writer. From the beginning of the story, the man
is marked out from mainstream Meiji Japan, which embraces the virtue
of labor and the upward mobility of society at large. Still drowsy, Yamada
gets out of bed, as the sound of hammering leaks out of a carpenter’s work-
shop near the lodge where he is staying—a reminder to Yamada of his own
laziness. The sound echoes as if “showing off their labor,”30 and so alien-
ates him from the invisible circle of work-oriented society. Even as a writer,
Yamada feels a sense of inferiority in relation to Shirai, a playwright who
is employed by a theatre company at a stable monthly salary of 200 yen.
Shirai has won respect for being a gentleman, but on top of it, Yamada is
envious of him because he is “neither a lazybones, imprudent, nor poor.”31
To make matters worse, Yamada’s wife is far more capable of providing for
the family and managing their wretched household than he is. In the face
of their productiveness, Yamada internalizes his own ineffectiveness and
is disgusted by it.32 But the man’s remorse remains at the level of empty
words, and his debt continues to grow apace. Unable to control his dissi-
pated life, Yamada evinces a kind of decadence that lacks both maturity and
tactics, being driven only by momentary cravings for pleasure. Therefore,
he epitomizes a failed case of the modern homo economicus, perpetuating his
own entrapment in a vicious circle wherein he loses money, finds his men-
tal health compromised, and loses money again. None of the investments
Yamada makes leads to a sense of satisfaction; instead, each contributes to
his accumulated guilt and pain. At the end of the story, he is wasted, and
what remains to him are only emptiness and a sense of alienation born of a
society based on labor and monetary transactions.

Iwano Hōmei’s Indulgences

Iwano Hōmei published Indulgences in the literary magazine Shinshōsetsu
in February 1909. Prior to the publication of the novella, he was already
known in literary circles for his essay “Shinpiteki hanjūshugi” [Mystical
Semi-Animalism] (1906), which defines the essence of humanity as a syn-
thesis of Naturalism and Symbolism. Indulgences inherits the same line
of inquiry from these two pillars of aesthetics, though it contributed to
establishing his reputation as a Naturalist writer. Like Fūyō, Hōmei was
influenced by Katai’s The Quilt, and thus Hōmei’s Indulgences is dedicated
 immature decadents / 43

to Katai.33 As though proving Hōmei’s aesthetic credo that the mission

of literature is to emancipate subjectivity through the depiction of human
instincts,34 the novella is based on the author’s own decadent life experience
in Nikkō, the region he visited with the aim of completing a number of play
scripts.35 The narrative of Indulgences also centers on the financial problems
faced by the protagonist Tamura, Hōmei’s alter ego. The problem has arisen
in large part because of his relationship with Kichiya, the geisha whom he
met at a tavern in Kōzu, a resort town on the Pacific Coast in the Kanagawa
prefecture. Nearly identical to Yamada in Fūyō’s Indulgences, Tamura is in
his 30s, married with children, and mired in debt. Unable to put off mak-
ing payments, Tamura also looks to his wife for financial rescue. The plot,
theme, and motifs bear a striking resemblance to those in the Fūyō version;
however, the similarities are coincidental and suggest that their decadent
lifestyle was ubiquitous and symptomatic of the period among the literati.36
Of the two, however, Hōmei’s version of Indulgences offers a more tangi-
ble argument through the portrait of a profligate man, partly thanks to
Hōmei’s familiarity with Symbolism and fin-de-siècle Decadence.
The protagonist Tamura embodies the archetypal urban Meiji intellec-
tual caught between aesthetic ideals and patriarchal family duties. These
dual dimensions of life haunt him, but unable to make a full commit-
ment to either, he experiences neither a catharsis nor a sense of satisfaction.
Exactly the same as in Fūyō’s Indulgences, Tamura is trapped in financial
problems that are rooted in his own debauchery and poor management.
Tamura’s descent into financial crisis begins one summer when he visits
Kōzu to begin a writing retreat. Despite his initial motivation, soon after
he arrives, his eagerness to work deserts him to be replaced by a growing
obsession with Kichiya, the geisha who works at a tavern called Idutsuya.
Tamura immediately becomes one of Kichiya’s regular customers, and so
his debt rapidly accumulates. Though the amount of the debt is not stated,
it is not long before Tamura cannot pay his bills: “How should I survive
until the end of this month?”37 However, in Tamura’s case, the debt origi-
nates in his overly generous tipping and his overblown ambition. In com-
peting for Kichiya with three other men who are trying to purchase her
by loan, Tamura provides her with considerable support. Not only does
he plan to finance Kichiya’s training to become an actress, he also plans
to pay off the debt she owes the tavern. In addition, he also plans to treat
her parents to a meal that includes eels, a fine and expensive delicacy.38
But of course, Tamura lacks the money to make these plans a reality. He,
therefore, turns to an old friend of whom he requests a loan of 150 yen.39
The friend, however, refuses to advance the money for the simple reason
that the plan is unrealistic. Unable to come up with an alternative solu-
tion, Tamura pawns his wife’s clothes and accessories.40 In turn, as soon
 44 / decadent literature

as Kichiya receives the money from Tamura, she pays off his debts at the
tavern and at the restaurant where he did in fact buy the planned meal for
Kichiya’s parents. She also pays some of her own bills using the money.41
As the money is not sufficient for her lessons to become an actress, she
eventually returns to her home and settles down with Nozawa, an afflu-
ent bureaucrat who works in a municipal office.42 As reflected in the way
Tamura deals with debt, Hōmei, unlike Fūyō, presents a decadent antihero
not simply as a byproduct of the traditional social psyche of paternalism,
a reciprocal dependence on acceptable others. In terms of money, Fūyō’s
Yamada lives on the edge and yet continues a life of escapism without any
way out. Tamura indulges in the realm of dreams, but in the end suffers
the consequences of his debt by losing Kichiya. Unlike Yamada, Tamura is
at least not left with the social practice of leniency based on mutual depen-
dence but simply realizes the harsh reality surrounding money.
In this regard, Kichiya is not a mere object of desire but an allegorical
trope that sets forth Tamura’s gradual awakening to his own financial
responsibility through a series of disillusionments with her. Although she
is a dilettante who simply flirts with Tamura, because of her beauty and
seductive nature, he falls into a financial predicament. Despite the vicious
circle of debts, he continues to spend money on Kichiya. Compared with
Yamada’s indiscriminate squandering, Tamura’s expenditure, though
reckless, is at least based on some kind of aesthetic judgment. Most likely
reflecting Hōmei’s fascination, Kichiya echoes the voluptuousness of
femmes fatales in fin-de-siècle Decadence, who are capable of consuming
men’s virility and material possessions. Though lacking sophisticated tac-
tics and vice, Kichiya exerts a hold over Tamura and other men that evinces
her talent as a seductress and her sadistic nature—after all she does drive
Tamura to tears.43 The characterization of Kichiya as a femme fatale is not
a coincidence, as Tamura is repeatedly referred to as the writer of a book
titled Dekadanron (On Decadence), and appears to gravitate toward the
femme fatale, a quintessential fin-de-siècle symptom and aesthetic ideal.
His fascination with her leads to him squandering his money and physical
energy; however, these expenditures do not lead the man to any sense of
remorse. Rather, he takes pleasure in consuming the self while continuing
to use her as the stimulant to advance his own degeneration:

My oversensitive mind and body are becoming dissolute. [ . . . ] Corruption,

desolation, languor, fatigue—I feel rather proud of wandering around this
field called “decadence.”44

In so enunciating the self, he is conscious of the waste and dissipation in

which he is indulging. Tamura’s self-knowledge, compared with Yamada’s
 immature decadents / 45

helpless waste, clearly affirms that his decadence is not a miserable conse-
quence but a willful aesthetic project. Subsequently, as often seen in fin-
de-siècle Decadent stories, Kichiya, who is once the object of Tamura’s
passion and desire, quickly loses her freshness and aesthetic value for the
man.45 By financially feeding his degeneration, Tamura, too, embodies
an empty decadence without productive outcome. Therefore, Kichiya is
ultimately a destroyer of the man’s resources and talents, and even worse,
she does not reciprocate his generosity with any emotion of her own. She
appears to be an offspring of la belle dame sans merci, an archetypal figure
whose beauty draws men’s desires for the sole purpose of treating them
with cruelty.46 She also belongs to the genealogy of malaise fin de siècle
because she suffers from both syphilis and an eye disease.47 For Tamura,
Kichiya constitutes a terrifyingly real threat to his life. None of his expen-
ditures have any prospect of return, and so he is under threat both finan-
cially and physically. In the end, Hōmei’s Indulgences proves to be one of
the earliest Japanese appropriations of fin-de-siècle Decadent literature,
for its misogynistic depiction of the heroine. Instead of being devoured by
her monstrosity, after his impassioned squandering, Tamura recuperates a
sense of rationality that allows his objective judgment regarding Kichiya as
the incarnation of disease.
Along with the outflow of money, Tamura’s decadence also presents
itself as the absence of productivity. His plan to complete a play is never
fulfilled during his sojourn in Kōzu. When he does bring himself to write,
he barely manages to draft an introduction to The Romance of Leonardo da
Vinci [Senkusha (The Forerunner)] by Dmitrii Sergeevich Merezhkovskii,
for which he earns a modest fee paid by a publisher.48 Instead of writing
the play, he reads this book on Da Vinci, which eloquently depicts the
Renaissance Man with rationalist integrity and creativity. Da Vinci’s pro-
ductivity and prodigious ability in regard to painting, architecture, sculp-
ture, and science, remind Tamura of his own mediocrity. Merezhkovskii
portrays a man of ingenuity, but teaches nothing about recovering from a
life of dissipation. Out of despair, Tamura can only renew his commitment
to his life of decadence. Although he admires Da Vinci’s creative output in
art and science, Tamura reflects that the philosophies of utilitarianism and
productivity are incongruent with his own ideal.49 Thus, the man affirms
his own unproductivity, arguing that it constitutes his ontological essence.
However, the novella is ultimately a dialectic between an affirmation and
a refutation of decadence. It poses a question—Does “decadence” under-
mine or enhance life?:

As my pen writes of these sophistries, from some unknown lofty place, it

seems that someone is whispering that “It is because you are indulging your
 46 / decadent literature

decadent self.” Also, from somewhere unfathomably deep, a voice groans

that “indulgence is life.”
At any rate, it is just my mind that drifts away from the state of indulgence
and chopping logic. And, I painfully thought that my current adversity and
nervousness will pester me as long as I continue to live.50

In conclusion to the story, Tamura cries out, “My indulgence is still not
enough.”51 He is aware that he cannot attain any form of catharsis and
that this hopelessness can be consoled only by “the object of indulgence.”52
Likewise, the man uses his worries about debt and waste as the pretext for
his artistic inability, and paradoxically comes to vindicate his indolence as
the foundation of his aesthetic self. Therefore, the epilogue is marked by
Tamura’s voice that utters his cravings for what galvanizes his nerves:

[M]y emaciated nerves are in need of a potent stimulant; what I am look-

ing for is an immediately effective injection. Like alcohol, like absente, the
strongest fragrance is the most effective. Then, our natural desire for that
stimulant is our love, our admiration.53

The rhetoric imitates that of fin-de-siècle Decadence. In the moment, the

entropic outflow of productive energy is set aside to the horizon of obliv-
ion. The absence of efficient labor and productivity is attributed instead
to his weary nerves. At this point, the qualitative gulf between him and
fin-de-siècle Decadents becomes undeniable. Until the end, Tamura can
do nothing but uses his decadence only as empty rhetoric, without any
productive outcome.

Unproductivity and Waste in the Two Indulgences

In the light of Itō Sei’s classification of Japanese mentalities, the decadent
antiheroes in Fūyō’s and Hōmei’s Indulgences clearly belong to the tōhigata
(escapist) type, rather than to the hametsugata (destructive) type.54 Unlike
the latter type, which tends to pursue social righteousness and thus con-
sumes their energy, the former opts out of social life as contamination
(jokuse) and searches for alternative realms in pursuit of aesthetic or philo-
sophical ideals.55 These archetypes in duality reflect the sense of alien-
ation developed within the epochal ambience among men of letters. In the
post-Russo-Japanese War and Taishō periods, young literati consciously
withdrew from the mainstream officialdom and business circles, realiz-
ing that those social spheres operated according to an obsolete formal-
ism with no space for genuine humanity.56 During these periods, much of
the decadent literature had escapist themes and identified the publishing
industry and literary circles with their utopia, idealizing them as a sort of
 immature decadents / 47

sanctuary wherein freedom and decadent life would be readily accepted.57

It is notable that the Japanese I-novels of the time germinated in such
environments. The heavily featured theme was in fact an outlet of the
writers’ pride and lamentation over failing to be molded by the formalistic
conventions of mainstream social venues.58 The characters in I-novels tend
to suffer a dramatic tension between their life experiences, desires, and
moral standards. For readers of the time, the individuals engaged in such
struggles appeared to be free from banal everydayness, though they are in
reality painfully bound to it. In such an escapist mode of reading, readers
yearned to live like the I-novel protagonists do.59 In response to readers’
expectations, according to Itō, authors, though perhaps unconsciously,
sought to present a world defined by images of escapism and solitude.60
Life problems revolving around the family, love, money, and health typi-
cally accentuated the genre’s escapist ethos in the course of dramatization.
Not only did the authors of I-novels draw on these adversities in their
writing, but they also insinuated a sense of danger for the sake of pleas-
ing their readers. In this way, their semi-autobiographical fiction accom-
modated their desire for narcissistic performance. Partly because of this
tendency, the I-novel was often considered an inauthentic representation
of the author’s self.61
Fūyō’s and Hōmei’s Indulgences can be situated at the intersection
between the escapist ethos and the representative aesthetics of the I-novel.
Here, it is beneficial to restate the Meiji slogan of the fukoku kyōhei (rich
nation, strong army). In the first decade of the twentieth century, this
national dictum had already achieved importance as a rallying cry in the
Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). As expressed in Fukuzawa Yukichi’s
jitsugaku ron (philosophy of pragmatic learning) and in Tokutomi Sohō’s
influential national expansionism, the promotion of labor and produc-
tivity was indicative of their rejection of feudalism and their enthusi-
asm for building a vigorous modern nation. They ardently promoted the
idea of a Japanese people who would not blindly give in to bureaucratic
governance but who would be self-assured by virtue of their own labor.
The people’s independence, according to Fukuzawa, would be achieved
by emancipating them from a backward serfdom in order to develop a
capitalist economy. As such, the economy based on people’s independence
would strengthen the nation.62 In this course of economic development,
heavy industry and food production enjoyed generous government subsi-
dies. On the other hand, other areas such as arts and letters, were down-
graded because they did not contribute to practical knowledge. In his book
Gakumon no susume [Encouragement of Learning] (1876), Fukuzawa vig-
orously asserts that the purpose of learning lies only in pragmatism, and
without any practical end learning equals ignorance.63 In this principle,
 48 / decadent literature

his category of useless learning included literature as a body of knowledge

without pragmatic purpose.64 Some of Fukuzawa’s other claims such as
“the civilized man’s purpose lies in money”65 may sound drastic, further
clarifying his position as a pragmatist above all else. As Maruyama Masao
argues, however, Fukuzawa did not make a superficial charge against arts
and letters in general. Instead, he proposed a quotidian pragmatism (gaku-
mon no nichijōteki jitsuyōsei) in learning that would eliminate the leisured
components from life.66 His emphasis on practical learning was meant to
reinforce a productive nexus of knowledge and life, by virtue of the learn-
ers’ spirit of independence and high self-esteem.67 This position involves
a qualitative shift from the Confucian tradition that interprets phenom-
enal worlds according to an a priori value system to a worldview based on
empirical observation and understanding. Instead of blindly advocating
old moral values, Fukuzawa acknowledges the existence of a “purely exter-
nal nature” (junsuini gaitekina shizen no seiritsu) without involving any
subjective position.68 This new value system based on empirical observa-
tion was meant to expand people’s ability to control quotidian life. It is
undeniable that Fukuzawa’s philosophy encouraged the Japanese people to
cultivate a new frontier for humanity by both eliminating speculation and
dependence on others and emphasizing each individual’s strenuous effort
and empiricism.69
Having lived in the age of empiricism and independence, the protago-
nists of both Indulgences remain outside the ideal of enlightenment philos-
ophy. In the first place, both are at least committed to the creative activity
of producing literary work even if they do not pursue practical knowledge.
Pursuing a career halfway between literature and journalism, they work
but lack discipline, continuity, and regularity. For Yamada and Tamura,
the thriving urban life of Tokyo is a space that alienates them from epochal
norms and ideals. Their respective relocations to rural retreats separate
them from patriarchal labor and afford them the opportunity of indulg-
ing in a life of alcohol, overspending, and extra-marital affairs. Their
decadence has little to do with a self-willed uselessness or an aesthetic self-
presentation, and everything to do with a neglect of labor par excellence.
To the matters worse, unable to engage in productive labor, they cannot
even thoroughly indulge in dissipation. In conclusion, they are both bound
to find themselves in a vicious circle of debt and alienation of the self from
the economic reality.
From the viewpoint of labor and productivity, Yamada and Tamura are
diametrically opposed to the Meiji ideal of productive national subjects.
Their inability to be frugal is a metonymy of non-rationalistic individuals,
dropouts from Meiji society. They are always short of funds, habitually
make purchases on credit, and watch their unpaid bills accumulate—these
 immature decadents / 49

tendencies stem from a weary desire to escape the dual ties of patriarchal
duties and pragmatic social currents. At the level of individual livelihood,
these behaviors are not only detrimental in a moral sense but also self-
destructive and catastrophic. It is worth noting that Yamada and Tamura
both fail to perceive their wastefulness as a problem that endangers their
existence in social life. Instead of negotiating directly with their credi-
tors, both seek support from insiders, their respective spouses and friends:
Yamada’s wife uses her manuscript fees to pay off her husband’s debts,
whereas Tamura’s wife reluctantly agrees to pawn her clothes knowing that
there is no prospect of ever getting them back. In sum, they showcase only
anti-modern styles of ineffective financial management.
From the perspective of a modern social economy, Yamada and Tamura
is a sign of delinquency, and the financial dependence of each on his spouse
subverts the patriarchal norm. Their delinquency jeopardizes not only the
borrowers themselves, but also the communal well-being of Gemeinschaft.
Then ultimately it hampers the healthy development of a social Gesellschaft,
likewise. According to Samuel Smiles’s Self Help (1859), translated into
Japanese by Nakamura Masanao as the highly influential Jijyoron (1871),
the failure to manage money equals a renunciation of independence and
indicates a person’s inability to achieve any kind of meaningful self. In the
chapter titled “Money—Its Use and Abuse,” Smiles writes that money not
only has a material value, it also represents the abstract values of “personal
self-respect and independence.”70 Those driven by a desire to engage in
excessive spending are unable to attain independence. Instead, they are
tied to a state of “slavery.” “In constant peril of falling under the bond-
age of others,” they are forced to “accep[t] the terms [ . . . ] dictate[d]” to
them.71 This statement reflects the virtue of frugality in Victorian England,
where Smiles endeavored to contribute to the cultivation of morality and
diligence in the working-class population. This didactic publication’s
appraisal of labor and working people who wish through their own labor
to live in ways that are “useful, honorable, respectable, and happy” had
an impact on the work ethics of Meiji Japan.72 The book also argues that
dissatisfaction with work and class should be attributed to “weakness, self-
indulgence, and the perverseness of man himself”; therefore, such tenden-
cies are resolvable only through a person’s own efforts to overcome them.73
In Meiji Japan, Jijyoron sold more than a million copies, and along with
Fukuzawa’s Encouragement of Learning, the book became a driving force
for utilitarian work ethics. In line with Fukuzawa’s position, Smiles under-
scores the importance of people’s independence and of altruism in society.
To achieve collective well-being, for Smiles, the individual’s grasp of eco-
nomic sense plays an important role: “Simple arithmetic” reminds us of the
importance of planning a budget and saves us, therefore, from the dangers
 50 / decadent literature

of waste and the problems that come with a shortage of money. Therefore,
frugality is important not for egoistic ends; its purpose is to enable people
to pool surplus money and spend it for the good of a collective society.74
Given that the self-discipline endorsed by Smiles was instrumental
to the working-class self in Meiji Japan, Yamada and Tamura no doubt
deviate from the standard. Unable to keep their expenditures within their
actual earnings, they never get out of debt, such that any genuine inde-
pendence and altruism are foreclosed. Even worse, both protagonists con-
sider the family the greatest obstacle to realizing their potential in arts
and letters. However, once again on closer inspection, Yamada’s household
in particular does not take the entirely modern form of ie, as it encom-
passes members who are outside the parameters of what the Meiji Civil
Code defines as family. What traps the man is a conflict between this pre-
modern family and his responsibilities as patriarchal head and productive
laborer. The story exploits Yamada’s complex mental landscape: he is torn
apart by his indebtedness to creditors and his frustration felt for his family,
as underscored by the fact that he imagines his children’s deaths would
set him free.75 In this dysfunctional pre-modern household, ironically,
his wife takes up the patriarchal responsibility of providing for the family
by selling her writing.76 In Hōmei’s story, the household is more nuclear-
ized in terms of ie; therefore, Tamura’s inability to provide for his family
(father, mother, and wife) is understood as a failed patriarchy. Financially,
he depends on his spouse’s patience to prolong his life of indulgence. His
case illustrates the more modern conflict between the individual’s desire
and the patriarchal burdens imposed on him. Knowing that he is neglect-
ing his family,77 Tamura however does not reject his life of dissipation by
his own will. This self-conscious dissipation makes Tamura a more mod-
ern decadent than Yamada is.
With debt and the neglect of labor as central motifs, both Indulgences
share the uneasiness felt by the literati in Meiji Japan’s transitional socio-
economic phase. However, the narrative tactics are far from identical, and
their stylistic differences mirror the vicissitudes of their respective nar-
rative styles. In Fūyō’s Indulgences, as in Tayama Katai’s The Quilt, the
third-person narrative reports ongoing events and emotions by fusing the
rhetorical Romanticism of Kenyūsha with the subjective voice of Japanese
Naturalism.78 In this fusion, the narrative is highly descriptive and accom-
modates both objective events and subjective views through the frequent
use of subjunctive clauses such as “he thought” or “he felt.” However,
there is no psychological profoundness there. In contrast, by using the
first-person narrator, Hōmei employs the style of the objectivist narra-
tive, which reflects his theory of ichigen byōsha (one-dimensional depic-
tion or monistic narration). Despite such an allegedly objective narrative,
 immature decadents / 51

paradoxically, all the voices proceed from the protagonist’s subjective

viewpoint, and thereby create a discursive unity between the protagonist’s
subjectivity and that of the author.79 As an alternative to Katai’s hyōmen
byōsha (flat narration), Hōmei developed the theory of monistic narration,
which relies on an objective narrative style from the narrator’s omnipotent
perspective. Methodologically, Fūyō remains ensconced in the objectiv-
ist legacy of Naturalism. On the other hand, Hōmei, though inspired by
Katai’s The Quilt, turns away from objectivity and instead uses the narra-
tive as an expressive locus of the author’s worldview. For example, it is the
third-person narrative voice of Fūyō’s Indulgences that rather nonchalantly
describes Yamada as “not reflect[ing] back on his own empty, decadent
time and unproductive waste,” despite his wish to downsize his family and
maximize his work time.80 Thus, Fūyō paints a picture of an indolent and
profligate man. In turn, Hōmei’s first-person narrative goes beyond pre-
senting a slice of life to convey a more self-reflective psyche for his decadent
protagonist. Rather than expressing simple remorse, Tamura interprets
himself as a person whose exquisite sensitivity makes him restless, such
that a state of decadence is an almost inevitable outcome.81 He is aware
that Kichiya is nothing but a beautiful “object of indulgence” (tandeki no
mokutekibutsu),82 a distraction from his pursuit of artistic achievement and
from any hope of a life defined by productive labor. Ultimately, the narra-
tive succeeds in creating the modern psyche split between socio-economic
duties and aesthetic fulfillment.
Despite stylistic variations in their narratives, Fūyō and Hōmei are
equally critical of the patriarchal burdens that involve the management of
money. Both Indulgences therefore explore ways to reconcile institutional
responsibility with emotional life, considering family life to be directly
contradictory to efforts to fulfill an artistic vision. Accordingly, both cases
of decadent life are presented as an outcry against the institution-centered
nature of modernity. In this sense, paralleling their monetary debts, their
indulgences with women and alcohol provide the protagonists with neither
relief nor genuine satisfaction. Instead, such indulgences stimulate still
more cravings. The decadent life is ultimately a continuous perpetuator of
a vicious circle marked by failed physical and financial health. Yamada’s
inner voice describes the situation as follows:

Tirelessly, I long for the pleasure of the flesh, expecting something out of it.
Wanting and wanting, and finally that expectation is not satisfied. No, it
is not that it is not satisfied. At the bottom of the satisfied pleasure, there is
always a grave sorrow like lead, and it gradually surges to the surface of my
mind hand in hand with whatever sense of satisfaction there is. Shame and
remorse, and in addition to them, the pain in my body—Yamada was fully
ashamed of his licentious life and depravity.83
 52 / decadent literature

In spite of his self-disgust, Yamada does not renounce his decadent life style.
Finally, he pays off only a small portion of his debt and makes no progress
at all on his writing project. Similarly, at the end of Hōmei’s Indulgences,
Tamura leaves Kichiya, who by now is living with another man, but he
cries out for more of the life that she represents: “My indulgence is not
enough yet.”84 Tamura’s financial resources are completely exhausted, and
he must bear the consequences of his lavish life—his wife has become
prone to hysteria, and the fear of syphilis, which he may already have con-
tracted from Kichiya, haunts him.85 Hōmei’s rhetoric is borrowed from the
fin-de-siècle phobia of disease and amplifies the fear of red ink on the bal-
ance sheet in both a literal and a metaphysical sense. In these ways, the two
Indulgences illustrate the unresolved sentiments toward Meiji Japan that
had begun to dictate the border between social propriety and delinquency.
Their unproductive decadent life styles are considerably too discursive to
hammer out vigorous aesthetic autonomy and style. Even so, these stories
are significant at least in outlining the helplessness of modern man in the
face of new social norms.
The abrupt endings of both Indulgences are by no means arbitrary; they
expose the epistemological ambiguities embedded in Japanese Naturalism
and the I-novel in general. As the central motifs, poor financial manage-
ment and the neglect of labor are derived in large part from the authors’
real-life experiences. Among contemporary Naturalist writers such as
Tayama Katai, who was an admirer of Guy de Maupassant, Fūyō and
Hōmei, too, held that the “audacious and explicit depiction” of what had
actually occurred should be the priority for writers,86 although Kobayashi
Hideo later charged the pointed concern of Japanese I-novel with lacking
a mature socialized self.87 However, like such writers as Maurice Barrès,
André Gide, and Marcel Proust, all of whom wrote I-novels, Fūyō and
Hōmei also inquire into the socially perfunctory structure of humanity,
which was becoming an issue of some importance in the post-Russo-
Japanese War period. The financial ineptitude portrayed in both Indulgences
largely remains within a self-contained closure, yet their narratives predict
the rise of a production-driven capitalist society.
As seen earlier, the pre-socialized stage of “I” is particularly important
in Fūyō’s narrative, but in many respects in Hōmei’s, too. The paternalism
expressed through the incomplete enforcement of the financial contract
means that in the short-term Tamura can exploit the others’ leniency and
is, thus, protected from the worst possible consequences of his lassitude.
Living as a socially naïve individual, he defers serious confrontation with
his creditors who continue to show patience based on receiving minimum
payments from Tamura on a regular basis. To a large extent, the system sur-
vives today, most notably in the methods adopted by contemporary credit
 immature decadents / 53

card companies that allow borrowers to pay off their bills in minimum
installments (ribo barai, revolving payments in the Japanese term). These
options based on social credit rescue a borrower from present financial dif-
ficulties; yet, from a macro perspective, the accumulation of arrears jeop-
ardizes the healthy operation of a market economy. As John Bennett and
Ishino Iwao point out, business entities that follow paternalistic principles
are unable to use their resources efficiently. Such entities rely on “human
labor,” which reciprocates leniency with personal favors or subservience.
This system of business operation is integrated with various structures,
such as a family, networks representing particular interests, and religious
institutions, that is, social bodies that do not set a goal only in economic
terms.88 These units function on the basis of interpersonal necessities and
expectations, which are not always reducible to profit making or to a prag-
matic use of resources. Therefore, paternalistic practices in the realm of
economic activities cause vague entropy of energy.89 In the light of modern
economic theories, the system may be inefficient because it lacks consistent
standards and yields to arbitrary needs and desires. The benefits gained
from paternalistic business are to do with human relations and remain
“intangible, indirect, and extremely difficult to compute in terms of mar-
ket economic norms.”90
Within the social network of interpersonal support, Yamada and
Tamura can each afford a decadent life, but in return they never achieve
financial independence. Their ennui and passivity, especially in the case
of Tamura, are shared with the fin-de-siècle Decadents.91 In the realm of
economy, their neglect of labor and easy overspending are only detrimental
to the rational principle of modernity,92 and there is nothing aesthetically
sound here either. Therefore, although Tamura is clearly fascinated with
European Decadence, his decadent life trivializes the concept developed
by forerunners such as Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Huysmans who toiled
to construct the new terrain of counter-bourgeois aesthetics. In compari-
son, the Japanese portrayals of decadence in the late Meiji period lack a
foundation in individuality inasmuch as they are intertwined with a col-
lectivism based on paternalism. Even so, the emergence of two Indulgences
shortly after the Russo-Japanese War is significant as they illustrate peo-
ple’s changing perception of the Japanese socio-economic milieus. Further,
the useless man of each novella is indicative of the naïve Romantic desire
to subvert modern civilization. According to Karaki Junzō, such useless
men are typical of Japanese Naturalism, such that when Meiji society
began to embrace careerism (risshin shusse shugi), writers willfully with-
drew from this mainstream direction.93 “Decadence” portrayed in both
Indulgences is the agonistic locus of Meiji Japan where the very genesis of
“I” is subversive in nature. The daunting attempt to claim “I” is, according
 54 / decadent literature

to Takahashi Toshio, rooted in the sense of an ontological crisis that was

widespread among the intellectuals of the time. The rapid growth of the
capitalist economy deformed Japan’s modernity built on feudalism, and
the change suffocated individuals.94 In this context, Fūyō, and especially
Hōmei, depicts the repressed form of decadence garnished by a subtle sense
of guilt. For Yamada and Tamura, pleasures provide only a momentary
escape. Ultimately though relatively unconcerned about their respective
debts, neither is capable of cultivating a spirit of carpe diem. The Naturalist
decadents’ debts—the sense of deficiency—are realistic as a metonymy for
unproductive man, but they also offer an authentic metaphor for the “I”
that is jeopardized in the rise of modernity.
In both Indulgences, disorderly consumption and waste are more than
mere tropes disclosing the authors’ self-consciousness.95 The representa-
tion of a general pre-capitalist economy should not be blithely dismissed
here. In Japanese Naturalist I-novels, the motif is rather ubiquitous. Unlike
political literature built on an overtly ideological point of view, such as the
Proletarian literature of the 1920s, the teleological goal of the Naturalist
I-novel lies in the author’s implicit desire to publicize the excess of the
self. Jay Rubin considers the genre a repository of “variousness, possibility,
complexity, and difficulty” of the self,96 and within such discursiveness,
Decadent literature in the first decade of the twentieth century was thriv-
ing. The tenacity of the genre suggests that deviation from social confor-
mity was widely endorsed by the public. Semantically, too, the narrative
trope of squandering is significant in the context of the post-Russo-Japanese
War period. According to Bataille, a significant discharge of energy and
resources is necessary at times for the healthy operation of society. By
eliminating unused energy and resources, in Bataille’s term, “the accursed
share,” a healthy equilibrium in terms of production and consumption can
be sustained. Although the unusable portion remains “useless,” the organic
structure of society is bound to produce “an industrial plethora.” To sus-
tain health, such a discharge of entropic energy is inevitable and neces-
sary.97 The gigantic scale of World Wars I and II exemplifies this outflow
of energy. Consumption was necessary because the nations had accumu-
lated more energy than they needed to sustain the lives of their citizens.98
The system “must divert the surplus production, either into the rational
extension of a difficult industrial growth, or into unproductive works that
will dissipate an energy that cannot be accumulated in any case.”99
Bataille’s theory of excess guides our reading of the expenditures in
both Indulgences and helps explain the subsequently flourishing yūtō bun-
gaku (Decadent literature, literature of indulgences). The protagonists are
kōtō yūmin (intellectual vagabonds) who constitute the social entropy after
the Russo-Japanese War. In this epoch, due to the shortage of bureaucratic
 immature decadents / 55

posts, young intellectuals were left with no clear prospect of pursuing

careers in public office. In addition, despite Japan’s victory in the war,
the Treaty of Portsmouth curtailed Japan’s expansionist ambitions in East
Asia and redirected the country away from effecting a psychological unity
among the citizens of the nation. This ironic consequence pushed Japan
toward psychological disintegration.100 Coupled with the political condi-
tions, it is no wonder that the visible rise of individualism contributed to
the enrichment of the postwar literature.101 Both Indulgences are offspring
of the epochal psyche, which synthesizes multiple factors. In conditions of
postwar lassitude, the pejoratively labeled “useless” or “impractical” arts
and letters sought a sanctuary outside the consciousness of the unified
nation. Postwar Decadent literature up to the 1910s was, therefore, a recep-
tacle for an energy overflowing from the ideal of a vigorous Meiji Japan.
The disequilibrium of energies recurs throughout the twentieth century,
culminating in such works as Kawabata Yasunari’s Nobel Prize-winning
Yukiguni [Snow Country] of 1947, in which a decadent protagonist wres-
tles the impasse at which his life has arrived. To the extent of artistic
potential, the leitmotif of “Saufen und Huren” (drinking and whoring),
which was criticized by Akagi Kōhei in 1916, plays an indispensible role
in Decadent literature as a symbolic marker of entropic energy rather than
by providing a mimetic description of immoral reality. Hōmei’s and Fūyō’s
Indulgences anticipate the collective growth of yūtō bungaku, and to some
extent they are forerunners of work by such writers as Chikamatsu Shūkō
and Gotō Sueo.102 According to Akagi’s definition, the genre simply deals
with decadent life, and it has no goal beyond depicting a life of indulgence
fuelled by sex and alcohol.103 However, as we have seen, such a definition
reduces the complexity of Decadent literature to a literature concerned
only with moral hazard. In response to Akagi, as Yasunari Sadao argues,
the rising popularity of the genre cannot be separated from the deadlocked
socio-economic realities of the time akin to the mid to late years of the
Edo period.104 Postwar Meiji Japan produced a far more stratified society
than ever before, accentuated by the overflow of human resources. Having
reached the limit, younger generations were left with “disappointment,
indignation, rancor, anger, defiance.”105 Decadent literature did not propa-
gate the immoral but simply mirrored the zeitgeist. “Saufen und Huren”
was not only the writers’ preferred motif, but it also catered to a readership
that found consolation in escaping harsh reality.106 There, we cannot find a
parallel of the self-aggrandizement typical of fin-de-siècle Decadence and
Romanticism in Europe. In the following chapter, we will visit another
seminal case of Japanese Decadent literature rooted in the Naturalist
I-novel and the gloom of intellectual vagabonds who, however, opened an
intimate dialogue with fin-de-siècle European Decadence.
 Ch a p t e r Two
Th e D ec ade n t Consu m p t ion
of t h e Se l f : Nat u r a l i st A e st h e t ic i sm
i n Mor i ta Sōh e i’s S O O T Y S M O K E

As exemplified in both Indulgences by Fūyō and Hōmei, Japanese Naturalist

I-novels not only portrayed but also unpacked the socio-economic realities
of postwar Meiji Japan. For these novellas, “decadent” is a slippery term
that at best describes the face-value meaning of the undisciplined use of
money and the neglect of labor. Toward the twilight of the I-novel, the
mimetic representation of idle behaviors became more subtle than in ear-
lier examples of the genre and was joined by a nuanced contemplation of
psychological complexity. At this juncture, Baien [Sooty Smoke] (1909)
by Morita Sōhei (1881–1949) stands out from the crowd. Sooty Smoke is
one of the earliest self-reflexive Decadent I-novels, thanks to the author’s
efforts to emulate the representation of agonistic psyche prevalent in fin-
de-siècle Decadence. In the domestic Japanese context, the novel situates
itself in the transitional phase in which Naturalism began to incorporate
the methods of Symbolism and its aesthetic branches. Given the literary
standards of the time, Yoshimoto Takaaki singles out Sooty Smoke as avant
garde for its dual projection of objectivity and subjectivity.1 This unity of
the dual dimensions was predicated in part on the author’s immersion in
fin-de-siècle Decadent literature. Its voluptuous language influenced him
to the extent that his writing explored the dimension of sensorial stimuli
in narrative. It is noteworthy that Japanese Naturalism and Aestheticism,
thanks to the intervention of Decadence, developed a symbiotic rela-
tionship between a flamboyant subjectivity and a down-to-earth third-
person perspective. Such a paradoxical coexistence of isms is, of course,
not unique to Japanese Decadence. Charles Bernheimer reminds us that
Naturalism, though generally considered the antithesis of Decadence, ger-
minates its own decadent moments as though acting as the unconscious
side of the other.2 However, given the sectarian bundan (literary circles)
in Meiji Japan, Naturalism and the associated movements of Symbolism,
 58 / decadent literature

Decadence, and Aestheticism were considered entirely distinct styles based

on mutually exclusive aesthetic tenets.
Under this general assumption, Sooty Smoke exceeded readers’ expec-
tations of what a Naturalist I-novel could be. What problematized the
novel was the joint suicide attempt of Morita and Hiratsuka Haruko
(1886–1971, later known as Hiratsuka Raichō, a feminist pioneer in
Japan), which became the central motif of the narrative. Sooty Smoke holds
a unique position in modern fiction precisely because it goes beyond the
Naturalist mode of confession and sets aside the inquiry into patriarchal
morality. In lieu of objectivity, the novel largely employs methods typical
of Symbolism and foregrounds what can be called the psychological res
gestae. Though the motif of double suicide was by itself shocking to Meiji
readers, the novel, by virtue of its figurative narrative, appeared to sug-
gest that human experience cannot be reduced to a single aesthetic tenet.
In this regard, too, the novel is steadfast in not giving in to the public’s
sense of morality. Sooty Smoke, thus, aesthetically steps onto the territory
of fin-de-siècle Decadence and in doing so unravels a morbid story illustra-
tive of Japan’s feudalistic patriarchy. In trying to emulate the work of the
European Decadents, the novel partakes in the act of imitatio inasmuch
as Morita’s unresolved emotional experience with Hiratsuka connects
with the violence and sensuality of Il trionfo della morte [The Triumph
of Death] (1894) by Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), a famed Italian
poet and writer. Morita read the Italian novel as early as 1904 or 1905 in
English and German translations,3 and it was at least a few years before
their suicide attempt, which took place in March 1908. In the following
year, Morita published Sooty Smoke, which included a number of refer-
ences to The Triumph of Death, clearly suggesting the correlation between
the Italian novel and the Japanese writer’s suicide attempt. What comes to
mind here is indeed Oscar Wilde’s dictum “Life imitates art far more than
Art imitates life.”4 Imitating art, in Sooty Smoke, Morita becomes both the
subject and the object of art: the protagonist attempts suicide, and yet it is
Morita as the artist who depicts the event.
Evidently, Sooty Smoke is a record of human experience that cannot be
contained by the literary conventions of Japanese Naturalism. Shortly after
the joint suicide attempt, the author felt that the harsh societal response
and the emotional aftermath were unbearable. However, equally prob-
lematic and perhaps the underlying reason for the attempted suicide was
Hiratsuka’s excessively strong ego, which could not be fully depicted in
the existing paradigm of Japanese literature.5 Therefore, Morita apparently
needed to resort to his original style of synthesizing social realism with the
opulent language typical of fin-de-siècle Decadence. One of the significant
tropes is Nietzsche’s Übermensch (superman), a hyperbolic embodiment
 decadent consumption of the self / 59

of mental vigor that underlies The Triumph of Death. As spokesmen in

fin-de-siècle Europe, D’Annunzio and Nietzsche held positions against
the mass-driven cultural climate. On the other hand, Morita oscillates
between the austerity of the post-Restoration period and a fascination with
the rising individualism. Ultimately, Sooty Smoke is an ironic antithesis to
the ideal of the Übermensch, and the novel is thought of as revealing noth-
ing but the protagonist’s Hamlet-like indecision in the repressive wake of
modernity. Without Nietzsche’s exuberance, Morita’s narrative concentrates
on an agony rooted in the entropic overflow of emotion and language. In
this sense, Sooty Smoke is a qualitative shift from the quasi-contemporary
works of Fūyō and Hōmei, who portrayed the subversive economy in sloth
and delinquency in the service of a Naturalist approach. Genealogically
speaking, Morita, as one of Natsume Sōseki’s four principal apprentices,
offered a nuanced version of Decadence, and like his mentor, he was inter-
ested above all in a Romantic agony immanent in the superfluous men of
contemporary society. Another way in which the novel is significant is that
it commemorates Japan’s reception of the works of D’Annunzio. The volup-
tuousness of this writer’s oeuvre attracted not only Morita but also read-
ers in Japanese literary circles ca. 1905–1910, thanks to translations made
available by polyglot scholars such as Ueda Bin and Ikuta Chōkō.
D’Annunzio’s influence on the development of Japanese Decadent lit-
erature cannot be dismissed. He was known in Japan as early as 1898
through Ueda Bin, who introduced modernist Italian writers in Teikoku
bungaku.6 In this brief introduction, Ueda describes the poet’s style as
an offspring of classical elegance combined with the intricacy of mod-
ern thought—qualities that put D’Annunzio in the vanguard of modern
Italian literature. Ueda considers him a cosmopolitan writer who draws
on literary trends such as “the realism of Flaubert and Zola, the psy-
chologism of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, as well as the aesthetics of Ibsen,
Huysmans, and the Goncourt [brothers].” 7 As one of the earliest introduc-
tions to D’Annunzio, Ueda’s description presents the Italian writer’s style
as discursive, diverse, and excessive. This outline is not at all farfetched.
It captures the general characteristics of il decadentismo italiano (Italian
Decadentism), which goes against the grain of the aesthetic ideology of
the post-Resurgent nationalism that had attempted to dispense entirely
with foreign influence.8 In 1898, the date of Ueda’s brief report, Italy had
left behind the fervent Il Risorgimento (Resurgence) of the 1860s–1870s,
the period during which Italy became a unified nation reborn in the care
of such nationalist heroes as Giuseppe Garibaldi, King Vittorio Emanuele
II, and Camillo Cavour. As a modern nation that had become unified
late as compared to other Western powers, Italy strove to emulate those
other Western nations by promoting scientific positivism, an extreme
 60 / decadent literature

fruit of which was the anthropological criminology of Cesare Lombroso

(1835–1909). Similarly, in the realm of arts and letters, scientific objectiv-
ism known as verismo (realism) in Giovanni Verga’s term represented the
social current and rejected any mystification of the nation. In the name of
Italianità (Italianism), post-Resurgent Italy toiled to increase its industrial
power and reform its moral and intellectual structure as a modern nation.9
In this context, Italian Decadentism was considered a counter-positivistic
phenomenon in literature. According to Walter Binni, its aesthetic credo
constitutes a confluence of two major artistic currents of the nineteenth
century: the decadent self-consciousness formulated by Baudelaire and
Edgar Allan Poe and the Romanticism revamped by Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche.10 D’Annunzio, unlike Giovanni Pascoli, another proponent of
Italian Decadentism, brought “new stimulants detached from the preced-
ing Italian poetics.”11 These stimulants are not overly mythical, but derive
from the phenomenological observation of human sentience and intel-
lect. Waki Isao, who published the translation of The Triumph of Death
in Japanese in 2010, explains the poet’s aesthetics as involving four stages:
the tangible world of objects as stimulants, sensorial faculties awakened
by objects, emotions provoked by the senses, and finally thoughts built on
emotion.12 Through these four stages, mutually exclusive temperaments
appear to coexist in D’Annunzio: “barbarity, pan-ism, a desire for imagina-
tion and refinement, and Byzantinism.”13 By virtue of such synthesis, the
poet represents the quintessence of a cultural program engaged in combat-
ing the deterministic legacy of post-Resurgent Italy.
In socio-cultural circumstances akin to those of Italy in the 1890s,
Japanese literature ca. 1905–1910 was in need of fostering new literary
styles and sensibilities that would differ from the confessional mode of the
Naturalist I-novel. As suggested in Chapter 1, Naturalism was by and large
a literary convention that entailed the unapologetic display of the self and
the assumption that transgressing moral standards, through, for example,
adultery and incest, is acceptable.14 A major problem of the genre, though,
was the absence of social objectivity, due to the negligence of writers who
bypassed any scientific analysis of the relationship between individu-
als and society. However, this ambiguity irreducible to pure objectivity
is innate to Naturalism. For example, Abe Jirō (1883–1959) argued that
attempts to reduce human experience to something objective are doomed
to failure and that in fact Naturalism and Aestheticism are the insepa-
rable complements of each other.15 In postwar Meiji Japan (ca. 1900–1910)
where the spiritual legacy of the Restoration period was fading, people saw
the previous epoch as part of an unrecoverable long-gone past.16 To link
this view of history with Abe’s analysis, the positivistic ends of Naturalism
were doubtless outdated, as the movement’s ideals were suffocating
 decadent consumption of the self / 61

a wider spectrum of human reality. Even Shimamura Hōgetsu (1871–1918),

a proponent of theoretical Japanese Naturalism, thanks to his study of
the Pre-Raphaelites and French Impressionism, acknowledged the raison
d’être of Aestheticism, explaining that “the movement attempts to eman-
cipate human realities from the yoke of rationalist worldviews.”17 In this
way, Japanese Naturalism did not invite, unlike its European counterpart,
antagonism from adherents of Symbolism or Decadence. Nonetheless,
as the following pages will show, Morita’s Sooty Smoke is an emblematic
Decadent work because it radically breaks through the limit of narrative
convention in order to illustrate the complexity of the modern psychic
world. Then, the stylistic oscillation between Naturalism and Symbolism
is not rooted in the aesthetic principles they propose, but in an excess of
sensibilities that are not subsumed in the conventions of literary styles.

D’Annunzio’s Triumph of Death

The Triumph of Death was first translated into Japanese by Ishikawa Gian
in 1909 as Shi no shōri.18 The novel was published in Subaru, the journal
of the Group of Pan (Pan no kai), which was the epochal vehicle for the
Europeanization of Japanese literature. The last scene of the novel marked
by the murder-suicide immediately caught the attention of Japanese readers
of the time. Then, along with D’Annunzio’s voluptuous locution, the novel
was considered both too sensual and too violent.19 On the other hand, the
members of the Group of Pan, who were well-versed in European litera-
ture, praised the novel for breaking through the artistic impasse created by
Naturalism. In their view, the sensation caused by the novel was beneficial
for Japanese prose fiction, which had long been stifled by dreary phonet-
ics and obsolete poetics.20 Having learned of the reception D’Annunzio’s
novel had achieved, Morita, Natsume Sōseki’s protégé, came into pos-
session of the English and German translations of the novel in 1904 or
thereabout.21 Upon reading the novel, Morita became infatuated with fin-
de-siècle Decadence and ardently wished to bring the same kind of passion
to his own life and art.22
As part of D’Annunzio’s trilogy I Romanzi della Rosa [The Novels of
the Roses], The Triumph of Death depicts the sensational experiences and
turbulent emotions of Giorgio Aurispa, a young intellectual aesthete of
Rome. Having spent many years engaged in an illicit liaison with a sen-
sual woman named Ippolita Santis, Giorgio feels that the affair has passed
its peak. Although her physical beauty is a consolation, he is tired of the
banal repetition of intimacy. To undermine this sense of boredom, he tries
to rekindle their love by resorting to seductive rhetoric and retreating to a
rural village. But Giorgio is beset by his dysfunctional family in the rural
 62 / decadent literature

Abruzzian area of Guardiagrele. As if cursed, the family, which is tinged

with moral corruption, faces a bleak financial future and is in a state of
misery because of it. Above all, the family’s dejection is underscored by
the father’s polygamy and the mother’s hysteria, which together have kept
Giorgio away from home for many years. In sharp contrast, his deceased
uncle Demetrio, a sensitive musician who committed suicide, has inspired
Giorgio to explore a spiritual world of contemplation. Upon returning to
Rome, Giorgio intensifies his affair with Ippolita in the vague hope that
physical pleasure will rescue him from a psychological abyss. During their
retreat to a rural village on the Adriatic Coast, he encounters a religious
procession, which is part of a pre-Christian ritual. The Dionysiac fanati-
cism expressed through the procession suddenly reawakens Giorgio to his
life, and from then on, Ippolita appears to him to be the incarnation of an
atavistic and irrational energy that is hastening his death. As a result, he
plots both her death and his own. Ippolita now represents the primitive
force of the abject, and Giorgio considers her to be the menace driving
him to degeneration. In search of catharsis, he becomes obsessed with the
idea that a forced double suicide is the only way to purify their love. He
quickly accomplishes this objective. He tricks her into taking a walk along
a cliff, where he embraces her. As he holds her, he pushes them both over
the cliff’s edge. Her shriek, “Assassino!” [Murderer!], marks the end of the
novel.23

The Quest for the Modern Self: The Excess and

Waste of Individuals in Sooty Smoke
Sooty Smoke was serialized in Tokyō Mainichi Shinbun from January to
May 1909, thanks to the recommendation of Sōseki, who supported
Morita even after the scandal over his relationship with Hiratsuka. As
Morita recounts the events in semi-autobiographical style, their liaison
caused a public sensation mainly because Morita was already married, and
because of his joint suicide attempt in the mountain of Nasu-Shiobara
with Hiratsuka who was the daughter of high official at the Board of
Audit. However, their relation, at least allegedly, did not involve sexual
intimacy, and instead remained strictly Platonic.24 Double suicides were
not uncommon, but Morita and Hiratsuka caught the public’s attention
for the reasons outlined here. Upon the novel’s debut in this major peri-
odical, its first few chapters were well-received both by general readers
and by Aestheticist literati.25 Morita was already known to the public as
the ringleader in the Shiobara jiken (Shiobara Incident), the alias given to
the joint suicide attempt of March 1908.26 In these circumstances, Sooty
Smoke was mostly received as a typical Naturalist I-novel, a form in which
 decadent consumption of the self / 63

it is usual for the author, through narrated events, to express remorse for an
illicit liaison. This general reception was hardly surprising, as the author
had added an apologetic postscript to the novel, admitting that he feared
being “ostracized from society” due to his “blunder.”27 The story, however,
takes the form of a psychological drama, centering on the emotional agony
experienced by Kojima Yōkichi (Morita’s alter ego) in his relationship with
Tomoko, a beautiful college student. Following a similar structure to that
of D’Annunzio’s Triumph of Death, the first few chapters outline Yōkichi’s
depressive family history rooted in the rural village of Gifu. This part of
the novel establishes that the family is living in disgrace: Yōkichi’s father
has died of Hansen’s disease (leprosy), and his mother has had an affair
such that Yōkichi’s legitimacy is in question.28 Yōkichi’s marriage is also
portrayed as miserable: his relationship with his rural wife, who is obedient
but uninteresting to him, is best described as moribund.29 The narrative
tone of social realism ends when Yōkichi abandons her and their new-
born daughter in the village and returns to Tokyo to continue his life as a
man of letters. Soon after, his friend Kōbe—probably modeled on Morita’s
friend, Ikuta Chōkō—introduces Yōkichi, who is hospitalized for acute
knee pain, to a woman named Tomoko. Sensing that Tomoko might be
in sympathy with him, Yōkichi lends her a copy of an English translation
of The Triumph of Death.30 From then on, Yōkichi acts as her tutor, which
furnishes a pretext for their numerous rendezvous. Although Yōkichi is
enthralled by Tomoko’s coquetry and elusive nature, they remain unable
to consummate their love either physically or emotionally. Inevitably, their
relationship remains at stalemate. In an attempt to remedy this, they resort
to exchanging letters in the hope that they are able to express their feelings.
However, Tomoko, who has studied Zen Buddhism, reveals only her aus-
tere personality in her letters, which are written in the masculine sōrō bun
style. In this correspondence, she is impervious to his overtures, obsessively
declaring her resolution not to fall into Yōkichi’s hands.31 In the course of
their epistolary dialogues, her image becomes superimposed on the fin-de-
siècle imagination, echoing a Sphinx-like femme fatale who makes men
her prey. In this psychological battle, Yōkichi finds that he cannot expect
to receive either physical or emotional love from Tomoko. He, therefore,
decides to conquer her by imitating the ideal of the Übermensch fulfilled
by Giorgio of The Triumph of Death. Nevertheless, cognizant of the fact
that “he” is her victim, Yōkichi cannot act in accordance with his will. In
order to overcome his sense of despair, Yōkichi sets out on a path simi-
lar to that taken by Giorgio. In the novel’s denouement, Yōkichi takes
the girl to the rural Nasu Shiobara region, where they decide to execute a
double suicide in the snowy mountains. Even at the last moment, Tomoko
cannot acknowledge her love for Yōkichi.32 But in response, facing this
 64 / decadent literature

relationship pushed to the very edge, Yōkichi calls off the suicide plan. He
declares instead that he will “live.” 33
That Sooty Smoke constituted a new kind of novel at the time of pub-
lication can be also understood in the context of the social currents that
followed the Russo-Japanese War, especially in conjunction with the rise
of après guerre individualism among Japan’s youth. Before the Meiji period,
individualism was not an idea that was well-known to the general pub-
lic, because none of the traditional philosophies available in Shintōism,
Confucianism, or Buddhism encouraged it in lieu of moral principles based
on collective harmony.34 On the other hand, none of these traditions had
become the source of entrenched principles in Japanese society. Their sig-
nificance lays rather broadly in their egalitarian tenets, particularly under
the hierarchy based on the four social classes stipulated by the Tokugawa
shōgunate (1603–1868). Under the ancien régime, these religions (and phi-
losophies) did not advocate the values of individualism. Their job was to
encourage the general public to accept the social hierarchy by offering a
utopic worldview that transcends social reality.35 In sum, in premodern
Japan, human beings were both liquidated and subsumed under catego-
ries such as class, family, or work entity. In literary work, people’s con-
sciousness of such social structures is evident. As Janet Walker discusses,
the origins of individualism go back to a culture of aristocracy (ca. AD
700–1200),36 and Japanese literature has offered a kind of refuge to super-
fluous individuals who could not be molded in accord with the prevailing
collective mentality since that time. Such individuals have remained at the
margin of mainstream society, usually absorbed only in their own aesthetic
credos and ideals.37 Nevertheless, in terms of socio-economic conditions,
in the late Meiji period (ca.1890–1910), Japan was just awakening from
its pre-modern feudalism. The period found that individualism was not
entirely feasible, but accepted it as important to achieving Western ideals.
At this time, Japan was without a citizen-centered liberalism, and the read-
ing and writing of literature were seen as non-utilitarian leisure activities.
In such an atmosphere, writers, too, felt frustrated because limited by their
own aesthetics and means of expressing emotions, they were unable to
adequately portray the individualism they had learned from the West.38
In contrast to the premodern age, après guerre individualists were a
collective phenomenon of “a more hedonistic bent,” which drew criticism
for their “sensual dissipation” especially from older generations.39 Until
the end of the Russo-Japanese War, individualism was relatively obscure,
partly because the ie system reinforced patriarchy and a gender-based divi-
sion of labor in the household. According to Ueno Chizuko, the ie system
was neither a traditional nor a feudal construct, but a modern one. It was
a sort of chimera negotiated between Confucian filial piety and loyalty to
 decadent consumption of the self / 65

the Emperor.40 The major purpose of the Meiji Civil Code was to create
the ie as “an autonomous household unit, free from community control.”41
In reality, the system was meant to serve the national interest by reinforc-
ing the position of the Emperor as the patriarchal head of the nation.42 The
people were subject to the Emperor as shinmin (subordinated masses) who
were expected to contribute to the utilitarian goal of the nation. Japan’s
victory in the war proved the efficacy of the Meiji policy; therefore, the
subsequent period became socially relaxed and allowed the growth of indi-
vidualism. Even government officials such as Saionji Kinmochi, a notable
pro-Western prime minister, challenged the conservatism of the Meiji oli-
garchs, who considered individualism to be a “pernicious” force in the
nation.43
Among the common people, individualism meant neither political dis-
sidence nor the disruption of social harmony but simply a way to pursue
personal pleasure. On the other hand, for intellectuals and the literati,
individualism was a vehicle for spiritual modernity, partly because it was
a precondition of “love” as a personal fulfillment. Under the strictures
of Confucianism, love was considered detrimental to the orthodox prin-
ciple of a society based on hierarchy because love aimed only at the self-
ish “satisfaction of sensual desires.”44 To refute this view, the Christian
thinker Kitamura Tōkoku (1868–1894) argued that love between a man
and a woman is a valuable experience that advances our self-definition
and self-affirmation. For him, sexual love ennobles the human body and
allows us to transcend the limit of each individual being.45 In response to
the utilitarian moralism expressed by the influential critic Yamaji Aizan
(1864–1917), Tōkoku wrote an essay titled “Jinsei ni aiwataru towa nanno
iizo” [What Does the Challenge of Life Mean?] (1893), in which he argued
that all individuals are subject to the laws of Nature:

Remember that an individual [ . . . ] is a human being who is made of flesh.

Remember, he is regulated in every way by the yoke of love, by every attach-
ment [to the physical world], and by all the sensual senses.46

This claim centers on the sensorial flesh as the ontological core of each
individual being, suggesting that our sentience is the basis of love. In this
essay, influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Tōkoku proposed his holistic
idea of the naibu seimeiron (philosophy of the inner life), and later elabo-
rated his position by attacking Confucianism as the philosophy with the
most stifling effect on the human body and on affectivity. For Tōkoku,
within the social hierarchy, filial piety and loyalty are the manifest form of
a “positivism” that is detrimental to the genuine manifestation of the “life
essence” (konpon no seimei).47
 66 / decadent literature

In the development of individualism, the work of Nietzsche and the

work of Ibsen influenced generations of young intellectuals.48 A few years
before the Russo-Japanese War, Takayama Chogyū (1871–1904) radi-
calized Tōkoku’s philosophy of anti-formalism. As an ardent follower of
Nietzsche, Chogyū tried to depart from all philosophical dogmas includ-
ing those that were religious in nature. In his essay “Bunmei hihyōka to
shite no bungakusha” [The Man of Letters as a Critic of Civilization]
(1901), Chogyū claimed that Nietzsche’s work was capable of shaking off
“the oppressive weight of History.” For Chogyū, “History,” or a set of con-
ventional values, not only “negate[s] subjectivity, oppresses man’s nature,
ignores natural instinct, [and] hinders the development of individual free-
dom,” but also “makes all of mankind equal and banal, and curses all
geniuses.”49 This claim stirred up controversy, as Chogyū’s writing showed
individuals as those who possess “strong subjectivity,” with an assump-
tion that traditional moral and epistemological values are only relative and
limited in the phenomenal world.50 Further, in his essay “Biteki seikatsu
o zonzu” [Theorizing Aesthetic Life] (1901), Chogyū asserts that instincts
are intrinsic to human nature and that what he calls “the aesthetic life”
entails nothing but the satisfaction of instincts.51 Though this position was
almost certainly inspired by Nietzsche, it seems radically adrift from the
philosopher’s discourse on individualism in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885),
On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), and so forth. Notwithstanding the mis-
leading rendition of individualism as inhering in bare instincts, Anesaki
Chōfū vindicated Chogyū, arguing that his endorsement of Nietzsche
succeeded in combatting the “expedient formalisms” that have suffocated
“unlimited individual spirits.”52

Crafting the Aesthetic Self: The Excess of

Individualism and the Fin-de-siècle Psyche in Sooty Smoke
The reception of Nietzsche via Chogyū had a significant impact on
Japanese debates pertaining to individualism in the early twentieth cen-
tury. In literary discourse, writers expressed an infatuation with Nietzsche
through hyperbolic language, and such was certainly the case with Sooty
Smoke. The novel portrays a protagonist who attempts to cope with life on
Nietzschean terms but finds that he is thwarted by his own limits. Overall,
the novel employs the narrative paradigm of the Naturalist I-novel and the
Symbolist practice of a metaphorical style coupled with highly dramatic
language. Because of this synthesis, the novel can be considered a sort of
ars combinatoria and a forerunner of Decadent literature in Japan.53 On
the side of the Naturalist approach, the notion of ie plays a significant role
in portraying the protagonist’s social roots and, therefore, his attraction
 decadent consumption of the self / 67

to the heroine of urban Tokyo. Based on Morita’s own life, the details
of Yōkichi’s rural background epitomize the common Naturalist percep-
tion of ie as a stifling social unit with little space for individual freedom.
The first few chapters of the novel relate many instances of depressive
backwardness in rural households, of a closed communal life, and of the
wretched dysfunction of patriarchy. As though sharing the pain and rancor
of Giorgio in The Triumph of Death, Yōkichi is distressed by his mother’s
infidelity.54 His paternal lineage is also stained by the possibility that he
has contracted leprosy, the disease from which his father had died. Thus,
his parental influences contribute to his marked sense of resignation and
nihilism. In addition, he is obsessed with a superstition associated with
the family. Yōkichi suffers a sense of disgrace as the karmic result of an
ancestor who cut down the legendary pinetree associated with a sixteenth-
century warrior, Saitō Dōsan.55 As if all these factors weren’t enough, his
marriage is a cause of regret, as his wife offers nothing but obedience and
the ability to reproduce.56 Out of the disgust he feels for rural family life,
Yōkichi engages in an affair with a local girl, but his interest in her begins
and ends with her physical attractiveness.57 Such a momentary pleasure
cannot sustain him, but makes him aware that his dissipation stems from
“the absence of faith in his ideal.”58
In the closure of ie in a rural home, Yōkichi cannot be integrated into
an environment constituted by social norms. As a human resource, he is
wasting away because his erudition and intellectual labor are of no use
to a rural agrarian community. In this regard, he is an antihero typical
of the Naturalist I-novel in that he opts for a life of dissipation instead
of continuing to endure a frustration born of the feudalistic rejection of
individuality.59 Despite an egalitarian society, individual households were
reshaped in accord with the feudalistic structure of serfdom such that the
father was defined as the feudal lord and the women and children as serfs.
The ie was a projected image of the modern household, but in reality it
suffocated people. It was for this reason that Naturalist novels drew on
this social institution as a primary motif. In particular, the “irrational,
and anti-humanistic consanguinity” of the ie was diagnosed as the scien-
tific cause of people’s “gloomy fate, contradiction, and decadence” in Meiji
society.60 Family life figured as a burden was, therefore, not a fiction, but a
reality abhorred by people, above all by intellectuals and the literati. In the
post-Russo-Japanese War period, economic development in urban areas
had begun to deconstruct the deadlock institution of ie, and the influence
of this development was slowly spreading throughout rural communities.61
The first ten chapters of Sooty Smoke sketch out this transitional phase of
Meiji Japan, a country split between urban modernity and rural backward-
ness. We can situate Yōkichi at this epochal threshold, and understand
 68 / decadent literature

him, to borrow Kataoka Ryōichi’s words, as a quintessentially “chaotic

individual” experiencing a schizophrenia marked by despair, gloom, and
an escapist fanaticism in search of upward mobility in the context of urban
modernity.62 In the first three chapters, Yōkichi’s ambition is only cramped
as symbolized by his trivial affair with the village girl. Without making
any fundamental impact on the rest of his life, the decadent elements pro-
vide him with an ephemeral escape into carnal pleasure.
The subsequent chapters depict Yōkichi’s quest for individualism
through his Platonic affair with Tomoko, who is one of the earliest Japanese
femmes fatales influenced by fin-de-siècle Decadence.63 As a keen observer
and friend, Kōbe is aware of Tomoko’s depravity. But in stark contrast,
Yōkichi is naïve and lacks insight into her own self behind the façade of
urban refinement and sensuality: “I am barely immune to seduction.”64
During a period of convalescence in hospital, Yōkichi meets Tomoko and
lends her a copy of the English translation of The Triumph of Death.65 The
book is presented as expressing a metaphorical communion between Yōkichi
and Tomoko, based in part on his intuitive grasp of the girl’s psyches as
belonging to the enigmatic fin-de-siècle. According to Barbara Spackman,
convalescence in the cultural discourse signifies a “tabula rasa,” a rupture
in terms of artistic creativity that breaches the past from modernity.66 In
D’Annunzio’s Novels of the Rose trilogy, the heroines’ infectious diseases
cast them as “the ready-made victims” of sadistic male impulses.67 In con-
trast to this misogynistic view typical of fin-de-siècle Decadence, the male
protagonist in Sooty Smoke undergoes feeble recovery, presenting himself
as the vulnerable subject of a metaphorical female assault. Simultaneously,
the act of lending the book is a reference to D’Annunzio’s fin-de-siècle
stories, in which a symbolic gesture of generosity suggests both benevo-
lence and malaise. In response to the tacit generosity, Tomoko borrows the
book but never returns it. She later mentions that she has carelessly burned
it.68 The act of lending turns out to be a permanent transfer of the book
as if it were a gift, though the recipient has no attachment to it. Nicoletta
Pireddu reminds us of the importance of the act of gift giving, identify-
ing it with the fin-de-siècle Decadents’ fascination with a pre-capitalist
culture that operates on the logic of generosity and detachment from pos-
sessions.69 Further, according to Glenn Willmott, unlike mere objects or
commodities, “gifts” render the original owner’s social identity and power,
transmitting an intention to produce new social relations, dependencies,
and affiliations. Then, the act of gifting implies a critique of the capitalist
model of objectified relation.70 By offering the book, Yōkichi intends to
share with Tomoko D’Annunzio’s sensual text capable of “awakening” the
reader.71 On his part, the act of gifting the book implies dual meanings:
an articulation of his identity as an erudite aesthete; an intention to build
 decadent consumption of the self / 69

a new relationship based not on pragmatic calculation, but on his recogni-

tion of her as a capable reader of the book, an intellectual comrade. Despite
these implications of generosity, she barely mentions about the contents
and nearly dismisses the presence of the book.
Tomoko is a quintessential femme fatale who is far more complex than
most contemporary depictions of Meiji female students, who are innocent,
naïve, and work only within patriarchal limits. In accordance with the state
policy on women, the Education Ministry pronounced the female ideal as
that of a “Good Wife, Wise Mother” capable of contributing to the nation
through “self-abnegation, thrift, and productivity.”72 The girls who have
received some higher education were expected to cultivate “refined tastes
and [a] gentle and modest character” for the sake of managing the home
as the primary sphere of their lives.73 Imperial universities were predomi-
nantly a male preserve, and in fact, Hiratsuka Haruko, on whom Tomoko
is modeled, was a student of domestic science (kasei-ka) at Japan Women’s
University (Nihon Joshi Daigaku).74 Unlike the ideal image of female col-
lege students who focus on learning subjects related to domestic matters,
Tomoko, like Haruko herself, is engrossed in European literature and Zen
philosophy. Her exposure to these humanities subjects undermines her sim-
plicity, such that it is in part responsible for the mysterious coquetry and
masculine assertiveness. For Yōkichi, Tomoko is a sensual object of desire,
but that initial impression is overridden by her strangeness, which desta-
bilizes his male confidence. As time goes by, her impenetrable ambiguity
grows and gradually becomes superimposed on the fin-de-siècle image of
the Sphinx who tells riddles to passers-by.75 Taking her ambiguity as a flir-
tatious gameplaying, Yōkichi lets himself become captivated by Tomoko’s
enigmatic charm. However, Tomoko is not a devotee of romantic love,
and therefore refuses to succumb to his overtures. Her persona apparently
goes against the grain of the standard female college student and of public
expectations of femininity and modesty. Not only does she often sabotage
their rendezvous, but she also sends him delirious letters written in the
masculine style of sōrō bun (epistolary form). They are dramatic enough to
horrify the receiver when she writes: “Death is the only solemn possibility
to me. Please be ready for the day I die, it is ultimately the day you also enter
Nirvana.”76 Whereas Moto Izumi interprets Tomoko as a distillation of
feminist protests against patriarchal images of women,77 her androgynous
interaction with Yōkichi transgresses a simple paradigm of gender politics.
Tomoko displays a masculine austerity learned from Zen Buddhism,78 but
at times presents herself as an excessively feminine seductress. Unlike the
lovers of The Triumph of Death, Yōkichi and Tomoko never consummate
their love. Yet, her sensuality culminates in her entreaty: “I am going to
die by falling into your hands—I will ask to be killed.”79 To grant her
 70 / decadent literature

wish, Yōkichi also entreats her to confess her love for him: “You die for me,
and I die for you. Please tell me so. Only tell me that you love me.”80 She
never pronounces her love, but this does not necessarily suggest resistance
to the patriarchal oppression of women per se. Rather, her schizophrenic
tendencies are profoundly influenced by the author’s fascination with fin-
de-siècle Decadence. Tomoko’s ambiguity, therefore, conceals her hysteria
rooted in the dilemma between the social norm of the virtuous woman
and the personal desire to fulfill the psycho-somatic aspects of love.
In reality, Hiratsuka Haruko is a representative New Woman for her
vanguard position in Japanese feminism. Tomoko, however, is by no means
a simple reflection of the collective social phenomena. The emerging social
identity of the New Woman refers predominantly to wealthy women who
had access to higher education and to those who could reject gender roles
assigned to women by social convention. Those women rarely married and
demanded the rights and privileges enjoyed by their male counterparts.81
In our reading, Tomoko’s persona tacitly steps out of this stereotype, and
in turn combines the rise of individualism and the fin-de-siècle imagina-
tion of the femme fatale. Therefore, she functions as a vehicle of modernity
in Sooty Smoke. Further, her presence attests to the literary modernity of
expanding the narrative repertoire. According to Saeki Junko, Tomoko’s
complexity breaks through the stereotypes of female characters in Meiji
literature, which offered only the polar opposites of prostitutes and pure,
virtuous women. Her coquetry and diabolic flirtation go beyond the stan-
dard of female college students, and as a result, radically subvert Meiji read-
ers’ expectations.82 This point is corroborated by the fact that Morita had
difficulty finding a European literary model with an ego as strong as that
of Hiratsuka Haruko. Following Natsume Sōseki’s suggestion, Morita read
Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Sudermann’s The Cat’s Bridge, yet
he was unable to find a female character resembling Hiratsuka.83 Likewise,
Mario Praz’s Romantic Agony presents numerous examples of femmes fatales
in nineteenth-century Europe—women with tremendous sexual appetites
not in line with a Freudian unconsciousness but in the form of actual carnal
desire. Even within the paradigm of fin-de-siècle femmes fatales, including
D’Annunzio’s Ippolita, Tomoko cannot be reduced to conventional female
sexuality. By her austerity, Tomoko has the perfunctory role of taking
advantage of the naïveté of Yōkichi, who suppresses his sexual desire and
substitutes an investment in the literary imagination for it:

It is not possible to deny the fact that there is a hidden impulse of base desire
underneath his nature in search of constant stimulation. With his imagina-
tion nurtured by decadent literature, he has ornamented it, complicated it,
and sharpened it. In addition, he has even learned a way to vindicate it.84
 decadent consumption of the self / 71

His affair in his rural hometown and his marriage prove that Yōkichi is
not sexually impotent. Yet, his confrontation with Tomoko, their inability
to move forward to a physical relationship, emasculates him. This unprec-
edented female behavior is almost indescribable, and at best only through his
expertise in European literature can he rationalize it in psychopathological
terms like “double character,” “monomania,” and “erotomania.”85 Stemming
from positivistic research, these fin-de-siècle psychic categories are helpful in
attempts to rationalize pathological symptoms, but they cannot fully account
for the ontological core of such an ambiguous woman. Their exchange enters
a labyrinth, and out of psychological agony, Yōkichi concludes that the sense
of schizophrenia he is experiencing belongs not to her but to himself:

What is given by the girl is only long-lasting anxiety and doubt. [ . . . ]

In sum, I am merely a victim. It is unbearable that I am simultaneously a
witness of that fact. Is this love? There is no love like this. This is a kind of
sickness. From the beginning, this is only my sickness.86

As Spackman states, fin-de-siècle Decadents expounded their aesthetics

on the rhetoric of sickness, as by doing so they could explore the realm
of the unconscious. The “counternatural” realm of the unconsciousness
is a useful catalyst that plunges into a psychic alterity that is otherwise
unreachable.87 The locution of Yōkichi is self-reflexive, unraveling the
unconscious depths of his desire to give in to the girl’s sickening style
of seduction. Given her androgenous persona, the sovereignty of alterity
belongs to Tomoko. Even if Yōkichi were to kill Tomoko physically, unlike
D’Annunzio’s Giorgio, the girl’s excessive desire to conquer him would
haunt him. Thus, he would still be doomed to be her prey:

That girl will die for the sake of herself. For her, the death is a kind of tri-
umph. And I—I might kill her by my hand. But the one who is killed is not
that girl. It is myself.88

To resist this psychological game, Yōkichi tries to take refuge in art and by
so doing to invigorate his own ego. In a monologue, he creates a metanar-
rative self, visualizing himself as “the protagonist of romance”:89

I am a poet. I am a follower of art. I am a worshipper of beauty. I kill you;

at the moment of murdering, how beautiful my lover would appear to me.
I should say that everything beautiful reaches the peak of beauty upon per-
ishing. I should be the first and only person who sees that taboo.90

The passage is a notable imitatio of Giorgio who fetishes Ippolita’s voluptuous

body through the imagination.91 In the context of early twentieth-century
 72 / decadent literature

Japanese fiction, Sooty Smoke commemorates a qualitative shift in narrative,

mainly because of Morita’s hyperbolic rhetoric, which is unprecedented in
the Naturalist I-novel.92 The above passage, in particular, is significant for its
rendition of a robust subjectivity with a linguistic décor. These two elements
mark the migration of Symbolism and Decadence into the Naturalist narra-
tive. By enunciating a morbid passion, Morita allies himself with fin-de-siècle
Decadent writers, as suggested in the references to Oscar Wilde’s Salome,93
Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium-Eater,94 and so forth.
However, these experimentations in narrative do not come entirely from
the author’s imagination. The skeleton plot of Sooty Smoke is a Naturalist
I-novel based on objective facts, as he intended to explain why he had
plunged into double suicide in the service of the “literary imagination and
youthful ardor.”95 What underlies this plot including the excess of passion
and language is the author’s encounter with Hiratsuka Haruko, who is
incomprehensible in terms of both gender and literary conventions. At this
juncture, it is not an overstatement to say that the social reality of late Meiji
Japan and the language of modernity go together hand in hand. Indeed,
Morita’s frequent use of hyperbole and his abrupt action deviate from the
Naturalist tenet of objectivity.96 Yet, this fluctuation attests to the emer-
gence of a new interstitial gender and identity in motion. The narrative is
in this sense a historical record of the Japanese male’s fear of “Sphinx-like”
girls who are ungraspable within the conventions of the established socio-
cultural paradigm. Apparently, the majority of the Meiji literati, above all
Natsume Sōseki, who recommended Sooty Smoke to Tokyo Asahi Shinbun,
had not grasped the ineffable difficulty that Morita’s work sought to
address. Thus, Sōseki considered the novel a failure for its anti-mimetic
narrative, as noted in his diary entry of March 6, 1909:

Sooty Smoke is extremely violent. [ . . . ] We cannot find any realistic voice in

this man and woman. [ . . . ] I feel pity for their burning, unnecessary pas-
sion and their display of insanity. This man and woman are infatuated with
an artificial fin-de-siècle passion, and they are proud of it. They believe
that it is an extreme of nature. Genuine love transcends language. It is not
experienced by mere Westernization (of the language). In reality, natural
human instinct does not manifest itself like this.97

Sōseki could not endorse the aesthetic choices made in Sooty Smoke because
they appeared to him an absence of insight into human psychology. Sōseki’s
novel Sorekara [And Then] (1909) is written from the same viewpoint. His
protagonist, Daisuke, “always wonder[s] why Western love stories depict
relationships between men and women as overly explicit, unrestrained, and
sensual.”98 Based on this statement, Sōseki tenaciously argued that Morita’s
work draws quite heavily on the aesthetics of Decadence and Symbolism.
 decadent consumption of the self / 73

Given Sōseki’s position as a founding father of modern Japanese literature,

anti-natural rhetoric was not widely accepted in the first decade of the
twentieth century.
The literary excess stems not only from the emerging new female sen-
sibility but also from the question of subjectivity. According to Kamei
Hideo, the trope of double suicide in the postwar Meiji period was an
important vehicle for the new “I” sensibility. The first-person subject is a
critical construct capable of objectifying the other as a full-fledged partner
such that the “I” and the other die together. This sensitivity articulates the
division between two subjects through a desire not only for “someone else
to accompany” one in death, but also for “someone who would actually
fulfill that desire [of double suicide] together.”99 In the eighteenth century,
when Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725) wrote jōruri (puppet theater)
scripts such as The Love Suicides at Sonezaki (1703) and The Love Suicides at
Amijima (1723), the motif of double suicide allowed lovers to escape from
social constraints typically represented by class differences, illicit relation-
ships, and financial adversity. Lovers tended to choose double suicide in
order to fulfill the obligations of the Confucian moral code. This conven-
tional paradigm of the genre strips away the distinctions between multiple
layers of consciousness (social, authorial, transcendental, etc.), subsuming
each man and woman into communal society. In contrast, the postwar
Meiji narrative establishes clear divisions between each character’s will,
with the assumption that suicide is “an individual death” made possible by
a person’s autonomy.100 The suicide attempt in Sooty Smoke reflects this rise
of the individual, whereby both men and women are active agents of the
deed, even though moral codes still affect what each decides to do. Meiji
readers were still taken aback at this representation of joint suicide, as the
lovers’ individual psychic conditions did not appear to be sufficient for the
narrative outcome in the last scene.
From the viewpoint of literary history, the tour de force of Sooty Smoke
is the narrative emphasis placed on hyper self-consciousness, which can-
not be fully examined by the flat objectivity of Naturalism. Therefore,
Morita, inspired by the fin-de-siècle malaise through The Triumph of
Death, explored the new terrain of narrative. The significance of the novel
lies not only in its stylistic imitatio but also, as we have seen so far, in its
effort to portray a modern relationship, one featuring two people driven at
least in part by an explicit individualism. The attempt was made possible
not by a Naturalist quest for the self via flat observation, but by the inter-
vention of European Decadence and Symbolism that facilitated Morita’s
efforts to defamiliarize the realm of unconsciousness. In the last scene of
The Triumph of Death, Giorgio’s despair over Ippolita intensifies as he per-
ceives his lover as an embodiment of atavistic female instinct. She is the
 74 / decadent literature

animalistic other to be antagonized, otherwise his ontological core as a

rational male will be jeopardized. The dramatic suicide and murder in the
Adriatic Sea is cathartic in nature, as the narrative reads “mute and pure
like the superior Heaven,”101 and thus provides the story with a closing
drama. In Sooty Smoke, though the mounting tension of the last scene can
be likened to that of The Triumph of Death, Yōkichi cannot dismiss his
lover to the same degree. For Giorgio, the precipice of the Adriatic Sea is
an ultimate locus dramatis, whereas the mountain on which Yōkichi and
Tomoko wander is a locus of ontological uncertainty and echoes rather the
selva oscura of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. At the threshold between
life and death, Yōkichi declares that his plan of double suicide goes unful-
filled: “I will live. I do not know if Nature kills us or not. I no longer kill
myself. I do not kill you either.”102 His inner cry then marks the epilogue:

Alas icy prison! Icy prison! Finally the girl’s dream has come true. In the
end, I was brought by her to the inside of this icy prison!—Inside the man
an ineffable delight surged. It does not matter any longer. It is all right!
Holding hands together, both of them were sitting in the snow. There is
no more to say!103

His decision to abandon the suicide plan is largely intuitive. It is abrupt,

but if we read the novel as a modernist text, the denouement in the final
scene has a considerable degree of semantic importance. Yōkichi over-
comes the dialectics of death and life, but the resolution to “live” is a
passive gesture of anti action worthy of Hamlet.104 His resolution is not
rationally charged; instead, it is relaxed, free from dramatic tension.
Metaphorically, the protagonist willingly gives in to the girl’s domination,
tacitly renouncing the vigor of self-determination. Therefore, the novel’s
ubiquitous references to D’Annunzio and Nietzsche ultimately offer these
writers as ironic counterparts to Yōkichi’s persona, implying a great psy-
chological distance between European Übermensch and the Japanese man
of ambiguous modernity. Giorgio holds, no doubt, a quintessential fin-
de-siècle Decadent spirit, in that he draws on his strong will in an endeavor
to separate himself from “the tumults and sorrows of the vulgar crowd”
in order to construct an internal world of individualism.105 On the other
hand, Yōkichi is not temperamentally a man of action but a decadent
man absorbed in contemplation, melancholia, and inertia. Another reason
is the social current of Meiji Japan, where feudalism still hampered the
birth of mature civil society and individual social constituents. The excess
of individualism in Sooty Smoke hovers at the level of self-consciousness
but not at the level of a full-fledged relationship between a man and a
woman. Yōkichi’s marriage and infidelity are the byproducts of feudalistic
 decadent consumption of the self / 75

patriarchy, and the latter is an outlet for excessive frustration and carnal
desire. In turn, Tomoko is the urban femme fatale who is hyper conscious
of her individuality. Her excessively strong ego paradoxically mirrors an
outflow of the fear and uncertainty she feels in regard to the rigid gender
divisions in Meiji society. But even so, her distinctively strong ego is the
catalyst that awakens Yōkichi to the reality of individualism within the
limits of social constraints. Thus, he murmurs that “the worldview of mod-
ern man is halfway between optimism and pessimism.”106
The artificial ornamentation of the narrative in Sooty Smoke is a psy-
chological detour that helps the protagonist to dodge an action and com-
mitment. In the poetics of fin-de-siècle Decadence, artificial language is
a notable tactic that tends toward the aggrandizement of the self. In Sooty
Smoke, the lovers’ barren liaison is also constructed in a hyperbolic narra-
tive. Morita’s dramatic narrative was by and large interpreted as a dangerous
reservoir of an over self-consciousness inhering in a neurotic fin-de-siècle
imagination that leads, in Yōkichi’s words, to a “fiddling even with life.”107
On the other hand, the novel engages in a down-to-earth discourse of
modernity by portraying the psychological unrest that had become com-
mon among Meiji intellectuals. The protagonist belongs to the generation
that came late to the laborious first phase of the Restoration, and to a great
extent, the narrative is animated by a collective realization that contempo-
rary Japan could no longer celebrate prosperity but was entering a phase
of decadence.108 Above all, the sentiment permeated among men of arts
and letters who considered themselves outside the utilitarian cycle of labor
and production. Therefore, far from being arbitrary, the title Baien, “Sooty
Smoke,” is a symbolic rendition of the zeitgeist. As if mirroring Yōkichi’s
sense of uselessness, the leitmotif of dusty smoke represents what is unus-
able in modern industrial routines:

Leaning on the column, Yōkichi stared at the dirty reddish smoke rising
from the high chimney of the arsenal. After moving horizontally about 100
yards, the smoke was blown away by a gust of wind.109

The image of the smoke expresses his sense of “Weltschmerz (worldly pain),
as it relates to his physical and emotional thirst for Tomoko.110 Transient
and ungraspable, the smoke visualizes the uselessness of excessive self-
consciousness. The pessimism in the sense of uselessness is nonetheless
integral to the Japanese take on Decadence—along with the Romantic
connotation of worldly pain. As Haniya Yutaka notes, this pessimism orig-
inated in the respective works of Baudelaire and Dostoevsky. These authors
lamented the modern world where “languor and helplessness” overwhelm
humanity, and discovered in Christianity a rescue from decadence.111
 76 / decadent literature

In contrast to that trajectory of Decadence, Japanese writers of the early

twentieth century were rather self-sufficient and remained ensconced in a
passive nihilism (shōkyokutekina nihirizumu).112 Sooty Smoke originated in
Naturalist accounts of personal res gestae, so that shame and embarrass-
ment certainly scaffold the novel. As the story progresses, however, the
novel’s I-novel aspects recede and thus become a secondary focus. In turn,
the narrative filters personal adversity into a universal sense of unrest in
the ever-changing modern environment. In this sense, the femme fatale
is a synecdoche of spiritual unrest that specifically destabilizes Yōkichi’s
patriarchal male self in modernity. Neither able to imitate Giorgio nor
resort to a sentimental pre-modern double suicide, Yōkichi realizes that he
is “not” a Nietzschean Übermensch. In this unfolding, the reader sees that
this self-knowledge of negativity is at the core of Sooty Smoke’s modernity:
“I am neither a superman who experiments with homicide, nor a ferocious
fanatic oblivious of myself.”113 This ontological detour is the fruit of a com-
plex narrative in which the many faces of the modern collide.
Giorgio’s ultimatum underpinned by the notion of the Übermensch fas-
cinates Yōkichi as the foremost reference to the fin-de-siècle psychic world.
At the same time, it is the edge that the Japanese decadent is unable to
cross. Together with a sense of uncertainty and perplexity, his hyper-self-
consciousness persists, suggesting that he is in no sense resolved to die.
In this sense, Yōkichi is the one who perpetuates decadence and finally
surrenders to the Sphinx-like mystery of the lover who continues to delude
him. In parallel with The Triumph of Death’s Ippolita, Tomoko is also a
manifest case of fin-de-siècle malaise as displayed in her repressed feminin-
ity. Unlike Ippolita, Giorgio’s object of desire, Tomoko competes psycho-
logically with Yōkichi for her hyper-self-consciousness. Caught between
the social expectations of women and her desires for Yōkichi, she embodies
the austerity typical of Meiji women who live in the changing modern psy-
chic world. The unspoken social pressure develops into a psycho-somatic
repression, up to the point at which she explodes in hysterical epilepsy.114
Here, her seductive passion and suppressed carnal desire remain unful-
filled, leaving that energy as an unusable excess. This excess—in Georges
Bataille’s term “the accursed share”—is Tomoko’s superfluous energy. It
cannot be consumed in sexual intercourse for a double bind. Tomoko’s
passion for Yōkichi is never liberated because of the moral codes set by the
patriarchal ie system, which requires her suppression of her feminine self
in front of a married man. Then, the girl’s will to power trained by Zen
Buddhism shores up the moral code. It is only the epileptic outburst that
announces the imbalance between her sexuality and mental struggle.
D’Annunzio’s reception in Japan reflects on the fact-based Sooty Smoke,
and through its own linguistic opulence, the novel unravels the country’s
 decadent consumption of the self / 77

belated fascination with fin-de-siècle Decadence. In the history of Japanese

literature, though its heyday was already over by 1909, the novel is a notable
endeavor that imitates European flamboyance at the limit of Naturalism.
Unlike its Italian forerunner, the narrative of Sooty Smoke cannot conceal
the absence of exuberance; what the text renders, even with its linguistic
décor, is the author’s frustration with the societal stigma caused by the
Shiobara jiken scandal. As noted earlier, even his beloved master, Sōseki,
was indignant at the aesthetics of Morita’s novel. In sum, the novel was
meant to be a Naturalist apology to the general public, but ironically, it
failed to offer a catharsis for its avant-garde style in the post-Russo-Jap-
anese War epoch. The novel, however, deserves credit as one of the first
modern Decadent novels in modern Japanese literature. Everything in the
narrative of Sooty Smoke flows without being consumed—the lovers’ sexu-
ality, the will to power, and the linguistic hyperbole proved nothing but
the entropy of self-consciousness. In the end, as the title acutely states, the
excess remains up in the air like a whiff of sooty smoke.
 Ch a p t e r Th r e e
D e c ade n t R e t u r n e e s : Th e D i a l o g ic
L a b or of Se nsi bi l i t y i n Nag a i K a f ū’s
S N E E R S a n d Ueda Bi n’s TH E VO R T E X

In this chapter, we empirically apply theories of heterogeneity to narra-

tive voice in the Japanese Decadent literature of the post-Russo-Japanese
War period. Our purpose here is to shed new light on the role of complex
socio-cultural sensibilities as a form of non-material labor, acknowledging
those psychic effects as a significant contributor to Japanese Decadence.
Drawing mainly on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia, we will
examine the process through which the self is constructed via interac-
tions with heterogeneous others who share and differentiate socio-cultural
beliefs. In so doing, we will extend our consideration to the issue of dilet-
tantism through which the subject negotiates with multiple spectrums of
ongoing cultural modernity. Within the framework of dialogic interaction,
Japanese Decadents remained calm and self-reflexive, in contrast with the
turbulent psychological agitation that fin-de-siècle European Decadents
tended to evince. For Japanese Aesthetes of the epoch, “decadence” was a
novelty as well as a new cultural platform, wherein they witnessed the decay
of indigenous traditions and the rise of Japan’s eclectic culture. In reality,
their psychological dispositions were, generally in a positive sense, closer
to those of dilettantes. With these perspectives in mind, we will focus on
two stories considered to be seminal to the fiction of Japanese Decadence
and kichōsha (returnee from the West) stories: Nagai Kafū’s Reishō [Sneers]
(1910) and Ueda Bin’s Uzumaki [The Vortex] (1910). Critics tend to point
to affinities between these two works, but offer little of detailed discus-
sion about the respective narrative characteristics. At most, both stories
are considered portraits of high-blown aesthetic tastes based neither on
the epochal élan vital nor on clearly developed plots.1 Such a superficial
assessment lumps both work into the category of modernist texts, ignoring
the narrative methods that, in fact, constitute a nuanced representation of
kichōsha sensibilities caught between Meiji Japan and the West.
 80 / decadent literature

Sneers and The Vortex reveal a complicated affection for and frustra-
tion with the cultural modernity of postwar Meiji Japan. Both stories were
written shortly after the authors’ sojourn in the West. In the style of semi-
autobiography, these kichōsha writers express multiple spectrums of cul-
tural consciousness: an appraisal of the West, disillusionment with Meiji
Japan, and nostalgia for their homeland’s cultural past. Written in a phase
of the writers’ early literary careers, the stories may be relatively imma-
ture but they are not restrained by cultural elitism. Instead, each vividly
attests to the epochal sensibility shared among the bourgeois literati. In
the multiple layers of narrative voices, Kafū and Ueda plead for individual
aesthetic refinement in the last years of Meiji Japan, where cultural condi-
tions are both in flux and permanently adrift from the traditions of the
Edo period. For them, contemporary Japan was both socially and cultur-
ally backward and incongruous with the sensibilities they had nurtured
via European Aestheticism, Symbolism, and Decadence. Acutely aware of
being avant garde, the authors strived to express their frustration with the
still feudalistic homeland. In this context, Sneers and The Vortex fall into
the broad category of Decadent literature, most particularly for their efforts
to transform their protagonists’ entropic energy into aesthetic sensibility.
Nonetheless, neither novel explicitly appropriates European Decadence. It
is more accurate to say that they gesture toward kyōraku shugi (the term
preferred by Ueda), which can be translated as dilettantism, hedonism, and
Epicureanism. Secondly, for both Sneers and The Vortex, dialogic narrative
plays a significant role in building a noticeably intersubjective social circle.
In the imaginary community, each character engages in the conversation
on current socio-cultural issues and contemporary art. The dialogues take
place within the closed environs of bourgeois society. Notwithstanding
these limits, each voice represents a wide range of reaction to and percep-
tions of the epoch. Far from insisting on any particular position or belief,
all the voices are in some measure shy, hesitant, even introverted, being
susceptible to the comments and impressions of others. Magnifying these
less frequently discussed aspects, this chapter explores the significance of
the yielding narrative attitude as a form of self-conscious labor. Through
this undertaking, we explore the ways in which the kichōsha authors nego-
tiate Japan’s impending cultural modernity.
Ueda and Kafū both refrain from making any direct criticism of Meiji
Japan based on a dichotomy between Japan and the West. In lieu of mak-
ing a comparison, Sneers and The Vortex astutely engage with current issues
pertaining to mass culturalism, mass commodification of art, and pragma-
tism. Related to his novella, Ueda confronts these issues in his essay titled
“Kizokushugi to Heiminshugi” [Aristocratism and Populism] (1911).2
There he argues that the currents of politics, art, and science are under the
 decadent returnees / 81

hegemony of mass cultural influences. What scaffolds a society dominated

by mass culture, according to Ueda, is the logic of number as proven in
democracy and the primacy of the majority that undergirds the politi-
cal ethos. In observation of this, he asserts that “the foremost evil of the
contemporary world” stems from the collective mass mentality that dislo-
cates the spirited individuals from social center.3 The widespread mindset
is dangerous because it overlooks the fact that human society is “supra
organic,” that is, individuals precede the formation of any society.4 He
goes on to argue that the uniqueness of each individual has been severely
diminished by collectivism, figuratively calling this social phenomenon “a
kaleidoscope” played by the invisible.5 In metaphorical terms, he claims
that individuals are forced to renounce “personality, intuition, affectiv-
ity” (jinkaku to chokkaku to jōi), such that they are necessarily confined to
limited forms and patterns. Non-material dimensions of inner life allow
individuals to be amorphous, resistant to objectivism, and liberated from
fact-based “truth.”6 In the conclusion to the essay, echoing Nietzsche, Ueda
asserts that only spirited individuals can fully partake in the creative evo-
lution of the human race. They are genuine geniuses who are entitled to
elevate social standards stained by the idiocy of the masses.7
Ueda’s refutation of positivism and populist mass culture are very much
in accord with the underlying ideology of fin-de-siècle Decadence. With
an emphasis on self-consciousness and artificiality as the way to recuperate
individuality, as Richard Gilman observes, Decadents distilled spiritual
unrest and psychic ambiguity into tangible forms of art.8 Similarly, the
ideal of art for art’s sake, credited to Théophile Gautier, placed no less
emphasis on individualism while privileging the artist’s perceptive faculty
over material reality.9 As they were in the vanguard of Symbolism and
Decadence, Mallarmé and Baudelaire also advanced Romantic subjectiv-
ity by means of artificiality and linguistic innovation. These poets stressed
that the individual faculty was of prime importance, even to the point of
endorsing a state of “narcissistic solipsism.”10
Though ideas relating to Western individuality were well-known to
both Ueda and Kafū, their semi-autobiographical kichōsha stories veer
away from vigorous subjectivity of individuals. As part of the vanguard of
anti-Naturalist literature, however, Ueda and Kafū each played an impor-
tant role in introducing Symbolism and fin-de-siècle Decadence to Japan.
Their kichōsha stories constitute a subtle degree of self-consciousness, incor-
porating a complexity that Baudelaire considered indicative of Romantic
self-aggrandizement and self-condemnation.11 In the narrative progression
of each story, the radical assertion of the self is gradually replaced with a
conceding tone of dialogues. Overall, what Ueda and Kafū project is a
complex aggregate of the returnee sensibility developed through contact
 82 / decadent literature

with Europe, disappointment with the socio-cultural condition of late

Meiji Japan, and an effort to come to terms with the local reality. In these
dialogic narratives, multiple voices turn away from the Naturalist style,
being away, above all, from the narrative technique of what Tayama Katai
called hyōmen byōsha (flat narrative). Flat narration aims to achieve a one-
sided objectification of what the narrator (and the author) perceives in
certain events. In turn, a dialogic narrative creates in the returnee sto-
ries an organic depth by virtue of heterogeneous perspectives and socio-
cultural realities that tend to be ironically absent in Naturalist narratives.
According to Mikhail Bakhtin in “Discourse in the Novel” (1935), the
linguistic merits of dialogue are as follows:

[A] particular belief system belonging to someone else, a particular point of

view on the world belonging to someone else, is used by the author because
it is highly productive, that is, it is able on the other hand to show the object
of representation in a new light [ . . . ] and on the other hand to illuminate
in a new way the expected literary horizon, that horizon against which the
particularities of the teller’s tale are perceivable.12

In the dialogic form of narrative, a particular belief system concretely

manifests in speech, either in the first or third-person narration or in the
characters’ locutions. A belief system thus expressed can differ from the
author’s own viewpoint, and precisely because of such otherness, the nar-
rative builds a discourse that “refract[s] authorial intentions.” External
ideas of the other can inhabit the narrative, having a potential to influence
authorial speech itself. In this migration of multiple voices into a single
text, a novel can introduce the other’s consciousness in diverse structures
of dialogue.13
Dialogue plays an ideologically central role in Sneers and The Vortex.
The dialogic interactions among the characters are, in tandem with the
structure of semi-autobiography, vehicles for European trends in art and
literature as well as for criticism of Meiji society and economic currents.
However, those voices do not in a democratic way accommodate differ-
ent layers of social class and consciousness. They are significant in terms
of the morphological structure of dialogism, creating a locus of inter-
subjective experience wherein the respective authors’ aesthetic credos are
made available in a nuanced way via the characters’ beliefs and locutions.
Simultaneously, the uniqueness of Sneers and The Vortex can be found in
complexities that do not yield to the affluent bourgeois taste and sensibility.
In reality, Kafū and Ueda belonged to a socially privileged upper middle
class, as their lives in the West and their subsequent positions as university
professors attest. Notwithstanding, thanks to their exposure to the West,
 decadent returnees / 83

both authors at times critique their compatriots, even those who belong to
the same socio-economic class, with sarcasm or banter. The gesture toward
dilettantism, together with the dialogic narrative, is an effort of mitigat-
ing a strong ego in order to protect their returnee sensitivities from Japan’s
mass culture and shallow progressivism. On this basis, Sneers and The
Vortex belong to a halfway place between the performed introversion and
the pride of an erudite returnee. Through exploring these two kichōsha sto-
ries, this chapter redefines the parameters of Japanese Decadent literature,
expanding that limit to the theme of dilettantism. Generally, the term
“dilettante” connotes a disposition less assertive than that of “decadent.”
Tentatively, we can posit that, being free from specific tenets or ideology,
“dilettantism” is less susceptible to influences from an external realm,
as well as more flexible and in flux. Then, the dialogic narrative form
is highly congruous with dilettante attitudes, as discursive interlocutions
play out a series of socio-cultural consciousness, rather than hammering
out staunch ideological viewpoints. Dialogic encounters between thesis
and antithesis continually deflect a decisive belief or thought and discard
a linear plot. The kichōsha texts reveal not only a dilemma in regard to
Japan’s modernity but also a bitter-sweet effort to overcome the former via
a set of heterogeneous voices. Therefore, for Kafū and Ueda the dialogic
narrative is not an arbitrary choice, but an aesthetic strategy that reflects
their phenomenological worldview. In this scheme, an individual is con-
stantly transmuted into a communal being. In this very way, Sneers and
The Vortex clearly distinguish their demonstration of individuals from that
of the postwar Meiji literary works discussed in the previous chapters.

Nagai Kafū’s Sneers: The Community of Kichōsha and Muyōsha

Nagai Kafū (1879–1959) serialized Reishō [Sneers] in Tokyō Mainichi
Shinbun during 1909 and 1910. As one of his kichōsha stories, the novel is
regarded as among his most important works.14 Without a clear plot, the
novel portrays amicable interactions among three returnees and a tradi-
tional aesthete, all of whom are in their mid-30s. In one way or another,
these men have witnessed the socio-cultural vicissitudes of urban Tokyo
since the heyday of the Meiji Restoration. Though the narrative progresses
according to a linear timeline, it is often interrupted by flashbacks to the
late Edo period, the reading of correspondence, forays into literary criti-
cism, and reflections on socio-cultural issues. This fusion of multiple liter-
ary forms has perplexed critics, leading them to wonder whether the work
should be read primarily as social criticism or as fiction. In his influential
Kafū the Scribbler (1965), Edward Seidensticker is critical of Sneers, judging
it to be considerably less than a serious work.15 Notwithstanding this view,
 84 / decadent literature

critics such as Stephen Snyder and Rachael Hutchinson have considered

Kafū’s kichōsha stories as intentional affronts to serious cultural criticism,
and therefore they are underpinned by the author’s agonistic experience
of modernity and his view of Japan and the West as radically dualistic.16
Stylistically, too, as Yoshida Seiichi states, the sanbunshi style (poetic prose
writing) reveals Kafū’s indignation at the mental backwardness of Meiji
society that “mimic[s] the West.”17 By stepping out of the trend of contem-
porary prose fiction, the eclectic style of the narrative itself thus embodies
the author’s self-consciousness as a returnee.
Kafū’s kichōsha stories tend to be tinged with a bitterness that reflects
the author’s frustration with Meiji Japan. In his view, though wrong to
abandon Edo culture, the country has inadequately adopted Western civi-
lization due to a lack of holistic insight to the indigenous legacies. His
sentiment goes beyond romantic nostalgia, manifesting rather, as Isoda
Kōichi describes it, a grudge against both the socio-cultural progress and
the backwardness that coexisted in Meiji society. Further, in Kafū’s view,
Meiji civilization is damnable because it not only destroyed indigenous
culture but also sustained a feudalistic ancien régime without giving credit
to individualism.18 As a kichōsha, he experiences a complicated unsettled
identity, and for this reason, he can make no genuine commitment to either
epoch but reveals only the excess of self-consciousness through sarcasm,
nostalgia, and self-pity. But he was far from the only writer beset by these
sentiments, as many returnee intellectuals of the late Meiji period expe-
rienced a similar psychological deadlock. For both Kafū and Ueda, early
twentieth-century Japan appeared a pathetic imitation of the West, with
no clear idea about how to construct its own viable culture and identity.
Kafū’s immersion in the United States and France inevitably revealed Meiji
Japan as hovering between tenacious feudalism and material civilization.
As is widely known, Kafū chose a drastic remedy by designing a regressive
and downward career path in praise of Edo’s gesaku (trivial work) writing
and decadent life in the demi-monde.
Thanks to his views on Meiji Japan developed during his five-year
sojourn in the United States and France, Kafū expresses a sense of frus-
tration that goes beyond a critique of East (Japan) and West (Europe) as
diametrically opposed.19 His complex views on the West and Japan are, as
Komori Yōichi states, a sign of an internal conflict typical of a privileged
kichōsha. This psychological complexity challenges his identity by forcing
him to suppress his own Japanese or Asian self in exchange for holding on
to the West he so admired. Simultaneously, the Westernization of the self
(that of the author and of his protagonists) entails a process of internal-
izing the Western gaze.20 Caught in this gaze, Kafū is forced to look at
himself and his Japanese compatriots, for example, in Julia Kristeva’s term,
 decadent returnees / 85

as an abject, and thus he needs to undermine his Asian self. With this
ontological scheme, Kafū’s kichōsha stories set forth the ideal of “datsua
nyūō” (“departure from Asia and an approach to the West”)—an expe-
dient political motto that describes the movement away from feudalistic
backwardness as entailing a move to the West in order to build a modern-
ized nation. To shore up this logic, Kafū casts a disdainful gaze (bubetsu no
manazashi) on Japan and Asia at large.21
It is well-known that Kafū’s path entailed indulging in Edo eroticism
and gesaku writing. For his self-definition as an erotic/trivial writer, he
is considered decadent. His persona goes against the grain of contempo-
raneity, accentuated by his identity that subverts the privilege of being a
returnee intellectual. In reality, he enjoyed an elite academic career, hav-
ing gained tenure at Keiō University where he founded the literary jour-
nal Mita bungaku [Mita Literature]. On the other hand, in private, he
pursued a radical individualism such that he married twice but saw both
marriages crumble. His philosophy of “shison muyō” (“the uselessness of
my offspring”) resonates with that of fin-de-siècle Decadents who were
determined to be the last in their line, at “the end of [their] lineage, [. . .]
[and its] culmination and fulfillment.”22 In the Japanese context, Kafū’s
attitude clearly belongs to what Karaki Junzō calls the self-consciousness
of muyōsha (useless man) in the genealogy of Ariwara no Narihira in The
Tale of Ise.23 Like Narihira, who stepped out of mainstream politics, Kafū
turned decisively away from the mainstream of literary circles, in order
to demonstrate himself literally useless. In a short essay titled “Hanabi”
[Fireworks] (1919) published in Kaizō [Reconstruction], Kafū deplores his
inability to stand up against the government’s brutality in Taigyaku jiken
[the High Treason Incident].24 On this point, he unfavorably compares
himself with Émile Zola, who had publicly denounced the injustice of the
Dreyfus affair.25 Kafū’s turn to gesaku is in accord with his non-utilitarian
philosophy, as the literary genre far from claiming social or political con-
viction focuses on frivolous and trivial matters instead.26
Published a decade earlier than “Fireworks,” Sneers predicts Kafū’s nega-
tive response to utilitarianism in contemporary society. Without a unified
narrative voice, the novel consists of a dialogic narrative and so provides
access to different dimensions of the author himself. Satō Haruo calls the
novel “gyōei sōrin gata” (a form in which different aspects of the self are
dissected and presented in narrative), pointing out that the novel simply
deconstructs the self and assigns each character different aspects of the
author’s alter ego.27 Such a narrative strategy echoes the psychopathology of
the schizophrenic as first described by Eugen Bleuler in 1908. Influenced
by Spinoza and Nietzsche, Bleuler categorized schizophrenia with optimism
and gradualism, rather than considering it a manifestation of a pathological
 86 / decadent literature

condition. Viewing schizophrenia as innate to the human condition, Bleuer

saw the symptoms as “an extension of normal personality” capable of pro-
viding insight into human reality.28 In light of Kafū’s self-design as a useless
man, it is not surprising that the novel lacks a clear plot and relies on verbal
interactions. Each character mirrors Kafū’s own biographical profile and
beliefs: Koyama Kiyoshi, a returnee from the United States who currently
holds the position of bank president; Yoshino Kōu, a hedonistic aesthete
and novelist who has recently returned from Europe; Nakatani Teizō, a
kyōgen playwright portrayed as a traditional dandy and the nihilistic deca-
dent of all; and Tokui Katsunosuke, head clerk of a commercial ship and a
progressive feminist who resents his father’s despotic power over him.
The four distinct voices all share a sense of being unfit for contempo-
rary Japan. The first part of the novel is dominated by Kiyoshi, who is
frustrated that his life in the mainstream commercial world is “dull and
truly boring.”29 This sense of boredom is linked to his feeling that he was
born too late, and thus missed all the excitement of the political upheaval
of the Restoration period. No longer in an age of progress, the Japan of
the post-Russo-Japanese War period offered few opportunities to latecom-
ers like Kiyoshi, who were expected only to live off the wealth of their
parents. Kiyoshi simply inherited his father’s bank, and the absence of
excitement makes him see himself as meaningless, akin to “an ornament
in an alcove.”30 He finds this privileged position useless and pathetic as
it leads only to a life of inertia.31 Such an attitude was common among
the younger generation in the postwar Meiji bourgeoisie. As latecomers
to modern Japan’s formative years, many members of this generation felt
unable to function in the new age. This disenchantment with life led them
to a sulky kind of decadent life style. Added to what we can fairly term
a sort of twisted psyche, Kiyoshi possesses a complexity typical of the
kichōcha who returned to Japan around 1910 having been exposed to the
individualism of the West.32 Doubtless, his time in the West sharpened his
aesthetic and political vision, too, and consequently the geishas in Tokyo
no longer appeal to him. Additionally, his egalitarian ideas regarding men
and women cannot be understood by his old-fashioned wife.33 Plagued
by these realities, Kiyoshi’s identity is distorted, and in this respect the
novel’s title “Sneers” appears to derive from an accumulation of disillu-
sionment and anger34: “Whenever he was disappointed with reality, his
defiance further elevated his ideals. [ . . . ] [He] anticipated a delusion from
the beginning with resolution, and continued to raise the level of his ideals
with nihilistic sneers.”35 In despair, he finds consolation in Ryūtei Rijō’s
Hasshōjin [Eight Laughing Men], a convivial Edo story of gesaku in which
friends celebrate life with no concern for pragmatic matters such as pro-
ductive labor or profit-making.36
 decadent returnees / 87

Of all the characters, Kiyoshi is the one whose biographical background

is closest to that of the author, and he is loosely situated in the hub of
the dialogic narrative. Following him, two aesthetes, Yoshino Kōu and
Nakatani Teizō, express their ideas mainly on contemporary issues in art.
Mirroring the author’s own artistic sensibilities,37 Kōu is very much in
sympathy with modernist European literature. He admires such artists as
the Goncourt brothers and Richard Wagner for their ability to cultivate
a new artistic terrain and for in-depth research into their respective cul-
tural legacies. Further, post-Resurgent Italy, on the basis of its modern
development akin to Japan, also provides Kōu with artistic inspirations.
Above all, D’Annunzio and Giovanni Pascoli of Italian Decadentism are
significant to him, as they championed Italy’s cultural glory and rejuve-
nated its national past, by inventing a new poetics.38 In admiring these
writers’ cultural topoi, which include Venice, Kōu feels nostalgia for his
own cultural root in the Fukagawa district of Tokyo.39 But like Kiyoshi,
he is aware that those European modernist writers have reinvented the
images of their homeland, and likewise he is also no longer touched by the
simplicity of indigenous Japanese art.40 He understands, therefore, that his
nostalgia for the bygone Edo period is without doubt an effect of moder-
nity. Ultimately, the feeling of the modern amounts to a sense of restless-
ness, a sort of anxiety born of coming late to socio-cultural trends toward
Westernization.
Though saturated with pessimism and melancholia, Kōu is psycho-
logically more proactive than the others in the novel. He, at least, explores
alternative ways of overcoming the sentimental malaise of modernity. In
response to Kiyoshi who cynically asks whether he would be willing to
return to pre-Meiji Japan, Kōu solemnly answers that such a return would
be blissful if only it were possible. Well aware of the irretrievability of his-
tory, Kōu likens present-day Japan to “a ship without a helm.”41 Kiyoshi
takes over Kōu’s metaphor and asks what could vigorously guide the drift-
ing ship through present uncertainties. Surprisingly, kichōsha Kōu offers
this response: “I would like firmly to say that it is our aesthetic enthusiasm
for the beauty of the homeland.”42 Kōu’s affection for indigenous tradi-
tions is not upfront nativism, but rather his interest in the past proceeds
from his reading of Western literature. To illustrate his own admiration
for old Japan, he refers to Maurice Barrès’s affection for the white birch in
his home town and Georges Rodenbach’s passion for the melancholic city
of Bruges. These European references locate Kōu halfway between locality
and universality, thanks to his sensibility to identify with foreign lands as
loci of nostalgia. On the other hand, Victor Hugo’s untitled poem, which
reads “[D]ream is fortunate, expectation is vital; how unwise the traveler’s
mind trying to run through a foreign land,” suggests the regrets the poet
 88 / decadent literature

feels for his culturally uprooted life. Likewise, the epistemic novelty Kōu
sought in the West has disconnected him from good old Japan.43 Such a
consequence is however, inevitable given the cultural uncertainties of the
present time:

Perhaps I have become capable of escaping my disillusionment and indigna-

tion with today’s world, and become able to live only in nostalgia for the
past and yearning for dreams. If it is so, I no longer need to either curse or
resent our time by engaging in pretentious polemics. If I have the time to
curse (people or society), I should serenely dream about the future that we
are headed for. If I have the energy to resent it, I should instead make an
effort to rekindle the remnants of the past, as long as possible . . . . Isn’t this
a sad mission for a poet in a transitional period?44

The passage does much to determine the novel’s pessimistic tone. Whereas
the erudite modernist Kōu accepts the linear progression of history, he
is helpless and continues to indulge in the imagined beauty of the past.
Precisely because of this ambivalence he elicits, Kōu represents the psycho-
logical paradox immanent in returnees from the West.
The narrative structure of Sneers lends itself to Bakhtin’s theory of
dialogism. Even when presented as “the other’s voice,” the narrative con-
tributes to the creation of a fictional universe controlled by the author’s
ideology. Impersonal speeches such as objective third-person statements,
too, are inextricably connected to the author’s thoughts, even when they
are flexible and ambiguous.45 The fluidity of the narrative voices in Sneers
accommodates multiple beliefs and points of view attributed to the four
characters. Although all the voices originate in the author’s self, none is
entirely in accord with the others, so that taken together they create a
condition of heteroglossia that articulates Kafū’s bitterness and pessimism.
Even so, through the dialogic synthesis of everyday speech, the author
renders his ambivalent sentiments toward ongoing modernity, at least
with an effort of mitigating his anger and despair. Though less frequently
speaking up than the other two, Nakatani and Tokui also contribute to
the nuanced worldview the author embraces. Portrayed as a self-assured
dandy (date otoko), Nakatani lives as an urban hermit who identifies him-
self as the embodiment of local Edo traditions.46 He casts a cynical gaze
on contemporary materialism, deeming it vulgar and superficial. Offering
pointed criticism akin to that of Baudelaire, Nakatani proudly retires from
mainstream society, in order to join the demi-monde among whom the
pre-modern spirit of play is still alive. Paradoxically, he feels that the arti-
ficial paradise of the demi-monde preserves an “unembellished environ-
ment” capable of affording him peace of mind.47 Choosing this lifestyle, he
takes pride in not bending to the dictates of a modern utilitarian society.
 decadent returnees / 89

This detachment from the circle of ordinary social life is central to

Nakatani’s pride and identity:

As a premise for everything, I degrade myself as much as possible, and

afterwards observe the outsider from a kind of transcendental position. In
the meantime, no matter what I encounter, there is always a sneer at the
corner of my mouth.48

As expressed through Nakatani’s voice, the cynicism and pessimism of

Sneers are not only a critique of the upward mobility of modernity, but they
also conceal a desire to transcend a material-driven world oblivious of any
playful spirit. In lieu of material reality, it is a matter of self-consciousness
that invokes a vision of the world. This is especially the case for Nakatani,
who has mastered the twisted play of the self, pursuing his personal plea-
sure (tsūkai) of self-degradation (hige) for the sole purpose of securing his
aesthetic standards. In this artificial psychic play of stepping away from
sheer pessimism and frustration, Nakatani is the most radical decadent
among the all four men.
In contrast to nihilistic Nakatani, Tokui is more socially engaged,
above all capable of offering critical comments on the feudalistic patri-
archy. Having worked on a commercial ship overseas, he has lived in a
literally interstitial space between Japan and the West, and his social criti-
cism is underpinned by this experience. As a cosmopolitan liberalist, Tokui
condemns Japan’s patriarchal household as “the enemy of the happiness
of the human race,” for it severely hampers women’s self-assurance and
dignity as individuals.49 Apparently Tokui possesses a sense of altruism
that is absent in the other three men. On similar grounds, in regretting the
lack of communication between himself and his father, Tokui views this
broken relationship not merely as a personal problem, but as one endemic
in institutional feudalism. As a member of the first Meiji generation, his
father took advantage of the economic growth after the Restoration. Now
he is satisfied with the status quo and has no sympathy for the plight of
others.50 To a similar extent, Tokui’s concern for the social well-being of
his countrymen counterbalances the regressive individualism of Kiyoshi,
Kōu, and Nakatani. Thanks to his democratic position, Tokui diversifies
the novel’s ethos, rescuing it from the pitfalls of solipsistic individualism.
In their respective roles as a decadent, a pessimist, and a self-assured her-
mit, the other three men all wish to minimize their engagement with con-
temporary society. In sharp contrast, Tokui, though his presence in the
novel is limited, plays a cathartic role in referring to the democratic aspects
of modernity.
 90 / decadent literature

Diversifying the narrative is not the only effect of the four characters.
The cultural alterity of the West itself is ingrained in the narrative, implic-
itly mobilizing their locutions detached from Meiji Japan, except in the
case of Nakatani. Cultural otherness enters the novel primarily through
Kōu, who admires European modernist literature. For him, Naturalist and
Symbolist writers are the driving force of modernity because they have cul-
tivated a future-bound perspective out of history and nostalgia. According
to Kōu, Japanese writers are oblivious of their cultural legacy and lack
a blueprint for the future. In France, he reflects, the Goncourt brothers
and Zola offer insight, by virtue of Realism, into the eighteenth century,
thereby rejuvenate their social and cultural past. In Italy, too, D’Annunzio
and Pascoli of the Decadentism drew on the artistic legacies of the country
in their effort to create a modern style of poetics.51 Reflecting on their pro-
ductive revisionism, Kōu feels that he is now in the same boat, as Japan is
on the edge of an epochal threshold that the European artists have already
crossed.
In spite of the sympathetic conversations that take place among the
four, the conclusion of Sneers reshuffles the psychological alliance of the
dialogic community. Toward the end of the story, the four men plan to
gather at a Western-style restaurant for an evening of pleasure. Kiyoshi,
Kōu, and Tokui readily keep the engagement. Nakatani, the aficionado
of Edo culture, stays away, sending instead a clown doll with a mando-
lin as his stand-in.52 His nihilistic gesture is clear in the doll, which does
deliver Nakatani’s sneer to a venue incongruent with his aesthetic credo.
The silence of the doll, however, could also be seen both as reifying the
friendship between Nakatani and the others, along with his vigorous indi-
vidualism. The presence of the doll is a symbolic answer Kafū endorses, as
it suggests Nakatani’s determination not to meddle with the others’ pre-
dilection for Western culture. Far from being vexed, the other three men
welcome Nakatani’s response not as a sign of cynicism but as a sincere con-
tribution to the event. According to Kiyoshi, the dandy friend’s absence
makes for an intriguing twist, as shown in Hasshōnin, Ryūtei Rijyō’s gesaku
story in which eight egoistic characters intermittently destroy the harmony
of chaban (a short improvised comedic play).53 In Sneers, ultimately, the
intersubjective bonds of the four men are built on mutual respect, regard-
less of the personal disposition and socio-cultural identities of each. But
fundamentally, they share a sense of being superfluous to contemporary
Japan; each, therefore, cherishes his membership in this tiny circle of
dilettantism. In the final scene, the third-person narrative stops attrib-
uting statements to individual speakers, thereby suggesting that all the
voices coalesce into a unified whole through intersubjective effects. One
of the unnamed speakers reaffirms the men’s identity as a sphere separated
 decadent returnees / 91

from the external world. The voice comments with a hint of self-pity as
follows:

It would be easy if we could think of everything in terms of pragmatism. If

the whole of society began to spend its days being interested in purposeless
chats, that would be the real decadence.54

Another unidentified voice defends their high aesthetic tastes by noting

that their indifference to mainstream social life is caused by the pragma-
tism of society itself.55 As the conclusion makes evident, Sneers represents
a dialogic community in which multiple layers of consciousness encoun-
ter each other. The community’s scope, though, is limited to contentions
within the clique itself, with no serious prospect of engaging with a society
beyond itself. In the guise of dialogue, the novel is ultimately a variant of
the I-novel, in which a self-contained narrative implicitly resists a funda-
mental transformation via an exchange with the other. The central fact
here, though, is that the West is no longer a genuine other. It inhabits the
compatriots of late Meiji Japan themselves.

From Muyōsha to Dilettante: Aestheticist Pleasure in The Vortex

Published in Kokumin Shinbun in 1910, Uzumaki [The Vortex] by Ueda
Bin (1874–1916) is considered a semi-autobiographical novella that directly
reflects the author’s life and aesthetic philosophy.56 Renowned as a polyglot
translator, critic, and professor of literature at Kyōto Imperial University,
kichōsha Ueda was an indefatigable writer. His major translations of
English, French, and Italian poetry and fiction are collected in Miotsukushi
[Channel Buoys] (1901) and Kaichōon [Sounds of Tides] (1905), and these
works attest to his unsurpassed knowledge of modern European litera-
ture.57 As one of the most influential literati and critics of the time, Ueda
introduced Symbolism, Parnassianism, and fin-de-siècle Decadence to
Japan, and his work in this regard made a significant contribution to the
modernization of Japanese literature. The Vortex, his only work of fiction,
is often regarded (as is Kafū’s Sneers) as the text most illustrative of kichōsha
sensibility and erudition. Even before his travels in the United States and
France, Kafū, five years Ueda’s junior, had already developed an interest
in Symbolist poetry thanks to the translations in Sounds of Tides. Based
on a shared interest in Symbolism and their respect for each other’s talent,
Ueda and Kafū formed a friendship that was to be an important factor in
the inception of Aestheticism in Japan.58
The Vortex presents a series of cultural commentaries on postwar Meiji
Japan and Europe, clearly reflecting Ueda’s ideal of dilettantism and his
 92 / decadent literature

anti-pragmatist take on art. Stylistically akin to the narrative of Sneers, The

Vortex builds on crisscrossing dialogues among multiple speakers. Their
heterogeneous ideas and positions in regard to the literature, music, and
social issues of the time are filtered through the perspective of the protago-
nist, Haruo, the alter ego of the author. Via dialogues, the novella loosely
takes the form of Bildungsroman in that it promotes Haruo’s spiritual
growth and reflects the cultural values with which the author identifies
himself in Meiji high society. The dialogic interactions are limited in this
closed sphere, but the speakers’ perceptions of art and cultural trends are far
from being univocal. Situated at the nexus of multiple conversations, Haruo
notices the subtle differences among people who supposedly belong to the
same socio-economic cluster. Through the dialogic experience exposed to
various ideas and beliefs, the protagonist nourishes his own intellect and
sensibility. Within the microcosm of dialogues, the novella sustains an
amicable narrative tone, sympathy among the characters, a hint of idle-
ness, and a sense of being immersed in modernity. This overarching psyche
is rendered through a reinvention of f ȇte galante, the eighteenth-century
ambience prevalent in Rococo aesthetics. The author projects this mood
into the imagined community of dialogues with a reference to Antoine
Watteau’s painting, The Embarkation for Cythera (1717).59 As if restaging
its idle and elegant tone, The Vortex does without a clear plot and unfolds
its narrative through impressions, sentiments, and unrestrained opinions.
Distinctively different from Kafū’s cynicism, however, these narrative ele-
ments resuscitate another picture of the kichōsha intellectual community.
When juxtaposed, the optimistic dilettantism of The Vortex can be seen as
compensating for the pessimism saturating Sneers.
The prologue of The Vortex is presented through a third-person narrator,
who raises a question as to what dilettantism (kyōraku shugi) actually means.
The entire story is designed to explore possible answers to this question,
and accordingly each chapter takes the form of a vignette in which social
and cultural issues are discussed. At the onset of the story, the narrative
touches on Haruo’s upbringing, which was greatly influenced by Western
literature and music. His childhood years took place when Japan was at
the epochal threshold, as the Edo culture was vanishing and the arrival
of the new epoch was readily felt. Haruo’s upbringing was both socially
and culturally privileged, thanks to his grandfather, a former high official
of the Edo Shognate who had traveled to France, Germany, and Russia
in that capacity.60 This affluent background nurtured his admiration for
foreign cultures through contact with splendid artifacts, concretely figured
as a British clock and a Venetian mirror.61 These tangible objects fossilize
the distant past and are used to teach him a chain of ceaseless mutations
in all phenomenal worlds—a concept Ueda borrows from Heraclitus’s
 decadent returnees / 93

Panta Rhei.62 In the reinvention of f ȇte galante, The Vortex confronts this
universal law and proposes the principle of impermanence as shaping the
aesthetic sensibility of the protagonist who wishes to experience all kinds
of “senses, thoughts, emotions” (kankaku, shisō, kanjō) in his lifetime.63
Given the evanescence of impressions and perceptions, human minds are,
he says, like a “vortex” in which sensations and emotions are “mesmeriz-
ingly spinning.”64 All human beings are subject to the rigid Panta Rhei,
and Haruo believes that a meaningful life is possible only by savoring the
transient nature of sensations as often as possible. His idea echoes a famous
passage from Walter Pater’s “Conclusion” in The Renaissance (1873), a text
Ueda knew well: “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to main-
tain this ecstasy, is success in life.”65 This statement expresses in shorthand
Pater’s belief that the excitement and the immediacy of sensations are the
ultimate goals of aesthetic experience.66 Haruo’s dilettantism is congruent
with Pater’s aesthetic philosophy, as both locate the purpose of life in the
freshness of experience for its own ends. The awareness of each fleeting
moment attests to Ueda’s optimism inasmuch as the writer chooses future-
bound empiricism.67
In an early instance of contemplation, Haruo concludes that genuine
dilettantism entails labor—an endeavor to boost one’s knowledge, an
interest in cultural novelty, and an ability to distinguish between genuine
and inauthentic values. In the context of the uncertainty Haruo is living
in, the life philosophy of dilettantism saves him from falling victim to a
deep skepticism and positively transforms a wide range of experiences into
pleasure.68 In this process, dilettantism in The Vortex entails a pedagogic
process through which Haruo participates in the circle of cultural activi-
ties not only physically but also in a highly cognitive way. Necessary labor
in his view is not artisan-like toil but a kind of play that belongs to a realm
halfway between sensibility and intellect. Such subtlety cannot be crystal-
ized by a theory after all, so that this attitude is closely related to that of
Pater who shuns the theorization of aesthetic experience to which the nar-
rative often alludes.
As Bakhtin’s theory of dialogic narrative holds, the stylistic features
of The Vortex allow the author to incorporate multiple spectrums of con-
sciousness within the context of Meiji high society. Though overall the
novel foregrounds convivial ambience, at times the author injects the
straightforward voice of cultural criticism. For example, Haruo considers
the Meiji reformation of education to be an utter failure that succeeded
only in divorcing the people from their indigenous cultural traditions.
Democracy, too, has wrought negative effects and undermined the genu-
ine spirit of individualism. Its achievement consists of disclosing the fact
that the politics is a sphere of mediocrity and indolence.69 Borrowing
 94 / decadent literature

Nietzsche’s words, Haruo laments that Meiji society has been given over to
the mentality of the masses. Further, given that society consists of tedious
regulations, that structure obstructs those who are artistically talented
from becoming Übermensch.70 In such a way, the narrative often reminds
us of the difference between artistry and mass mediocrity. In Haruo’s view,
the contemporary world is a jumble of wheat and tares to the extent that
intelligent individuals have no choice but to rely only on their own senso-
rial faculty. Though prevented from using their intellect to the fullest, aes-
thetes can at least turn to dilettantism as a last resort because it “expand[s]
the life of the self (jiko no seimei), amplify[ing] and intensify[ing] every
precious second.”71 With this potential, Haruo asserts that arts and let-
ters is the only discipline capable of attracting genuine dilettantes.72 Here,
once again, Ueda implicitly invokes Pater by introducing Victor Hugo’s
words as cited in the “Conclusion” of The Renaissance: “[W]e are all under
sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve [ . . . ]. We, humans,
live in an interval before the ultimatum of death, and ‘the wisest’ people
spend this period in high passion [ . . . ] in art and poetry.” 73
With these references to Pater’s aesthetic credo, The Vortex weaves a
modernist patchwork of individual ideas, reflections, and sensations. After
the first few chapters, the narrative shifts its focus from Haruo’s reflec-
tion on dilettantism to a series of conversations. In an effort to refine his
understanding of dilettantism, Haruo listens attentively to each opinion
and occasionally states his own ideas. The first conversations take place
during a duck-hunting expedition organized by Haruo’s friend Murakami.
One of the guests, Miura, a returnee from Europe, displays a shallow cul-
tural essentialism and naïveté. As the son of a banker, he studied in Britain
for many years and firmly believes in Western superiority. Slightly con-
descending, he often draws on a simple dichotomy between East (Japan)
and West, exaggerating for instance the “Japanese spirit or the theory of
traditional chivalry.”74 According to Miura, an eclectic style is the only
option available to Japanese music because authentic Western musical
forms are too difficult for Japanese musicians to imitate. But this essen-
tialist idea does not irritate Haruo because he considers it the product of
a simple mind typical of the “masses” (the “bokugun,” or herd, as Haruo
puts it) who are proud of erudition but blindly follow any lead with little
or no critical reflection.75 Similarly, another guest, Madam Nomura, who
is married to a member of the House of Peers, represents a decaying female
dandyism. Although she has painted her face with cosmetics, she has not
made up her neck, which reveals her parvenu status as an aesthete.76 She
talks in progressive terms, emphasizing the importance of education for
girls, especially that of English. But her opinion is only a token of an elit-
ism founded on her despair in regard to Japan’s own literature and cultural
 decadent returnees / 95

legacy, which she views as useless and unhealthy. In his soliloquy, Haruo
shrugs this off, noting that Madam Nomura’s attitude is ubiquitous among
society women who are overly self-conscious of their own erudition and
progressiveness.
Given their shallowness, Miura and Madam Nomura provide a useful
counterpoint to Haruo’s own socio-cultural views. Instead of despairing
them as uptight and ill-informed, for instance, Haruo sees Miura’s eclecti-
cism as feasible for Japanese art, politics, and social policy. As Haruo listens
attentively, their ideas impact his own thinking in regard to whether Japan
should hold firmly to its traditions or let Western civilization override
indigenous cultural styles. It is a question that is difficult to answer in the
age of cultural fluidity. At this early point, Haruo decides not to take any
single position but to choose the attitude of a bystander (bōkan no taido),
“oscillat[ing] between the old and the new (cultures) like a pendulum.”77
To deter those gathered from reaching a hasty conclusion, Koike, a chem-
istry graduate, adds a scientific viewpoint. He refutes Miura’s argument
according to which the way forward is to create an eclectic form of national
music (kokumin ongaku), arguing that a harmonious fusion of Japanese
and Western music is impossible in terms of basic structure. Instead, he
proposes that Japan continue to import Western music simply as a foreign
art form. Here, Murakami, the host of the party, intercedes for Miura
with Koike, in an attempt to modify Koike’s positivistic idea. Murakami
is against the recent trends in which scientific methods underlie art forms,
as exemplified by the government’s outrageous plan to alphabetize the
Japanese language. According to Murakami, the plan is analogous to the
destruction of native English effected by the Norman Conquest.78 This
reference highlights the threat presented by hegemonic power by point-
ing directly at the potential annihilation of Japan’s indigenous cultural
forms.79
Notwithstanding the multiple viewpoints expressed in these conver-
sations, Haruo remains at the hub of the self-reflexive narrative. And
though he does listen to the others, at the same time, Haruo does not
relinquish his general beliefs. Subsumed in the pedagogical architecture
of the Bildungsroman, all the interlocutions are in this sense implicitly
at Haruo’s disposal. Whereas each voice displays its own distinctive ideas
and beliefs, the narrative still nurtures a communal wholeness, precisely
because the story is held together by the common historical conscious-
ness of postwar Meiji Japan in transition. Unlike melancholic Kiyoshi or
Kōu in Sneers, Haruo presents himself as a positive modernist who readily
accepts the end of the Tokugawa period.80 Instead of lamenting the pres-
ent time as a sorrowful departure from the past, he perceives the present
as the transitional phase at which new veins of human knowledge fuse
 96 / decadent literature

with the old. Accordingly, even science appears to him not a matter of
sheer objectivism but a complement to the imagination. To illustrate the
point, Koike talks about the light-weight engines that enable aircraft to fly
at high speeds. In response, Haruo notes that Leonardo Da Vinci origi-
nated the idea of aviation, with a faith in the ability of humans to fly and
the prediction that “wings will surely come out [of the human body].”81
The prediction for the future is a byproduct of imagination and scientific
technology, such that the episode implicitly underpins Haruo’s position
wherein he dismisses neither the old nor the new. In The Vortex and other
works, the author is clearly frustrated by the absence of artistic gaiety in
Meiji Japan. Nonetheless, he, through Haruo’s voice, still gives full credit
to art, so much so that The Vortex is his plea for a collective recognition
of human sensibility in and for art. Therefore, the story is motivated by
Ueda’s disenchantment with Japan, the country where even artists do not
see themselves as spiritual patricians.82
To offset this frustration, the second half of the novella changes the
narrative mood and moves on to construct a dialogic communal space
wherein the focus is given exclusively to art. This psychological trajectory
is evident in Chapters 27 to 36 in which the characters interact during
the concert given by a symphonic orchestra. In this sequence, criticisms
and arguments are set aside and give ways to good fellowship and music.
In Haruo’s eyes, on this occasion, even Madam Nomura, who attends the
concert for no other reason than to socialize, appears perfect, thanks to her
gaiety, flamboyant Western-style dress, perfume, and whispering voice,
all of which contribute to the seductive ambience of the evening.83 This
positive re-assessment of Madam Nomura triggers a subtle shift in the dia-
logues. As discussed earlier, Haruo (as well as the author and the narrator)
laments the decline of art understood as the domain of lofty individuals,
such that an alternative scheme must be put in place for the contemporary
art scene—this is precisely the semantic goal of The Vortex. Unlike nine-
teenth-century Europe in which “total art” (sōgō geijutsu) boasted of its own
grandeur and culminated in the operatic work of Wagner and D’Annunzio,
there is no such space in the mass culture-driven Japan of the early twen-
tieth century.84 Combining script, music, and visual effects on stage, total
art was capable of uniting the spectators. In Japan, the kabuki plays of the
Tokugawa period once had a comparable effect on the cultural scene. In
late Meiji Japan, though, this theatrical art form had reached an impasse.
Given the contemporary cultural climate, if art itself cannot be reinvented,
there remains the possibility of inventing audiences who better appreciate
it. In this underpinning, in the guise of Haruo’s Bildungsroman, the narra-
tive illustrates a process whereby art opens an intersubjective space wherein
people are entirely engrossed. Chapters 30 to 36 highlight this magical
 decadent returnees / 97

moment, capturing the climax of the concert during which the audience
becomes rapturous. Haruo himself experiences feelings of bliss, especially
when post-Romantic works are played one after another: Georges Bizet’s
L’arlesienne, Gustave Charpentier’s Impressions d’Italie, and Carl Maria von
Weber’s Der Freischütz, as well as excerpts from operas, Giuseppe Verdi’s
Rigoletto, and Wilhelm Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. As the pro-
gram proceeds, Haruo comes to realize that the music is making an impact
on the entire audience:“The wave of musical sound” captivates them, and
“the greatest pleasure of ‘harmony’” overwhelms all those in attendance. In
commenting on this sense of bliss, Haruo asserts that modern art tends to
take the form of music, and the pleasure it transmits transcends time and
space.85 With this claim, music in The Vortex is given a unique, privileged
position over other art forms. Unmediated by tangible objects, music,
through its amorphousness, communicates with the audience collectively,
and directly, without any barriers. Through the beauty immanent in “har-
mony” (harumoniya), Haruo claims that music “emancipates one’s sub-
jectivity,” which is normally compartmentalized in individual existence
(jinkaku to iu rōgoku). As one of the audience, he is overwhelmed by the
pleasure of the sounds and comes to a conclusion: Whereas human beings
are defined by the limits of flesh and will, by virtue of harmony, individu-
als can break through that separation and so achieve a collective unity.86
The statement may sound dramatically hyperbolic. However, it announces
Haruo’s new perspective and thus closes the gap that had hitherto existed
between his aesthete self and the anonymous masses.
In the subsequent chapters, an intersubjective experience is extended
to a number of dialogues on modern literature. Despite their different
professional backgrounds, Haruo, Nagata, and Koike all share sympathy
for the European modernists. Above all, their conversation on Stendhal’s
The Red and the Black intrigues Haruo, because of its protagonist Julien
Sorel, a typical Übermensch capable of pleasure, empiricism, and pas-
sion.87 Nagata suggests that the hero’s balanced life entails a keen sense
of timing. To illustrate the point further, he alludes to Robert Browning’s
reference to Hippocrates’s aphorism, “ars longa, vita brevis.”88 According
to Browning’s poem, “The Statue and the Bust,” Duke Ferdinando and
Madam Riccardi fall in love at first sight. But the potential lovers do
not have the courage to consummate their love even as the decades pass.
Instead of advancing the relationship, they create a statue and a bust fig-
ure of themselves, in a gesture that commemorates their bygone youth.
The episode is an allegory about the brevity of life, and as such it high-
lights the idiocy of wasting time in conventional morality. With this
example, Nagata concludes that a weak-willed mind is a sin even when
the purpose of such a mind is moral.89 The intrepid will for action is
 98 / decadent literature

of didactic importance in Haruo’s dilettantism: “Genuine dilettantism,

proactive dilettantism means to dive into the vortex of life, to swim that
raging wave with overarm strokes.”90
Discussions on European literature with the others are eye-opening to
Haruo, who is most concerned with a cognitive experience of art. Now
what the dialogues teach him is the importance of maintaining an equi-
librium between contemplation (meisō) and energetic labor (rikigyō). He is
surprised at the fact that he, a man of letters, learns a life philosophy from
Nagata, an expert in commercial and administrative law. This unexpected
dialogue reminds Haruo of the words of Maurice Barrès:

Wise individuals know only a kind of dialogue. It is a dialogue between two

“selves.” It is a dialogue between a transient “self” of the present moment
and the genuine “self ” achieved by ceaseless efforts.91

The passage rescues Haruo from solipsism, causing him to realize that life
entails constant stimulations from others. To conclude the novella, the
narrative quickly moves to the epilogue, which hints at Haruo’s vita nova.
Intuitively, he feels that the last few days of the duck-hunting party and
the concert have changed his life, and expects that he will soon face “the
examination of life.”92 What prompts this change is Natsuko, a beautiful
girl who accompanied him during the last three days at the party and the
concert, though hardly present in the narrative. Haruo is, however, keenly
aware that her presence has enriched each moment for him in an intersub-
jective way:

Natsuko, who was immersed in the reflecting light of the shining pond,
standing beside the fountain of Murakami’s garden. Natsuko, with whom
I dreamt about a view of Italy in Charpentier’s piece, with whom I felt poi-
gnant love in Tristan and Isolde and Drdla’s serenade . . . .93

The Vortex closes with an allusion to the delightful future they will share.
In the very last line of the novella, Haruo recalls how Fabrice del Dongo,
the protagonist of Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, feels like a debu-
tante when he joins the Battle of Waterloo.94 Here, once again, the nar-
rative underpins the author’s modernist optimism, which is drawn from
taking pleasure in art and human reality bent to the law of Panta Rhei.
Given this inescapable reality, there is nothing a person can do but savor
every fleeting second to share whatever pleasure it affords with his or her
contemporaries. Such an unrestrained attitude mitigates the frustration
that Haruo (and the author) feels about Meiji Japan, and in turn extends
the horizon of cultural experience. In the journey to this conclusion, the
 decadent returnees / 99

self-assured dilettante Haruo tackles solipsism, opening himself to oth-

ers via dialogue and music. Where Sneers piles up cynicism and restless-
ness, The Vortex succeeds in diminishing them, and instead imagines what
individual sensibilities can do in the cultural era to come. This positive
mindset is the driving force of what Ueda considers “dilettantism.” To
fully understand the novella, along with Bakhtin’s sociological model of
heteroglossia, an effective guide can be found, for example, in Merleau-
Ponty’s plurality model of interlocution. Though lengthy, a passage from
“The Phenomenology of Perception” (1945) is worth quoting here :

In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person

and myself a common ground; my thought and his are interwoven into a
single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by
the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation
of which neither of us is the creator. We have here a dual being, where the
other is for me no longer a mere bit of behaviour in my transcendental field,
nor I in his; we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity.
Our perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist through a com-
mon world. In the present dialogue, I am freed from myself, for the other
person’s thoughts are certainly his; they are not of my making, though I do
grasp them the moment they come into being, or even anticipate them. And
indeed, the objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from
me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed, so that at the same time that I
lend him thoughts, he reciprocates by making me think too.95

The reciprocity sketched out by Merleau-Ponty may appear idealistic and

pacifistic. It is precisely the point Ueda is making in The Vortex. Similar
to Sneers, the novella also laments the cultural oblivion of Meiji Japan, a
time during which Japan had not yet fully absorbed Western art forms. As
exemplified by Miura’s voice, some of the literati essentialized the dichot-
omy between East and West.96 To depart from this nativist obsession, as a
proud kichōsha and aesthete, Ueda engineers a borderless sensibility via an
appreciation of literature and music. As we have seen, The Vortex includes
some seminal passages and episodes from European sources; therefore, the
raison d’être of the text exceeds the ordinary parameters of autobiography,
and in fact enlightens Japanese readers by introducing them to foreign art
as an asset of cultural modernity. For this very reason, the novella is a van-
guard project in the trajectory of Japanese literary modernism.
To involve others in aesthetic pleasure, the narrative tends—as suggested
by the reference to The Embarkation for Cythera—to take the form of an
irenic play highly congruent with the space of the imagination discussed
by such critics as Wolfgang Iser and Mihai I. Spariosu. On the assumption
that literature can offer a potent way to transcend an immediate historical
 100 / decadent literature

context, the medium can create a locus of play in which alternative human
values operate to create a utopic space. Those values may be incommen-
surate with objective reality, even as they are expressed through literary
language.97 Likewise, The Vortex is not exclusively concerned with the
socio-historical reality. Set between the fading Edo and flamboyant Meiji
periods, the narrative pictures Japan’s acculturation as an irenic process.
In this scheme, the West is not foreign but subject to the author’s roman-
tic admiration, a stimulant that heightens the longing for “things afar,
things in the past” (tōku hedatta mono, harukana mono).98 This admiration
for the West counterpoints any nativism and shares its openness with the
contemporary Pan no kai (the Group of Pan).99 By implicitly renouncing
indigenous traditions, Ueda rejects that romantic impulse and defends the
country’s pliability regarding foreign cultures.100 This ability to accommo-
date heterogeneity runs through the narrative, so that The Vortex not only
escapes the pessimism displayed in Sneers but also participates in building
a new cultural space by reinventing the audience.

* * *

As returnees from Europe, Kafū and Ueda share a background that affords
them a privileged experience of art. Simultaneously, their sensitivity sug-
gests that they find the absence of both cultural maturity and cultural
gaiety in Meiji Japan to be vexing. It is worth noting that both Kōu of
Sneers and Haruo of The Vortex take refuge in a complex love for both
antiquarian Edo and modern Europe. Kōu is trapped in melancholia and
sees the epoch as a sorrowful period of transition during which the beauty
of the local past is fading away. In contrast, Haruo sees the possibility of
transforming the pathos into a future-bound will in order to cultivate his
own experience of modernity. In Sneers, the dialogues create a microcosm
of community so as to separate the interlocutors from the world outside.
Though The Vortex is morphologically similar to Sneers, the dialogues of
the novella connect each participant while opening their views to the oth-
ers’. These differences in the psychic trajectories perhaps reflect the tem-
peraments of both authors. Redemption is more on the side of Ueda, who
employs art as a new way to reconcile kichōcha erudition with the Meiji
culture that by and large caters to the masses.
In terms of narrative structure, theme, and motif, Sneers and The Vortex
are representative works of Aestheticism in the post-Russo-Japanese War
period. Whether or not the authors were aware of it, these stories are deeply
concerned with a theme prevalent in modern Japanese literature: the par-
ticularity and universality of the self.101 Kichōsha Kafū and Ueda under-
stood well enough the impossibility of turning away from modernity to
 decadent returnees / 101

embrace instead the fading world of Edo Japan. In the first instance, this
historical context allows both works to be called decadent, even though
neither deals with excessive indulgence or neglect of labor. In the second
instance, their main concern manifests in a gentle transition to dilettan-
tism, a playful psychic game developed out of the languid feeling of being
a latecomer to the Meiji Restoration. Whether rooted in psychological
regression or in dilettantism, the play of the self in Sneers and The Vortex
constitutes an effort on the part of each author to mitigate his own frus-
tration with his own compatriots. Ultimately, the dialogic narratives are a
variant of les paradis artificiels made possible through the dual processes
involved in the dispossession and requisition of the self. In this cultural
economy, the self does not belong exclusively to an individual. For kichōsha
Kafū and Ueda, modernity means an endless struggle with the masses. In
order to come to terms with their uneasiness, the modernist authors must
assume the attitude of a bystander who tacitly observes the reality of “now”
and dissimulate their genuine ideals.
 Ch a p t e r Fou r
Ta ishō M a l a ise a s D ec ade nc e :
Se l f -R e c lusion a n d Cr e at i v e L a b or
i n Satō H a ruo’s A PA S T O R A L S P L E E N a n d
Ta n i z a k i Ju n’ic h i rō’s A F O O L’S L OV E

One of the most significant ideas that the writers of Taishō Decadence
drew from fin-de-siècle Decadence was the primacy of artificiality over
nature. The European appraisal of artificiality involves an intricate inter-
play between nature and human dexterity, drawing it from a dialectic
between the mature civilization and the barbaric.1 The primacy of artifici-
ality is a notable departure from Romanticism wherein Nature is the opti-
mal source of art and human subjectivity. In Decadence, the primacy of
subjective worldview subsists, but it goes hand in hand with concrete labor
beyond pure imagination and fascination with Nature. A notable case is
readily available in Baudelaire’s concept of paradis artificiels (artificial par-
adise). Through this artistic scheme, the poet crafted an ideal condition
of individuality through the use of narcotic substances. For example, the
artificial effect of morphine and wine fueled his hallucination and dream,
and lead to enhance his faculty of the imagination proper. In comparison
with the previous age of Romanticism, as Jean Pierrot states, fin-de-siècle
Decadents were keen to incorporate such substances into their aesthetic
program in the quest for hitherto unknown sensations and pleasure.2 By
pushing the human imagination to new limits, the Decadents overtly repu-
diated the classical notion of art as an imitation of life and stood against
Romanticism, too, in presenting an anti-natural view of the universe.3
Baudelaire proposed his idea of artificial paradise about 20 years before
the heyday of fin-de-siècle Decadence. The concept became a powerful
reference to the movement as its proponents zealously explored an alterna-
tive realm from within the modern world. In cleaving to an individual
paradise, the Decadents at least in part compensated themselves for their
disenchantment with the norms of a bourgeois-centered social reality.
 104 / decadent literature

For the writers of Taishō Decadence, “Decadence” was no longer a mere

epithet that could be sprinkled on their writing or a superficial style imi-
tated through affecting a life of dissipation. Unlike the Naturalist I-novel
writers of the previous decade, Taishō Decadents were well-versed in the
works of fin-de-siècle Decadents and had drawn on them to nourish their
own literary style. Above all, the artistic potential of an artificial paradise
dovetailed with their own bitter-sweet experience of Japan’s modernity and
helped them to unleash a literary imagination beyond indigenous conven-
tions. In Baudelaire’s formulation, an artificial paradise is at the poet’s
disposal, a creative scheme with the mission of enhancing the self. Be it
wine or hashish, the narcotic substance is employed to trigger an out-of-
this-world hallucination, to take the artist out of mundane reality, and to
galvanize the dormant realm of unconsciousness.4 In Taishō Japan, such
ingenious artistic escapism had great appeal for writers. Despite an increas-
ingly growing material culture, the conservative patriarchy and pragma-
tism in social life had continued to suffocate people. This dichotomy in
regard to everyday experience is prevalent especially in portrayals of dis-
integrated individuals suffering from psychopathological symptoms such
as hysteria, obsession, or hypochondria, or even from the ocular disorder
of seeing a doppelgänger. These forms of sickness can also be laid at the
door of Japan’s experience of the West, which discursively constructed
romantic Occidentalism, together with anxieties about the cultural other.
For example, the representative psyche of the epoch culminated in the
suicide of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, who could not overcome “a vague sense
of anxiety” (bonyarishita fuan) transacted from living as a writer during
this time of cultural flux.5 Closely intertwined with such epochal moods,
Taishō Decadence, as a variant of Japanese literary modernism, became a
locus for writers’ attempts to negotiate between the rise of a new material
culture and the psycho-somatic limit of individuals. As ways to enhance
sensory pleasure, writers were drawn to both aesthetically pleasing objects
and technological inventions. However, their temperaments were anti-
thetical to those of aggressive urban modernity. According to Kawamoto
Saburō, the sensibility typical of the Taishō Decadents was introverted,
reflecting their nature of being subtle individuals (awai kojin) who tend
to take pleasure in a private sanctuary. In that personal artificial paradise,
those writers’ decadent tendencies (kakō shikō) find safety and respite, in
opposition to the upward mobility (jōshō shikō) of the social climbers.6
To borrow Kawamoto’s dualism, Den’en no yūutsu: aruiwa yameru sōbi [A
Pastoral Spleen: Or the Sick Rose] (1919)7 by Satō Haruo (1892–1964)
represents the sensibility of a subtle individual whose wish is to cultivate a
private sphere as an alternative to a tumultuous urban life. Its poetic nar-
rative portrays the psychic world of a neurotic artist who retreats to a rural
 taishō malaise as decadence / 105

hermitage to recover from mental fatigue. On the other hand, Chijin no ai

[A Fool’s Love] (1924)8 by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886–1965), who shared
a complicated friendship with Satō, depicts the toil of an urban engineer
who casts a girl in a Pygmalion fantasy, triggered by his fascination with the
West. Both stories reveal a subtle individualism in their respective versions
of artificial paradise, portraying a modern man who invests a great deal of
labor, financial expenditure, and mental energy. Before writing A Fool’s
Love, Tanizaki was already experimenting with the Pygmalion theme of
an artificial paradise in such works as Shisei [The Tatooer] (1910) and Aoi
hana [Aguri] (1922). In Hirotsu Kazuo’s assessment, despite their stylistic
differences, both Satō and Tanizaki represent the Taishō spirit, as each
is equally concerned with “sensation, the modern degeneration of nerve,
[and] psychopathological illusion” (kankaku, shinkei no kindaiteki taihai,
byōteki gensō).9 Neither writer is interested in a mimetic portrayal of real-
ity, but instead each implicitly apotheosizes fin-de-siècle Decadents such
as Wilde, Huysmans, and Poe. Equally, Satō and Tanizaki reject utilitarian
mentalities and a pragmatic use of art, and in this sense clearly belong to
the genealogy of European Decadents. These Taishō writers are no longer
willing to invest energy in seeking a point of reconciliation between their
art and mass culture, as in the work of Ueda Bin, for example. Taishō
Decadence surely holds the line against the aesthetic taste associated with
collective social ideals. Galvanized by the growing presence of the West,
Decadent Taishō writers manifest a qualitative shift from the works of
the post-Russo-Japanese War period. Symbolized by an artificial para-
dise, Taishō Decadence is a proactive attempt to both reinvent a realm of
individuals and retain the epochal malaise intact as an artistic resource.
Infatuated with the demonic force present in European Decadence, Taishō
Decadence mastered the art of psychological retrogression, and ultimately
became a significant cornerstone of twentieth-century Japanese Decadent
literature.

The Failed Dream of Artificial Paradise: Satō’s Pastoral Spleen

Satō Haruo’s novella, A Pastoral Spleen (1920),10 is a testament to the
fact that Taishō Decadence was born largely of Japan’s late reception of
Romanticism and fin-de-siècle Decadence. The worldview of the novella
reflects the neurotic sensibility prevalent in the poetics of Goethe, Blake,
and Poe, and likewise in Decadent novels such as Flaubert’s Salammbȏ
and D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death.11 Most notably, the novella
orchestrates the images, the poetic dictum, and the overall ambience of
Baudelairean spleen. In regard to the collage-like narrative of A Pastoral
Spleen, Yasuda Yojūrō of the Japan Romantic School commented that the
 106 / decadent literature

novella is a discursive showcase of artistic excesses that cannot be sub-

sumed under the paradigm or genealogy of any previous aesthetics.12 Given
Yasuda’s reputation as a writer of linguistic excess, his comment points to
the novella as chaotic insights into modern man that attempt “a perfect sci-
entific study on poets” (kanpekina kagakuteki shijinron).13 Although Yasuda
does not articulate what the core of such a scientific study might be, the
reader can hardly overlook the fact that A Pastoral Spleen explores the inner
struggle of the protagonist who throws himself into the dialectic between
nature and the artificiality of art. The novella’s central theme is a diabolical
wager of the urban self, as portrayed in the neurotic protagonist’s empirical
immersion in rural life. In a natural environment, his solipsistic vision as
an artist is constantly challenged until the point he utterly exhausts him-
self. In this thematic approach to modernity, Satō draws an unmistakable
analogy between A Pastoral Spleen and Goethe’s Faust. Toward the end of
the story, the protagonist receives an omen-like message from his inner
Mephistopheles. It should be remembered that Mephistopheles derides
Faust for his exhaustion, observing Faust’s liaison with Gretchen that ends
in tragedy.14 Mephistopheles’s voice suggests the dangers of experiment-
ing with one’s life, warning against indulging a short-sighted daringness
that is in opposition to his ontological reality. In this regard, Kawamura
Masatoshi is correct to note that the protagonist is Satō’s alter ego in that
the author himself had effected an escape from urban life. The reader can
surmise that the experimentation was not a failure but a painstakingly pro-
ductive, as the collage-like narrative metaphorically reveals that his vision
penetrates not nature but art itself.15
A Pastoral Spleen is loosely based on Satō’s biographical account of
his youth, during which he spent a brief period (May to December in
1916) living in the village of Nakasato in the Kanagawa prefecture. He
purchased about 1,500 tsubo (approximately 1.2 acres) of hilly land for a
secluded life with his lover Kawaji Utako, an actress with the Geijutsuza
Company, along with two dogs and a cat.16 Though the novella appears
to cover several months of these pastoral days, it offers nothing explic-
itly factual or an objective record of the period. Instead, the narrative
places great emphasis on sensory perception, nerve, and emotion in the
protagonist.17 In A Pastoral Spleen, the rustic residence features an ironic
locus dramatis. At the beginning of the story, the house is introduced as
a rural hermitage, a concrete physical version of an artificial paradise in
which the unnamed protagonist takes refuge. Stylistically, the house is
old-fashioned with a thatched roof, and it is situated in the intersection
of hills “where the broad Musashino plane runs out at its southern limit
and enters mountain country.”18 In choosing this rustic area, apparently
lost to modern civilization, the protagonist feels himself to be a Romantic
 taishō malaise as decadence / 107

poet, “a prodigal son [who] had long clung to the hope of melting into the
embrace of nature” after being “crushed by the weight of humanity.”19 He
hopes that the bucolic space will relieve him of his sense of suffocation,
but it never comes close to meeting his expectations. The village is rather
unwelcoming to this stranger from Tokyo, treating him as a persona non
grata.20 As a sanctuary for the weary aesthete, the house presents itself
as a sort of simulacrum that imitates hermitages once used as retreats by
poet-priests and aesthetes such as Kamono Chōmei and Matsuo Bashō.
In fin-de-siècle Decadent literature, remote residences tend to feature as
sanctuaries away from the noisy modern world of bourgeoises, as exempli-
fied by the rural residence of Des Esseintes in Huysmans’s Against Nature
(1884). In the microcosm of his aesthetic ideals, aristocrat Des Esseintes
indulges in encyclopedic volumes of books and beloved items such as gems
and fragrances. However, he cannot confine himself to this closed space
for long because the residence, this dense repository of human history,
begins to suffocate him.
Similarly, A Pastoral Spleen also shows the quaint and rustic space as
unable to offer a complete sense of respite and consolation. Instead, the
space gradually begins to exert a quasi-animistic power that overwhelms
the person living there. The house provokes an unexpected effect of
autointoxication (jika chūdoku), causing the protagonist to feel a sense
of “idleness, languor, fretfulness, and emptiness” (“mui, kentai, shōsō,
kyomu”).21 All these consequences are foreshadowed at the beginning of
the narrative. Visually speaking, the rural village is “mediocre” and could
be “ubiquitous,” and its simplicity indeed attracts the protagonist who
is exhausted from life in an urban Tokyo “laden with the heaviness of
human beings.”22 By suffocating him, though, the pastoral space defies
the generally accepted Romantic views of nature as the counterpart to
urban modernity. The narrative subtly touches on this irony concealed in
the physical reality of the landscape. Unlike the protagonist’s (and thus
the author Satō’s) home in the Kumano region, the outskirts of Musashino
offer none of the dramatic landscape of sea and mountain. The scenery
showcases a “graceful line of hills, its sky, its expanse of mixed forest, its
wet and dry fields, its skylarks” as though “his loving mother.”23 Such
an image of gentle landscape is the modern construct of fūkei (scenery).
This depiction of rural scenery resonates with that of Kunikida Doppo’s
Musashino [The Field of Musashino] in which the scenery and physical
landscape are clearly separate, and the former is offered as an episte-
mological as well as a subjective reflection of the latter.24 According to
Angela Yiu, the imagery of the Tokyo suburb in A Pastoral Spleen draws
on the rural landscape present in the eremitic Chinese poetry of Tao
Qian (365–427), the romantic and lyrical Russian countryside of Ivan
 108 / decadent literature

Turgenev’s The Hunter’s Sketches, and the river bank farms and houses
depicted by Wordsworth.25 Therefore, suburbs are presented not by the
physical reality but as a subjective collage made out of the author’s mod-
ernist imagination.
As the title suggests, A Pastoral Spleen dramatizes the idea that mod-
ern man has no chance of divorcing himself from the artificiality born
of civilization. Akin to Doppo’s Naturalist sketch, the third-person nar-
rative highlights the landscape, but the artist’s vision is filtered through
modern perspectives. Thus, disenchanted with the natural world of
Musashino, it dismisses altogether the idea that there could be a paradise
in this world.26 With such melancholia, he does not project any expecta-
tions but longs for a place where he can enjoy deep sleep “akin to religious
ecstasy.”27 His artificial paradise is a paradox in modernity. That is, the
essence of paradise can be an absolute simplicity and comfort, but in the
modern world this must be created out of the artificial labor involving
physical relocation to the suburb. Nonetheless, even in the rural space he
cannot escape from his mindset immersed in urban modernity, as each
episode constantly reminds him of that ontological fact. At times, he is
fascinated by the artificial elegance (jinkō no ichiru no tenga) discovered
in the abandoned garden (haien).28 The space marks not the beauty of
nature sui generis, but an interplay between plants and the human pas-
sion for controlling nature via artificial ingenuity. In the summer garden,
the avalanche of flowers such as sasanqua, hydrangea, white magnolia,
and plum violently undermines the artificial regularity of the garden.29
The energetic plant imagery puts Symbolism’s influence on Satō’s sen-
sibility on display, and in this sense even the violent force of nature is
under the control of artificial attempts to decipher the natural world.
The abundance of nature boasts a powerful vitality that challenges the
human will, and at the same time mirrors the excess of self-consciousness
of the protagonist himself.30
Throughout A Pastoral Spleen, the interplay between nature and arti-
ficiality is the vehicle that animates the narrative, but the two elements
rarely create a harmony. The discordant synthesis reifies the protagonist’s
neurasthenia, a disorder of the nervous system.31 The novella is perhaps
one of the most prominent Taishō literary works that visualize the psy-
chosomatic symptom. In the narrative, the nervous illness takes the form
of vivid illusion or hallucination, and thereby the tenacity of the protag-
onist’s optical and aural disorders becomes apparent. Not all the effects
of neurasthenia are however agonistic, but in some cases, the disorder is
represented as a positive resource for artistic inspiration. One afternoon, a
distant mountain hill appears to him a “fairy land” when viewed through
the frame made by two trees that are also in the distance. The hilly land
 taishō malaise as decadence / 109

has been tilled, and as a result it is etched with stripes of green and purple.
The magical imagery casts a spell on him:

It was like watching a fairy at work in fairyland. Inspired with a feeling of

transcendence for this little hill, he stared unblinking with a sense of yearn-
ing, like a child looking through a kaleidoscope.32

The visual composite is an aggregate of nature, imagination, and illusion.

In the passage, Satō repeatedly employs the verb “mieru” (to appear, to be
seen) and thereby suggests a visual contingency, rather than his creative
ability as a seer. The image tacitly acknowledges the presence of multiple
factors in labor, and the perspective clearly departs from Romanticism,
which stresses subjectivity in artistic creation. Art critic Unagami Masaomi
points out that in the distinctive framing, arrangement, and harmony the
fairy hill strikingly resembles James McNeill Whistler’s drawing tech-
nique.33 The influence of Whistler, who is also credited with establishing
the principle of art for art’s sake, testifies to Satō’s modernist perspective
at work.
In the second half of the novella, the protagonist’s playful instinct as
an artist begins to collapse, and his neurosis becomes increasingly appar-
ent. Alongside, as his life in the pastoral dwelling continues, the pleasure
of indulging in the imagination dissipates, gradually being replaced by
pathological visions influenced by fin-de-siècle Decadence. One evening,
while his wife is away from the village, he sees a hallucination of her in the
burning firewood. From then on, he becomes haunted by the thought that
he is the doppelgänger, a shadow of his real self.34 The same dreadful feel-
ing assaults him when his dogs run to follow another man, though he fails
to identify the shadow disappearing in an open field in the moonlight.35
The doppelgänger is a visual representation of a split mind, which reflects
the polarity of his desire to escape urban life and his unrest in the pastoral
home.36As the scene suggests, in Taishō literature, the doppelgänger is a
leitmotif indicative of severe psychic instability. As a reference to the epoch,
the motif features in works such as Kajii Motojirō’s “The Ascension of K”
and Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s “The Two Letters.” According to Kawamoto
Saburō, fin-de-siècle Decadent literature had a close association with this
collective neurotic symptom in the Taishō literary discourse. Above all, the
works of Edgar Allan Poe caused the Taishō writers to develop an “abnor-
mal degree of curiosity” in the theme of mental disorders, driven them to
imagine that they, too, were suffering from the same symptoms.37 Together
with the doppelgänger, such medical terms as hypochondria, delirium, and
somnambulism often appear in works by Akutagawa, Satō, and Tanizaki.
In Kawamoto’s view, this range of pathological terms corresponds to what
 110 / decadent literature

Hirotsu Kazuo calls “the fin-de-siècle devil” (seikimatsu no akuma).38 This

“devil” implies that fin-de-siècle discourse integrates disease with art in
a way that encompasses the epochal ambience. Further, the Taishō writ-
ers were readily infected with both European scientific research and art,
including the pre-Freudian psychopathology of Cesare Lombroso. Their
interest in disease goes beyond a simple reception of the European literary
movement, and testifies the prevalence of a collective neurosis in the urban
life of Taishō Japan. In the socio-cultural transition, the country indeed
experienced a state of anxiety. There, the transmission of psychopathologi-
cal concepts from overseas articulated what modernity brought to Japan.
Once scientific research had established a systematic explanation for symp-
toms such as doppelgänger and hypochondria, the writers could adopt the
concepts and terms as de facto reality.39 This is indicative of the fact that
the speech act of science was an integral part of Taishō Decadence.
Though the same logic is at play in A Pastoral Spleen, as the story pro-
gresses, such a scientific grasp of the uncanny becomes impossible. The
protagonist draws on the medical term, “hypochondriac” (spelled out in
katakana as “hipokondoriya”), to define himself.40 The longer he stays in
the village, the more out of control his neurosis becomes. He loses any
conceptual grasp of the symptoms when random hallucinations, illusory
sounds, and insomnia begin to plague him. Initially, the sounds of a click-
ing clock, of a passing train, and even of organ music from a distant school
irritate him.41 This aural irritation, however, is soon replaced by visual
hallucinations. One day, a miniature cityscape, complete with street life
and glittering lights, disorients him with the astonishing speed:

As he stared closely, the whole street receded from his nose and became even
tinier, seeming about to disappear, but then the scene grew rapidly larger.
Unchanged but now very large, almost life-size, the street kept growing
relentlessly to become gigantic, as big as the whole world . . . . He watched
vacantly and the scene shrank quickly back to its former miniature scale
and returned to its former place above his nose. In a few minutes—or was
it seconds—it had gone in one flight, he felt, from the fabled Lilliput to the
country of giants and then back to miniature Lilliput.42

The vertigo in this vision is, no doubt, a manifestation of a schizophrenia

that reflects his inner discordance and chaos.43 As the hallucinations accu-
mulate, he comes to believe that he is being assaulted by invisible spirits.44
Out of desperation, he opens Goethe’s Faust and finds Mephistopheles
warning him about his fate:

To put it briefly, I have not grudged your tasting of these self-deluding plea-
sures. But you cannot long endure them. Already you are overtired. And if
 taishō malaise as decadence / 111

it continues, it will end either merrily in madness or drearily in cowardice.

Enough of that . . . .45

The words of Mephistopheles allude to the danger of “self-deluding plea-

sures,” and in them the protagonist sees a parallel between his life and
that of Faust. In essence, the protagonist is a modern urban man who
is disconnected from naïve Romantic nostalgia. In the end, he cannot
be cured by the rural environment to which he does not ontologically
belong. For this underlying scheme, the central theme running through A
Pastoral Spleen is the wasted consumption of modern manhood. Through
the manifestation of neurosis, the outcome of experimentation can be
summed up as a waste, as the protagonist’s physical vitality and inner
self are only diffused and consumed.46 He can only be rejected by both
the urban and rural space, as he is suspended in the interstice between
the two. As the protagonist oscillates between these two spaces, any psy-
chological rest belongs only to the metaphysical third space that he per-
ceives to be “[a] gloomy world, a groaning world, a world where spirits
wander.”47 In this sense, Satō links the novella to the worldview of Poe, as
it is referred to in the prologue: “I dwelt alone; In a world of moan; And
my soul was a stagnant tide.”48
As we have observed, A Pastoral Spleen portrays the failure of indulg-
ing with an artificial paradise. The fantasy of seclusion collapses because
of a neurosis and fear born of “loneliness and idleness” (kodoku to mui).49
In rural life, the protagonist, immersed in nature and the imagination, is
liberated from the pressure associated with engaging in productive work.
However, over time he succumbs to a sort of autointoxication precisely
because his pastoral life is devoid of labor and production. In essence,
he is a nervous urban artist who cannot come to terms with an idle life-
style. Given that he belongs to a production-driven modern society, what
defines him ontologically is the virtue of labor for an artist. So much so
that the paradox lies in his discharging of vitality where there is neither
need nor chance of productive labor.50 Furthermore, the rural hermitage
brings on a neurotic nausea and causes him to be in constant pain. In the
epilogue, however, an allusion to the reinvention of the self through art
hints that the protagonist may yet recover from his neurosis. This very
last segment of the novella is a literary collage derived from Chinese clas-
sicism, German Romanticism, and fin-de-siècle Decadence.51 This tactic
in narrative is not merely ornamentation, but evokes the fundamental
issue linked to the relation between neurosis and art. In the face of the
protagonist’s dissipation, only the voice and art of a cultural other can
substitute for his psychological aphasia. To dramatize this acculturation,
the roses resurrected from the violence of heavy rain suddenly capture his
 112 / decadent literature

attention.52 Their beauty puts him in mind of a poem by the Tang poet
Chu Guang-yi (AD 700–760):

A simple stem
Alone surpassing,
Hits the mark
For the garden’s heart.53

Despite the beauty that belongs to a single bud, the protagonist’s wife gath-
ers a bunch of red roses in which each bloom has been all but destroyed
by bugs.54 The abundance of roses in decay is a significant reference to
fin-de-siècle Decadence, above all the sensual leitmotif in D’Annunzio’s
trilogy, The Romance of Roses.55 In the conclusion to the novella, Goethe’s
poetic stanza, “Sind’s Rosen, nun, sie werden blühn” [Oh, Rose, thou art
sick!] is repeated as an incantatory echo. In the name of Romanticism, this
poetic enunciation is yet given in Taishō Japan; this spatio-temporal gap
transforms the line’s significance from a pure lamentation for the wounded
beauty of nature to the agony of modern man projected onto the rose’s
beauty. The poetic phrase is not an address to nature, but in the context
of Taishō Japan, the artist must bear with the agonistic identification of
the self with the weary rose. In the very last scene, he wonders whether
the voice is “a revelation from heaven” or “a prophecy.”56 The haunting
phrase “Oh, Rose, thou art sick!” is now uttered through his own voice.
In his reading of this scene, Dan Kazuo surmises that the novella is a
celebration of an incipient optimism, a prediction of artistic recovery.57 In
this way, A Pastoral Spleen maps out what art means in modernity. It is a
process of negotiation with one’s doppelgänger, which potentially leads to
a metaphorical overcoming of aphasia by virtue of cultural otherness. The
poetics of symbiosis tacitly announces this departure from neurotic solip-
sism. Departing from the classical notion of a bucolic locus amoenus, Satō’s
rural village no longer provides an Edenic space of comfort, delight, and
security. It is a dejected rural dystopia foreign to modern labor and produc-
tivity; nonetheless, at least the space facilitates the artist’s contemplation
and ontological renaissance.
In his short essay “A Brief Reflection on Decadence,” Satō asserts
that Decadents are defined by their ability to see “their own ugliness.”58
This schema is rooted in the desire to objectify self-consciousness, and in
this sense A Pastoral Spleen clearly diverges from Romanticism. In terms
of poetics, the novella cultivates a new vision of the inner self in mod-
ern Japanese literature. Through the trope of synesthesia, the narrative
explores the realm of the senses, including not only vision and sound but
also intuition beyond reason. The rural space provides a sort of pretext
 taishō malaise as decadence / 113

that awakens these invisible areas of sense perception, which are otherwise
dormant in urban modernity. In Romanticism, nature draws a dichotomy
between the pre-civilized world and modernity. Wordsworth, for example,
casts his poetic vision upon daffodils with great admiration, and in doing
so takes Grace in its tangible form for granted. This fascination with and
awe of nature ultimately constitutes a subjective poetic wonderment. Such
clearly pronounced divisions between nature and civilization, though, are
not present in A Pastoral Spleen. The novella simply veers away from the
Romantic vision of nature into the neurotic susceptibility of modern man.
The result is a blurred category between the urban and the rural, both of
which imply an incongruity with modern humanity.

Tanizaki’s A Fool’s Love

Tanizaki serialized A Fool’s Love first in Ōsaka Asahi Shinbun from March
to June 1924, and then continued the novel in Josei [Women] from
November 1924 to July 1925. This is one of the most frequently discussed
modern Japanese novels referred to as jyōfu mono (the story of the mis-
tress), a genre to which Tanizaki contributed a number of stories after the
scandal of the Odawara jiken (Odawara Incident) in 1921.59 Until that
point, Tanizaki had concentrated on saikun mono (the story of the wife),
in which a Byronian homme fatale, a dark anti-hero, usually ends up kill-
ing his wife. Norowareta gikyoku [The Cursed Play] (1919), for example,
falls into this category.60 In the genre of saikun mono, Tanizaki depicts
the anti-hero’s psychological struggle as a conflict between the ambigu-
ous self and the Romantic ideal of the strong self.61 The antinomy implies
a gulf between life and art, between Japan and the West, and between
innocence and diabolism. In this split, what prevails in saikun mono is an
absolute rejection of such dispositions as honesty and purity, which are
associated with motherhood in a patriarchal household. Through the act
of murder, Tanizaki appears to claim that art should take precedence over
life. Within this fictional scheme, the two central male characters gesture
toward becoming the Romantic man who possesses artistic vision, whereas
the female characters are assigned to the position of victim. The masculine
force of brutality conjures the image of the West, with Japan cast in femi-
nine subjugation.
Given Tanizaki’s interest in the violent male in saikun mono, A Fool’s
Love executes a paradigm shift that reverses the gender roles. Critics have
pointed out that the shift in the author’s artistic temperament originates in
his complex relationship with his first wife, Chiyo, whom he subtly identi-
fies with his mother, with whom it appears he had an incestuous relation-
ship.62 It is possible to draw a parallel between Tanizaki’s path and that of
 114 / decadent literature

his benefactor Nagai Kafū in the post–Taigyaku jiken period.63 In exploring

the art of “downfall” (daraku), Tanizaki renounced his art underpinned by
modern erudition in order to mend his marriage with Chiyo.64 In contrast
to Kafū, however, who consciously degraded himself by writing stories
in the gesaku style (playful, trivial writing), Tanizaki sought to establish
his poetics through plot-oriented storytelling. In regard to the style, Saeki
Shōichi comments that Tanizaki succeeds in creating a first-person narra-
tor who is indifferent to agonistic conflicts between social obligations and
private life, and that he thereby establishes a historically significant theme
in modern Japanese literature.65 Centering on an average worker living on
a modest salary, the novel implicitly claims that Decadence is no longer the
exclusive province of aesthetes and intellectuals, but a new psychic pattern
that is becoming widespread in Taishō Japan. The first-person narrator is
an introverted individual, whose only concern is to build his own private
happiness and pleasure, rather than calibrating an aesthetic ideal. In keep-
ing the genealogy of individuals in tact, A Fool’s Love sheds light on the
range of characteristics usually considered dull, inept, and clumsy.
Focusing on the unrefined male protagonist, A Fool’s Love poses a
pathfinder of modern Japanese fiction. This is achieved by the charac-
ter’s tireless labor, which eventually produces a satisfactory artificial para-
dise. Before writing this novel, Tanizaki had already become interested
in fin-de-siècle Decadence, as that is noted in references to his earlier
work Konjiki no shi [The Golden Death] (1914). Like Huysmans’s Against
Nature, the story features the theme of material obsession. Attempting to
build a utopic space, the protagonist accumulates artistic objects he desires
until the effort exhausts him and brings about his own death. This ver-
sion of artificial paradise can be considered a precursor to A Fool’s Love.
However, for unknown reasons, later in his career Tanizaki was to exclude
The Golden Death from his zenshū (complete collection).66 We can read
this exclusion as suggesting that the author escaped the danger of reduc-
ing his art to an ideological abstraction. In the genealogy of Tanizaki’s
decadent novels, A Fool’s Love is a sort of redemption of the ideologically
charged Golden Death, inasmuch as the former proposes an organic syn-
thesis between art and life.67
Together with Satō’s Pastoral Spleen, A Fool’s Love represents the litera-
ture of Taishō Decadence. Yet, these novels expound on the polarities of
mindset, temperament, and setting while opting out of interests in upward
mobility in the social mainstream in order to choose the alternative of
an artificial paradise. Unlike the escape to a bucolic rural setting that
defines A Pastoral Spleen, Tanizaki sets A Fool’s Love in an urban land-
scape, so that any attempt to escape modernity must come directly from
within it. The novel is exuberant, and what makes it so is the protagonist’s
 taishō malaise as decadence / 115

guilt-free individualism, his fascination with modern objects, and his

desire to explore the opportunities urban life has to offer. Building an
artificial paradise, then, entails ceaseless labor, which involves planning,
investment, and reinvestment—in sum, a capitalist production process. It
is important to note that the labor is in this case dedicated exclusively to
individual pleasure. This mindset never invests resources for the sake of
collective well-being but overthrows the utilitarian ethics that propagates
conscientious labor and frugality. Notwithstanding, the novel does not
explicitly address the ideological issue of labor and economy per se. What
A Fool’s Life illustrates is the awakening of an ordinary individual who
opens his eyes to pleasure in the private sphere thanks to the material con-
dition of the modernist Taishō era.

Labor Outside the Modern Capitalist Principle in A Fool’s Love

As we discussed in Chapter 1 in particular, the Naturalist I-novelists situ-
ated the main cause of decadence in the absence of any labor that could
lead to efficient productivity. In A Fool’s Love, the protagonist works hard
but does so mostly with the purpose of enriching his own life. In this sense,
he remains on the same valence as those Naturalist Decadents who are
unable to contribute to the collective social good. On the other hand, in A
Fool’s Love, labor is a self-sufficient closure though it traverses a capitalistic
cycle of production and profit making. The nature of labor in the novel
encompasses multiple spectrums of work that involve not only physical
toil, monetary investment, and maintenance, but also emotion and affec-
tion. At this juncture, labor undertaken in pursuit of decadent pleasure is
an implicit contest against the rise of the capitalist social system. And, as
such, it accords with what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call “living
labor” in Labor of Dionysus (1994):

Living labor produces life and constitutes society in a time that cuts across
the division posed by the workday, inside and outside the prisons of capital-
ist work and its wage relation, in both the realm of work and that of non-
work. It is a seed that lies waiting under the snow, or more accurately, the
life force always already active in the dynamic networks of cooperation, in
the production and reproduction of society, that courses in and out of the
time posed by capital.68

The underlying argument is that capitalism has suffocated the “indomi-

table” reality of living labor in the yoke of the wage–labor reduction.69
Hardt and Negri evoke the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1847), which
roars against the modern bourgeois society that has relegated laborers to
the status of slaves at capitalism’s disposal. With the systematic interlock
 116 / decadent literature

between the nation state and capitalism, in the name of abstraction, the
qualitative as well as the non-material aspects of labor are relegated to
matters of no importance. What Hardt and Negri revitalize here is self-
valorization (Selbstverwertung) via labor proposed by Marx as indispens-
able, with the renewed argument that labor is a value-producing activity
that involves immaterial praxis such as intellectual, affective, and techno-
scientific approach.70 At first glance, the assertion may sound exaggerated
as a theoretical paradigm for reading the fiction of Taishō Decadence.
The value system operating in A Fool’s Love is after all absent from both
the Naturalist I-novel and the fiction of postwar Meiji Decadence. In the
novel, in turn, non-material factors inaugurate the new form of labor,
which is an antinomy of abstract labor models that dehumanize the labor-
ing subject and dismiss the significance of individual self-fulfillment.
In the story’s opening, Kawai Jōji, the first-person narrator and the pro-
tagonist, identifies himself as an engineer earning a monthly salary of 150
yen at an electronic company. A diligent and modest worker who at 28 (32
by the end of the story) is a model “salary man” (salaried man), who has no
grudge against the company despite being locked into the daily routine of
work.71 His pastimes are limited to going to the cinema, attending the the-
atre, and taking walks. He lives an introverted life and has no special inter-
ests. In sum, Jōji is a prototype for middle-class Japanese workers not only
of the Taishō and Shōwa periods, but also even for today’s urban industrial
and business populations. Having been a cog in the wheel of corporate
economy, he is bored with the monotony of his days and longs for “color
and warmth” in his private life.72 In looking to offset this tedium, Jōji
develops an interest in Naomi, a fifteen-year-old waitress at Café Diamond
in Asakusa, a popular commercial district in Tokyo. He daydreams about
living with this girl who has a Eurasian-like appearance. But from the
outset, he wishes to live a life of play and enjoyment, instead of building
a conventional household.73 Keeping this objective firmly at the forefront
of his mind, he begins to live with Naomi, initially taking care of her as if
she were his child. Later, they legally marry, but she becomes a casual com-
panion rather than his spouse. Their informal marriage is clearly a gesture
that refutes the rigid ie system and the patriarchal role expected of men in
wedlock. Having been tied to corporate life, Jōji wants to secure a happy
space in his private life. To fulfill this wish, he avoids the formal steps of
arranging to have a partner, an engagement, and a wedding, as well as
escapes obligations such as caring for his in-laws.74
The artificial paradise in A Fool’s Love intertwines features of the West
with elements of play. The apparatus that accommodates his ideal life of
play is a bunka jūtaku (culture house), a modern Western house with a
thatched red roof and white walls. In Taishō Japan, it is an eye-catching
 taishō malaise as decadence / 117

adobe of fantasy. Accentuated by a large atelier together with a loft in

the attic, its interior is not very practical: it looks like a place in which
fairies might dwell (otogi no ie).75 Jōji takes full advantage of the unique
structure, decorating the space with Western-style furniture and photo-
graphs of American actresses.76 With neither Japanese decor nor practical
objects, the house becomes a space for play wherein the couple play hide
and seek and Naomi rides Jōji horseback.77 The space permits them to
indulge their trivial pleasures and whims, to live in a way that belongs to
the realm of fantasy. In Johan Huizinga’s classical definition, play is an
activity superfluous to necessity. It takes place within certain limits of time
and space where “an absolute and peculiar order reigns.” 78 Further, play
has no interest in any material or biological self-preservation that might
foreground the cycle of reproductive utilitarian economy.79 These ideas
are all invested in Jōji’s life with Naomi, and as a result their life together
revolves entirely around volitional activities and pleasure. However, in the
light of Huizinga’s theory, which posits play as ephemeral, Jōji appears to
cross the border in his efforts to perpetuate a life of fantasy. This miscalcu-
lation causes him pain, and it fuels Naomi’s further pursue of play, a series
of her adultery committed with the Keiō University students almost in the
form of hide and seek. Even so, Jōji’s creative labor may be assessed as a
psychological outburst among modern urban workers, who dream of an
alternative life outside a conventional household full of rules.80
In the artificial paradise of A Fool’s Love, the play of the pseudo-mar-
riage (despite their legal conjugality) involves a series of simulacra. The
inauthentic objects are the choices stemming from the economic and cul-
tural compromises Jōji must make. The culture house he rents imitates
a Western residence and thereby lacks authenticity. Its exterior resembles
the kinds of dwelling that are ubiquitous in the United States and Europe,
though it has only two rooms of san-jō (the size of 3 straw mats) and yo-jō-
han (the size of 4.5 straw-mats), in the style of traditional Japanese bed-
rooms.81 The couple sleeps on traditional futon mats provided by Jōji’s
rural family, and apparently the items are incongruous with the look
of the house.82 Not apart from the house, the most inauthentic of all is
Naomi herself. When Jōji first meets Naomi, her name evokes an image
of an intelligent Westerner, and accentuated by the sound of the name,
her face even appears to him like that of the actress Mary Pickford.83 In
reality, Naomi lacks intelligence, and even her Eurasian appearance sug-
gests that she is counterfeit, at most possessing ambiguous features being
between European and Asian. When Jōji learns to dance with Madame
Shlemskaya, he notices the whiteness of her hands. In comparing Naomi
with the Russian woman, Jōji sees a distinct difference: “Naomi’s hands
weren’t vivid white—indeed, seen after the countess’s hand, her skin looked
 118 / decadent literature

murky.”84 Naomi rather resembles a rough “Yankee girl,” without the ele-
gance of Italian or French beauties and without their subtle coquetry.85
These details reveal the limits of the socio-economic class and ethnic
differences that Jōji faces in reality.86 Far from being his ideal, Naomi
is merely an affordable commodity who/that cannot entirely satisfy his
petit bourgeois desire. His choice mirrors a commonplace Japanese per-
ception of the West, reflecting a strong self-consciousness, or a sense of
inferiority, in regard to ethnicity, class, and culture vis-à-vis authentic
Western counterparts. Jōji is in awe of Madame Shlemskaya and views
her in stereotypical terms, but such a reception of Westerners does not
indicate naiveté or an absence of erudition on the part of the author, as
Nakamura Mitsuo hastily concludes that Tanizaki’s idea of the West dis-
played in the novel is shallow and kitsch.87 Certainly, Jōji is initially inter-
ested in Naomi for her Eurasian looks. Picking her from among many
superficially similar girls may be a matter of whim, and Jōji is also highly
conscious of the fact that his interest in Western culture is only a hobby.
Thus, he implicitly casts the gaze of a consumer on the girl, purchasing
her at will in an attempt to satisfy his cultural palate. Naomi is one of
the few realistic ways of fulfilling his desires, as his life as a Japanese
man of modest means prevents him from experiencing genuine Western
life (and women).88 Whereas his relationship with Naomi is a matter of
compromise, his playful spirit translated into marriage is a remarkable
move for this average man.89 Unlike Nakamura, who dismisses Tanizaki
for his shallow perspective on the West, Saeki Shōichi acknowledges
the significance of the “fake West.” The cheap counterfeits—including
Naomi and the culture house—do not reveal the absence of erudition
but offer instead a collective perception of the cultural other in Taishō
Japan. Therefore, Tanizaki wittingly poses as ignorant and dissimulates
a more refined view of foreign culture.90 Saeiki’s reading between the
lines is important because although A Fool’s Love is generally labeled
a fūzoku shōsetsu (epochal lifestyle novel),91 it underscores the author’s
indifference to verisimilitudes of the West and to the dichotomy between
East and West. Likewise, the references to Madame Shlemskaya and to
other European women do not privilege an authentic West. They simply
accentuate the hierarchy that exists between European women and those
such as Naomi, who is no doubt less refined and less privileged in regard
to both social and economic status.
Naomi’s inferiority is an important precondition for her relationship
with Jōji, as it fuels his passion for and interest in cultivating her. In this
sense, the novel becomes another version of the classical Pygmalion. For
Jōji, just as Naomi’s resemblance to Mary Pickford is only on the surface,
she offers a shallow simulacrum of the West with no genuine substance.
 taishō malaise as decadence / 119

In Jean Baudrillard’s definition, simulacra refer to cultural artifacts that

succeed in “feigning” an innate quality.92 Naomi possesses a Eurasian-like
face and body, and this approximation of a European physique is what
attracts Jōji to her in the first place. Therefore, Naomi does not need to
mask her lack of Westernness; however, there is a yawning gap between
Jōji’s ideal image of Western women and Naomi’s untamable coarseness.
With the intention of transforming this girl into a lady, Jōji undertakes the
labor of mitigating the gap by investing money, education, physical energy,
and emotion into her. In the light of Hardt and Negri’s argument, as stated
earlier, Jōji’s labor is a value-creating process situated outside the pragmatic
routines of production. Its goal does not involve any clear prospect of gain,
nor any use value except that of his own satisfaction. In professional cor-
porate life, Jōji is an engineer tied to the incentive of a monthly salary, and
in this capitalist nexus a man’s value is socially abstracted and dehuman-
ized entirely in terms of economic survival.93 For him, building a new life
of play with a Westernized Naomi means another labor—the process of
securing a private pleasure in the pursuit of self-valorization. This labor
exhausts Jōji, surely pushing him to a sort of masochism that consists in
showing her an excessive patience and submitting himself thereby to an
ongoing humiliation as her husband. However, this labor is entirely the
result of his subjective choice. In the corporate setting, his labor as an
engineer is subsumed under capitalism, integrated into the workings of
the nation state. His playful life with Naomi, on the other hand, is an
artificial paradise in which affection and dedication allow him to fulfill
to some extent his personal dreams and subjectivity. The irony lies in the
nature of the novel as a tragicomedy in which the protagonist labors for
the simulacra of the West in pursuit of eros.94 In any case, the outcome of
his affective labor produces values outside the parameters of profit-making
and capitalist-like acquisition.

* * *

In A Fool’s Love, labor and other resources are invested in a single vec-
tor—from Jōji to Naomi. In general, she takes his material and emotional
support entirely for granted and offers almost nothing in return. For this
indifference, she certainly belongs among the fin-de-siècle femmes fatales.
Throughout his relationship with Naomi, Jōji is generous in terms of
spending money at her request. His expenditures are various and extensive:
20 yen a month rent for the culture house,95 expensive meals such as beef
steak,96 tuition for English and music tutors,97 trips to the seaside resort of
Kamakura,98 and fabrics to make custom-designed dresses.99 These expen-
ditures are made to please her, but they also reflect his mission of turning
 120 / decadent literature

her into a lady capable of passing muster in Western terms. The labor
in the service of monetary expenditure is a unique investment, halfway
between the prerogative of a future spouse and benevolence toward a girl
of very limited means.100At first, he had intended to make an investment
based on the prospect of gaining a return through establishing a relation-
ship with her. Therefore, he is not a naïve, altruistic philanthropist, and
his investment is a very pragmatic project targeting the concrete outcome.
Furthermore, all the expenditures are meant to launder Naomi’s less than
respectable upbringing in the Senzuka-chō district, a locality historically
populated by lower-class merchants of one sort or another, including
women practicing the oldest profession. It is evident, then, that Naomi is
the Japanese version of Eliza in My Fair Lady. As Ken Itō points out, her
family runs a meishuya business, literally a saké shop, a euphemism for a
brothel without an official license.101 In spite of this background, what
makes Naomi worthy of investment is her physical beauty. In the earlier
stages of their relationship, Jōji’s labor appears to be successful as Naomi
grows into a healthy and lively girl who responds to his patronage by prom-
ising to become his ideal woman.102 At this point, her gradual movement
toward acquiring a measure of sophistication offers a reasonable return on
investment.
Such a utopic scenario of labor collapses though when Jōji’s investment
in Naomi stops showing the results he desires. A significant disappoint-
ment comes when she proves incapable of mastering simple English gram-
mar and shows a stubborn refusal to focus on the work. He has no choice
but to give up his plan of transforming Naomi into a lady capable of earn-
ing people’s respect and admiration.103 Upon realizing Naomi’s limitations,
Jōji must make a compromise, that of accepting her only for her beautiful
“flesh.”104 This realization has an impact on the couple’s playful life of fan-
tasy. From then on, Naomi becomes explicitly imprudent and begins to use
her body to control Jōji. Gradually, his focus shifts from making monetary
investments to protecting himself psychologically in order to overcome her
femme fatale-like control over him and to cope with her cheating. Well
aware of the changes in Naomi, and drawing an analogy between himself
and Mark Anthony, Jōji convinces himself that the domination he is suc-
cumbing to is an aspect of all female–male relationships.105 Mark Anthony
became a laughing stock, but Jōji feels sympathy for his surrender to his
lover’s power. Naomi is, of course, hardly comparable with Cleopatra. Yet,
in accord with the historical perspective shared by Jōji on the Queen of
Egypt, Naomi does exploit the man both financially and emotionally. Her
material demands keep growing, and Jōji finds it difficult to continue to
meet them. For example, she entreats him to pay for dance classes cost-
ing 40 yen a month and for the new dresses she requires to attend them.
 taishō malaise as decadence / 121

The first-person narrative details the impending danger to the couple’s

housekeeping:

[M]y monthly salary could no longer keep up with her extravagance. I’d
always been scrupulous about finances; when I was still single, I’d budgeted
my expenses and put the reminder, even if it was only a little, in the bank.
By the time I began living with Naomi, I’d saved quite a bit. What’s more,
though I doted on Naomi, I never neglected my work; I continued to be the
exemplary hard-working employee, and I earned the trust of the managers.
My salary increased until I was earning about four hundred yen a month,
including the usual semiannual bonuses. This amount would easily support
two people living normally, but it wasn’t enough for us. Perhaps I shouldn’t
go into detail, but our living expenses came to at least two hundred and fifty
yen a month, sometimes as much as three hundred, by a conservative esti-
mate. Rent accounted for thirty-five of this (in four years it had increased
by fifteen yen); after subtracting expenses for gas, electricity, water, heating,
fuel, and laundry, we were left with a balance of from two hundred to two
hundred and forty yen, most of which went for food.106

Clearly, as homo economicus, Jōji is an ordinary frugal man. However, he has

obviously become homo reciprocans, a man who makes extravagant expen-
ditures in order to fuel Naomi’s interest in him. For this reason, his labor
and resources are explicitly consumed by the girl’s squandering. Unable to
refuse her ceaseless demands, Jōji supports her “reckless spending” whether
for kimonos, footwear, concert tickets, streetcar fares, textbooks, maga-
zines, or novels.107 Given her material desires, she reifies, once again, the
image of the fin-de-siècle femme fatale who lures and devours men. To
satisfy her demands, he saves money by minimizing his own expenditures,
by cutting down on socializing, and by downgrading his train pass.108 But
these modes of frugality make no difference. Not least because the more
he spends on her, the more she focuses on her life outside their relationship.
Simultaneously, Jōji also transforms his own nature—by understanding
better Naomi’s commodity value and acting on it, he becomes a savvier
investor. Not only is she inferior to real Westerners, but she also fails to mea-
sure up to other Japanese girls in many respects. Compared with Kirako,
an elegant actress whom he meets at a dance hall, Naomi lacks refinement
and femininity. Similarly, Naomi’s physical beauty now appears to him
ordinary in comparison with Kirako’s well-shaped nose and teeth.109 These
reassessments bring Naomi’s value down, and Jōji’s disappointment attests
to the fact that he has come to consider her either as a commodity that he
can afford by his money or as a mere object of desire. Despite this realiza-
tion, his attachment to her never diminishes, not because he is still in love
with her, but because his limits in regard to money and socio-cultural con-
ditions rationally keep him from renouncing the transaction he has made.
 122 / decadent literature

Therefore, he continues to support her from the stance of homo reciprocans,

though he now considers her to be unworthy of this investment. His moti-
vations are rooted in an attachment not precisely to Naomi herself, but to
the quest to sustain his artificial paradise.
The artificial paradise in A Fool’s Love is Naomi herself, an embodiment,
though it turns out a counterfeit, of the West accessible through labor.
Regardless of whether she is “a decent lady,” Naomi is invaluable to Jōji
because her presence articulates his ambiguous subjectivity in social life.
Even though pushed by the girl, his labor and investments are still spon-
taneous and volitional. His mindset as homo reciprocans refines this rough
material, this girl, in the hope of producing a modern Galathea. His labor
consists not only in material means but also in emotive and affective forms
of investment, such as fetishism, imagination, frustration, and jealousy.
These, in turn, are underpinned by his confidence in his ability to finance
her whims. In contrast with major works of fin-de-siècle Decadence that
involve a symbolic economy of unconditional expenditure,110 the pleasure
and pain of labor in A Fool’s Life are represented in the more concrete terms
of a pragmatic financial pact between the couple. Although Naomi flirts
with other men and thereby puts their marriage in danger, she still resorts
to coquetry with Jōji because she understands that his material support is
essential to her life. He, too, knows very well that Naomi cannot leave him
precisely because of the economic incentives he provides.111 Whereas Jōji
plays the masochist in their relationship, Naomi, even though she psycho-
logically dominates him, never escapes the status of being his possession.
For him, she is both the product of his labor and his property by right. His
anger at being cuckolded, therefore, is not just a matter of jealousy:

[M]ost of her value to me lay in the fact that I’d brought her up myself, that
I myself had made her into the woman she was, and that only I knew every
part of her body. For me, Naomi was the same as a fruit that I’d cultivated
myself. I’d labored hard and spared no pains to bring that piece of fruit to
its present, magnificent ripeness, and it was only proper that I, the cultiva-
tor, should be the one to taste it. No one else had that right.112

On first learning of her infidelity, Jōji, because of his sense of ownership,

does not renounce her. Only when her betrayal reaches a truly vicious level
does he finally allow his anger free rein and expel her from their home. The
occasion marks a turning point: now Naomi must use herself as the “fruit”
of Jōji’s labor initially just to survive and later to move upward socially.
When she briefly returns home, Jōji confounds her with “an unfamiliar
young Western woman.”113 Naomi’s metamorphosis and epiphanic beauty
announce a manifesto-like significance for the couple’s new relationship.
 taishō malaise as decadence / 123

Her return brings their relationship to an even more mercenary level.

Understanding her body as a powerful commodity, she seduces him by
at first not allowing him to either look at her or touch her. Having teased
him in this way, Naomi re-conquers him, and she manages to make a deal
of their relationship in explicitly monetary terms. She demands that he
continue to satisfy her material and social needs, which include relocating
to a Western-style villa with cooks and servants in Yokohama.114
To continue creating his artificial paradise, Jōji readily accedes to all
Naomi’s demands. The concession is part of his continuing labor, a mid-
point between play and painful expenditure. What exactly he achieves
through this labor, though, is a question here. It is neither the promise of a
stable loving marriage nor a materially secure future. For his psychological,
physical, and financial toil, the fruit of Jōji’s labor is a moment with a girl
he can barely afford, who is in fact promiscuous, selfish, and whimsical. In
terms of acquisition, only a “life like play” is left to him, with no clear pros-
pect of continuity. But this sort of wager, an alea mentality, is what makes
him a quintessentially decadent man. This daring tendency to squander
his resources is at the core of his labor, which is founded on personal voli-
tion, affection, and obsession, instead of on the pursuit of conventional
happiness. In this regard, the notion of the West recedes and becomes
of secondary importance in A Fool’s Love. Nakamura Mitsuo argues that
Tanizaki’s reception of the West is fundamentally intuitive, and indeed in
the course of development, the West in Naomi’s physique turns out to be
a mere pretext for him to enter the world of play. The West that can be
detected in her is, once again, an imitation without substance. Only the
surface—as a sphere of play—is worthy of his labor. As Nakamura puts
it, Tanizaki is fascinated with the West, as if he were Prometheus yield-
ing his body to the eagle—that is to say, by willfully emptying out his
own brain, he transforms the West into a personal fancy par excellence.115
Similarly, via the play of self-victimization, Jōji can remain enchanted with
the beauty of Naomi. In conclusion, Jōji no longer pursues the West per se
in any substantial way. At most, the West is the motivation for his playful
labor. As symbolized by the epiphany-like return of Naomi, the West is an
abstract idea that is physically unattainable. Ultimately, the apotheosized
image of the West feeds only the Japanese man’s labor that can fulfill the
sense of self-valorization.

A Genealogy of Energy Consumption and Saving:

From Sōseki to Satō and Tanizaki
The artificial paradise in Taishō Decadence mirrors a desire for personal
fulfillment outside life’s conventional obligations. For the writers of the
 124 / decadent literature

era, it is the West that galvanizes the imagination. Whether a tranquil her-
mitage or an ideal woman, no matter how the abstract idea becomes con-
crete in material reality, the artificial paradise belongs to the realm of the
imagination situated outside what the utilitarian superstructure of modern
society based on labor. Romantic escapism became a thematic force in
Taishō Decadence, with numerous examples of fantasy including repre-
sentations of a grotesque artificial paradise. Side by side with the nation’s
continuing urbanization and industrialization, the need to escape turns
out to be a compelling issue in literary discourse, though in genealogical
terms the modern decadent mentality is rooted in the previous decade.
In a similar vein, as expressed in Sorekara [And Then] (1910) and Mon
[The Gate] (1911), Natsume Sōseki is deeply concerned with the entropy of
human energy outside practical “use.” According to Komori Yōichi, Sōseki
extrapolates dual trajectories of energy in the logic of modernity. These
trajectories—“a tendency to save energy” (katsuryoku setsuyaku no shukō)
and “a tendency to consume energy” (katsuryoku shōmō no shukō)116 —are
not mutually exclusive but equally present in the psychic structures of
decadents. Energy saving is not necessarily a simple sign of idleness. It can
be a tactical attempt to conserve resources for a purpose other than meet-
ing the demands of collective society. Energy consumption targets a con-
crete result in material form, and to that end, consuming to the point of
exhausting resources is not agonistic but promises to produce pleasure.117
The economy of effective energy distribution is reflected in a human
instinct for self-preservation. Toward the end of the Meiji period, Sōseki’s
writing moved toward an expression of the tendency to save energy in a way
that is marked by introversion. On the other hand, in Taishō Decadence,
the trajectory of energy tends to be outward, in the constant pursuit of
pleasure from “external stimuli” (gekai no shigeki).118 To borrow the term
used by Komori, what characterizes the epochal tendency (shukō) is the
empirical consumption of energy in which regard A Pastoral Spleen and
A Fool’s Love are prominent examples. What differentiates these works is
their style of energy consumption. But what matters is the fact that for
both the consumption of energy is designed to effect an outward mobility
of the modern self.119 Given that fin-de-siècle Decadence influenced the
writers of Taishō Decadence, the latter endeavored to emulate the former’s
over-self-consciousness by transforming it into concrete labor for pleasure.
Satō and Tanizaki inherited the same economic principle of consumption,
which has no interest in collective merit but only in individual fulfill-
ment. On this ground, A Pastoral Spleen and A Fool’s Love are portraits of
daredevils who, despite their different temperaments, have no hesitation in
wagering their resources for the sake of pleasure and self-preservation. In
terms of this particular trait, the Taishō Decadents are more goal-oriented
 taishō malaise as decadence / 125

and self-sufficient as compared to the decadents of previous decades. The

postwar Meiji decadents are somewhat disoriented in the new socio-
economic order of modernity and, therefore, tend to expend energy without
transforming it into a self-fulfilling outcome. In comparison, the Taishō
Decadents are far more materialistic, teleological, and empirical, thanks
to the guilt-free individualism with which they are already saturated.
Their labor escapes a modernity that monopolizes human life by imposing
collective goals and propagating the kind of labor that undermines the
value of individuals. Both the rural hermitage in A Pastoral Spleen and the
simulacrum of the West in A Fool’s Love are clearly the fruits of private
labor, the consciously created artificial paradise designed to fulfill desire,
wish, and ultimately the sense of the self. Labor as represented in each of
these works is apparently that of individuals who divert energy from col-
lective social ends in order to invest it exclusively for private goals. Their
decadence is antisocial, but has nothing to do with idleness. Instead, it is
underpinned by a particular paradigm of work ethics. This self-fulfilling
labor and an astute distribution of energy are the two essential factors of
Taishō Decadence.
 Ch a p t e r Fi v e
dec ade nc e Be gi ns w i t h P h ysic a l
L a b or : Th e Po st wa r Use of t h e Body
i n Sa k ag uc h i A ng o’s TH E I D I O T a n d
Ta m u r a Ta i j i rō’s G AT E WAY T O
T H E FLESH

Japan’s defeat in World War II caused a rupture in the national polity, but
it was not of course limited in the realm of geopolitics and the economy.
Primarily, it was the common people who faced drastic changes in every-
day lives and ideological mindsets. One of the harbingers of this shift was
the postwar discourse of Decadence, full of ideologically charged dictums
that proposed the reconstruction of human beings. Here, it is necessary
to note the semantic shift surrounding the term “decadence.” Before the
war, during the Shōwa interwar period, Yasuda Yōjūrō added his voice
to the debate over Japanese modernity, advocating “decadence” (“botsur-
aku,” “daraku,” “dekadansu”) as the basis for recuperating the national
ethos. In entering intellectual discourse as an ironic way to describe Japan,
this range of words denoting “decadence” was considered a nihilistic ges-
ture in search of a historical catachresis. The speech act of decadence was
employed to purge Japan’s logic of modernity, that is, in Yasuda’s view, a
shallow, cosmetic borrowing from the Western other. From a nativist stand-
point, Yasuda criticized Japan for its inability to propound its own socio-
cultural legacy and refuted the country’s relationship with the West since
the Meiji Restoration. In turn, in the post-World War II years, Sakaguchi
Ango (1906–1955) wielded the concept of “decadence” (“daraku”) in order
to address the feigned morality of wartime Japan. His principle vehicle
was his essay “Darakuron” [Discourse on Decadence] (1946), which was
widely considered a manifesto for Japan’s postwar renaissance. By employ-
ing the rhetoric of decadence (daraku), this essay hammered out a staunch
defense of human nature as irreducible to “the indoctrinating power of
the state.”1 His novella, “Hakuchi” [The Idiot] (1946), in regard to which
 128 / decadent literature

the essay serves as a prolegomena, reifies the images of wartime humanity

emancipated from the yoke of moral indoctrination. However, the novella
should not be read just as a simple explication or allegory coherent with
“Discourse on Decadence.”2 What both texts mobilize can be termed “the
logic of flesh” (nikutai no ronri) in an écriture that goes beyond authorial
control.3 Ango’s postwar writing is relatively chaotic in that it operates at
the level of somatic reality and is not overly concerned with consistency,
rationality, or narrative completeness. Even so, this chaos retains Ango’s
vision of humanity as it is, allowing us to reread his texts from a van-
tage point that is less ideological or abstract and more interested in the
economy of the unmediated human desires he endorses. From this point
of departure, the chapter explores the ways in which the body constructs
a foundation for postwar ontology and the presentation of the body itself
as a medium building a new social subjectivity. The body in this sense
can signify a corporeality referring to individual autonomy and the social
body.
In “Discourse on Decadence,” Ango denounces the political struc-
ture that during wartime had repressed human desire in the name of
the nation. Considered one of the most outspoken postwar statements
on humanity, politics, and history, the essay offers the poignant critique
of wartime/postwar Japanese psyche. The uniqueness of the essay lies in
its self-reflexive inquiry into the absence of Japanese subjectivity, rather
than in an upfront denouncement of the government and its political
entities such as the Cabinet or Special Higher Police as the abuser of
power. In fact, Ango considers Japan’s defeat in the war to be a soterio-
logical cornerstone of the country’s renewal. In his view, the most deplor-
able players in this wartime drama were not the shrewd politicians but
the Japanese people who castrated their own will by giving in to political
control. According to him, the origin of the systematic political machine
is rooted in a small number of Machiavellian politicians, the Fujiwara
Family of the Heian period (794–1185 AD).4 Since ancient times, the
clan’s political hegemony was made possible by the Japanese people’s
escapism and cowardliness. Thus, in essence, the history of Japan con-
sists of the idiocy of the masses:

[T]here have been a handful of geniuses who brought a real creativity to the
acts of organization and supervision. Their accomplishments have taken
on a life of their own, serving as models for the mediocre politicians and
being handed down through the ages as the backbone of a long string of
political systems. History is not a chain of autonomous eras distinguished
by distinct political systems. It is, rather, itself a massive, independent living
organism. History absorbs all the particular political phenomena that have
emerged up to that point and is tremendously influenced by them.
 decadence begins with physical labor / 129

Who was responsible for the war? Tōjō Hideki? The military? While both
surely bear some responsibility, the real culprit was undoubtedly the irre-
sistible force of history, that immense living organism stretching its ten-
tacles into every corner of Japan. Simply put, the Japanese were but children
who surrendered themselves to the destiny shaped for them by this his-
tory. Individual politicians may be lacking creativity, but politics itself has
throughout history exhibited creative outbursts, acted on desires all its
own and, like the waves breaking on the ocean shores, maintained its own
unstoppable pace.5

Ango’s anthropomorphic metaphor of history might be rhetorical but not

arbitrary. In particular, his analogy of history as the human body highlights
the idea that the responsibility for the war belongs neither to the militant
government nor to the Emperor, but to the general national constituents
of Japan in the name of “history.” Setting aside the dialectics of power and
submission, Ango is in accord with neither the postwar democracy advo-
cated by Maruyama Masao nor the Marxist view of historical material-
ism represented by Tōyama Shigeki. Remaining outside the revolutionary
impetus and other forms of sectionalism, Ango construes history and the
national polity of Japan as, to borrow a term used by Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari, an “abstract machine of overcoding.”6 Coupled with the
austere bushidō (the way and ethics of militants), the Emperor was another
device at the disposal of the politicians. In their discourse, those nativist
symbols provided a useful pretext for assembling the political apparatus
and subjugating the national constituents as shinmin (subjects ruled by
the Emperor). Ango’s intention is to disassemble this concatenation by
offering daraku (“decadence,” “lapse,” or “downfall”) as an antidote. The
focal point of his discourse is that the speech act of “ikiyo, ochiyo” (“live,
fall”). Then, the dictum is not directed at the cunning politicians but at
the collective Japanese people who renounced their own autonomy, being
yielded to the fictional construct of the nation. According to Ango, this
twisted ethos of the nation is actualized in quotidian settings by what he
considers a farce, which is exemplified by the practices of worshipping
the Emperor and dictating female chastity for their dead husbands. The
repetition of these forced performances reinforced the self-subjugation
of the Japanese to political power while negating their subjectivity as a
decision-making matrix. At this juncture, Ango assimilates, perhaps by
chance, the Hegelian dialectics of master and slave, with the implication
that the Japanese people’s identity could exist only vis-à-vis their psycho-
logical enslavement to the Emperor. In sum, his ardent dictum “live, fall”
articulates the necessity of rejecting the moral counterfeit. In “Discourse
on Decadence,” Ango’s appraisal of decadence marks a qualitative turn
away from the classical notion of decadence, which equated to the collapse
 130 / decadent literature

of an organic society due to the presence of deviant individuals or to the

fall of an overly mature civilization.7
Desire, be it carnal or material, is not a trivial matter in the post-
war construction of Japanese subjectivity. Immediately after “Discourse
on Decadence,” Ango published an essay titled “Dekadan bungakuron”
[Discourse on Decadent Literature] (1946), in which he lambasts the war-
time frugality stipulated by the government. In this work, Ango expresses
an unequivocal hatred of the “so-called healthy virtues, honest poverty in
the spirit of saving, endurance of deficiency and humbleness,” putting that
“those are all vices.”8 Japan’s defeat was inevitable precisely because these
“virtues of endurance” (taibō no bitoku) antagonize the material and physi-
cal desires basic to human beings. Such “a silly retrogression of the spirit”
(fuzaketa taika seishin) served as a primary obstacle to the progress of the
Japanese people.9 A love of extravagance and luxury is genuine human
nature that is worthy of praise.10 Similarly the valorization of virginity,
chastity, and a household based on legal wedlock disavows human sexual-
ity. Ango’s argument appears quite radical in that it offers a hyperbolic
negation of all social institutions. His revolutionary thought is based on
a materialist perspective wherein the indoctrinated virtues appear only
as artificial contrivances that are simply “neither practical nor useful”
(jitsuyōtekina mono dewa nai).11
In regard to the body politic, Ango’s contemporary, Tamura Taijirō
(1911–1983), provides us with a further perspective on postwar Japanese
Decadence. For his unrestrained depiction of sex and sexuality, Tamura
is considered the major exponent of nikutai bungaku (the literature of
flesh, carnal literature). The way in which his work accords with Ango’s
“Discourse on Decadence” and other postwar essays is particularly evi-
dent in his representative novella, Nikutai no mon [Gateway to the Flesh]
(1946). The story centers on the motif of collective prostitution and
therein interweaves postwar issues pertaining to the emancipated body,
to capitalism, and to a new subjectivity based on labor. According to J.
Victor Koschmann, in the journey toward building a postwar subjectivity,
many writers of the time, including those associated with Kindai bungaku
(Modern Literature), reduced humanism to “the lowest common denom-
inator of human existence” in an attempt to envision a positive future.
Common among writers of the generation is the sense of the “meaningless-
ness of all values.” They are certain that the passion of the self should be
understood as the only agent of meaning in the world.12 Having lost faith
in philosophies, ideologies, and the values associated with them, writers
such as Ara Masato placed great emphasis on the ego. Those metaphysical
concepts could neither save Japan from totalitarian fanaticism nor prevent
her from participating World War II only to see the misery of the defeat.
 decadence begins with physical labor / 131

On the same ground, for Tamura, who was discharged in 1946 after
completing five years of military service in China, no preexisting values
or thoughts were to be trusted, as they could not rationally restrain this
out-of-control nation.13 Derived from his experience on the frontlines and
the reality of postwar Japan, anything not grounded in the basic needs
of the flesh was an empty construct. For Tamura, all kinds of thoughts
(shisō) had failed to do anything benevolent, constituting only a “despotic
politics” (sensei seiji) that wielded power over the people.14 For Tamura who
had drawn on his own bare survival instincts, the reality of the flesh is the
only index of what human beings are. A paragraph in his essay “Nikutai ga
ningen de aru” [The Flesh is the Human Being] (1947) makes this point
clear:

The flesh is now an outlaw, rebelling against everything. Isn’t it true that
today the flesh is raising up banners and placards, beating the gong, and
waging a frontal attack on “philosophy”? Starving widows sell themselves
on the streets to feed their children. Somewhere a young man is work-
ing as a burglar so he can run off to Atami with a dancer. A “gentleman”
rapes and strangles one woman after another. A student sells wheat flour as
opium for ¥50,000 and then kills his customer rather than be exposed. The
streets are filled with homeless waifs and wild dogs who pilfer and collect
garbage. The flesh is pained and cries out; bodies collide, blood flows, and
sparks fly. Doesn’t this suggest that the flesh is now totally distrustful of
“philosophy”?15

Setting aside moral standards, all these activities constitute responses to

bodily needs. Then, these delinquent deeds are in one way or another also
rooted in a keen economic calculation. They appear to be a hyperbolic
deviation from the conventions of normalcy but in fact operate the logic of
survival in arithmetic terms. Insofar as the Japanese reality is reflected in
postwar writing, Tamura argues, it has nothing to do with Decadent litera-
ture (taihai bungaku) but is better understood as a healthy reality of human
beings.16 In the essay, he does not articulate what Decadence might be for
him. However, the ending of Gateway to the Flesh is highly suggestive of
his vision of decadence, wherein a transition “from numbness to sensation”
in carnal knowledge predicts the birth of a new subjectivity. Departing
from the primitive, animal-like flesh, the novella implies that decadence
belongs to the realm of sensation, suggesting that the will to pursue bodily
sensation is the indispensable precondition for a genuine downfall. In this
sense, the novella is an important bridge that encompasses three stages:
the historical rapture located in the emancipation of the flesh, the use of
the flesh in pragmatic economic terms, and the rise of Decadence that
traverses survival instincts and the capitalist logic of body politics.
 132 / decadent literature

Carnal Desire Goes Bare: Irrationality and

Primitiveness in Ango’s “The Idiot”
“The Idiot” revolves around an idiosyncratic interaction between the pro-
tagonist Izawa, a self-conscious would-be bohemian filmmaker who is 27
years old, and Sayo, a feeble-minded but beautiful woman. Sayo, the wife
of a mad neighbor, lacks the full complement of intellect and rationality,
and therefore the third-person narrator dubs her “the Idiot.” 17 Centering
on this woman, the novella visualizes the idea of downfall that Ango dis-
cusses in “Discourse on Decadence.” “The Idiot” is a hyperbolic embodi-
ment of an anti-rational flesh itself rather than a human being: she merely
features a diabolic sexual appetite and an instinctive fear of danger. In the
context of Ango’s postwar thoughts, she is apparently an antithesis to the
wartime suppression of desire, and her animal-like attributes are a sort of
outcry against the hypocrisy of Japan as a political machine. On the other
hand, the male protagonist Izawa, despite being an artist, epitomizes what
Ango considers the idiocy of the blind Japanese masses under the control
of the national regime.18 To dramatize the self-realization of the man, and
to thereby awaken the collective psyche tamed by the militant political
regime, the interaction between Izawa and the Idiot has a hermetic mission
in the story. In the Tantric Buddhism of the Mahāyāna, with which Ango
would have been familiar,19 a strong sexual drive is observed in the cult of
enlightened female deities, for example, in the cult of Vajrayoginī. Related
to the locale of the cremation site, the goddess represents both death and
impurity.20 As exemplified by Vajrayoginī, the sexual practices associ-
ated with Buddhist tantras are based on a metaphysics of nonduality.21
According to Elizabeth English, the purpose of tantric practice is to shat-
ter conventional dualism and perceptions of the world as either pure or
impure. Sexual practices are meant to radically challenge a mind imbued
with dualistic thinking, while deconstructing the innate dichotomy of the
subject and the object in order to open up the experience of a nondual
reality.22 Echoing the Buddhist metaphysics, Sayo the Idiot holds a similar
function in the narrative process in which Izawa is set free from his hyper-
self-consciousness. Her tireless sexual energy and dwelling in a pigsty-like
neighborhood associate her with impurity, thus hinting at her deity-like
potential. Through their sexual liaisons, she pushes Izawa into the life-
threatening situation. At the story’s climax, Izawa finds himself alienated
from his neighbors in the midst of an air raid. Finding himself on the edge
between life and death, Izawa realizes that his perception of the world is
based on a trivial sense of mie (vanity), a dualistic mode of vision compris-
ing only self and other. Unlike Izawa’s self-consciousness, the Idiot’s body
rejects any imperative to suppress desire and completely shatters the war-
time fidelity and chastity dictated to women.
 decadence begins with physical labor / 133

As Mircea Eliade states in Symbolism, The Sacred, and The Arts (1985),
modern art has discovered the presence of the sacred manifested in sub-
stance or materiality.23 Whereas his analysis focuses mostly on plastic art
forms such as sculpture, painting, or architecture, the argument combines
sacredness with the primitiveness of the flesh applicable to reading the
Idiot’s body. According to Eliade, after Nietzsche proclaimed the “death of
God” in the nineteenth century, the modern world abandoned the “hiero-
phanization” of substance.24 At that moment, traditional epistemology
began to obliterate religion as a legitimate index for interpreting tangible
phenomena. Aesthetic visions also underwent a significant shift, trans-
forming the sacredness in substance into a mere “object par excellence of
scientific investigation.”25 At this juncture, Ango’s Idiot is an idiosyncratic
narrative device, a simple substance of flesh that articulates pure desire
devoid of rationality. Simultaneously, mental impairment in modern liter-
ary discourse often suggests the presence and/or concealment of a quality
that transcends ordinary human attributes and thereby predicates an alle-
gorical meaning. Traits such as mental disability or irrationality are power-
ful tropes in the fiction of such writers as Melville, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and
Musil.26 According to Deleuze, mental or physical deficiencies in literature
imply a sort of refuge, an escape from regimented social constraints, thanks
to the alternative value systems such conditions offer. In a non-mundane
realm, narrative erases what Deleuze calls “a zone of discernibility” where
the line between ability and disability is blurred.27 With the reduction of
difference, the ultimate purpose of literature is to discover “the zone of
proximity, indiscernibility, or indifferentiation” between the human and the
non-human.28 This epistemic model is no less remote to Japanese anthro-
pologists, who acknowledge the semantic importance of idiocy as a potent
human attribute. Alienated from the social center, in pre-modern Japanese
society, the mentally impaired were often considered sacred beings possessed
of supernatural powers such as the ability to see the future, or it was thought
that they would be reincarnated as animals beneficial to the community.
Paradoxically, they were almost apotheosized in local communities.29 From
this viewpoint, it is not farfetched to interpret “The Idiot” as the trope that
reanimates the significance of irrationality, insanity, and idiocy.
With the hyperbolic image of irrationality, the Idiot plays a key role in
Ango’s postwar picture of humanity. In “Tennō shōron” [A Short Essay
on the Emperor], an essay published after Emperor Hirohito’s Ningen
sengen (Declaration of the Human Being) (1946),30 Ango describes the
Japanese psyche as in need of transcendental authority. What hampers the
Japanese people’s ability to achieve psychological autonomy is the tradi-
tion of “feudalistic hypocrisy” (hōkenteki giman),31 a collective subservi-
ence that systematically undermines individual subjectivity. The center of
 134 / decadent literature

this hypocrisy is the figure of the Emperor,32 an instrument of complicity

between the military government and the masses. According to Ango, the
most notorious species of hypocrisy became apparent when Japan surren-
dered to the Allies. The Japanese people hoped for an end to the war, yet
they passively awaited defeat in the name of the Emperor.33 To strip away
this self-imposed indolence, it was imperative for Japan to exorcize the
divinity of Emperor Hirohito, the ultimate symbol of the country’s will-
ful subjugation of itself.34 Whereas Ango denounces the Emperor as the
puppet of Machiavellian politicians who manipulated the nation, he also
acknowledges the necessity of God (kami) or a transcendental being to
the human psyche.35 However, Ango does not offer an inquiry into the
issue of religion even given his familiarity with Buddhism. “The Idiot”
stands out only as a discursive allegory with no clear affirmation of idi-
ocy as a transcendental scheme. Sayo the Idiot is literally an object that
facilitates Izawa’s experience of irrationality. Here, it is worth noting the
etymology of “idiot”: in Greek, ιδιωτης (idiōtēs) denotes “a private citizen,
individual,” from ιδιος (idios) “private.”36 Precisely because of her idiocy,
the Idiot remains free from rational structures of society. The contrast
between Izawa and Sayo is compelling in this sense. He is highly conscious
of how he appears in the eyes of others almost at a degree of vanity. On the
other hand, Sayo is capable of shutting out others’ surveillance thanks to
her idiotic nature, which paradoxically secures her privacy within society.
Kobayashi Hideo once defended primitiveness and savagery on the ground
that they are a powerful platform for abstraction and rationality, but what
he advocates is “the unconscious, mythological, and poetical mind” in
savagery.37 These qualities are totally absent in the Idiot as a narrative
trope of pure primitiveness in the bare biological condition. Limited in her
horizons, the Idiot conjures an unmediated atavism and ahistoricity in the
midst of the war. Thus, although she lacks a clear human consciousness,
her libido escapes the regimented structures of social norms and values.
Accordingly, Izawa, who engages in a sexual liaison with her, also readily
ignores the social code of female chastity and in doing so takes part in
civil disobedience. Sayo clearly represents a historical rupture, while negat-
ing authorial fiction by means of the irrational flesh. The irony is that
this woman devoid of rationality enacts a genuine will to power, a para-
doxical subjectivity through pure instinct. For Ango, the suppression of
instincts is a fundamental vice, as it goes against natural social evolution.
As an extension of “Discourse on Decadence,” in “Yokubō ni tsuite” [On
Desire] (1946), he praises Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut (1731), in which
the heroine’s fidelity to her lover is clearly separated from the materialist
pragmatism translated into her prostitution and her corresponding sense of
mercantile ethics.38 Unlike this illuminated “modern prostitute,” wartime
 decadence begins with physical labor / 135

Japanese people lacked insight into the dilemma between social rules and
their own subjectivity. As expressed in Manon’s progressive life philosophy,
social and cultural progress owes much to “vice rather than to order.”39 For
Ango, the real essence of decadence lies in an artificial effort to undermine
human nature and in a dissimulation of that truth.

The Decadent Ideal as the Void of Rationality

As we have seen, “The Idiot” embodies Ango’s attempt to unravel the fac-
tors inhering in the absence of subjectivity that had contributed to the
“overcoding” of Japanese politics and socio-cultural doctrines. Given that
the novella is a fictional explication of his thesis, “live, fall,” the decadence
represented therein is tantamount to exuberance, a sexual jouissance, and an
élan vital. One night in wartime Tokyo, Izawa discovers Sayo in his dwell-
ing, and she immediately becomes a fixture in his life as a sort of parasite.
She appears to be a gift out of the blue, as Izawa had very much wanted
a woman in his life. He takes her presence for granted, though, viewing
her as “a forlorn puppet made for him.”40 Seen merely as “a lump of lustful
flesh,” her body allows him to indulge in repetitive intercourse and anaes-
thetizes him to the misconduct rife in totalitarian wartime. In portraying
the Idiot’s lack of rationality, the narrative overthrows the Confucian pre-
cept to which Ango refers in “Discourse on Decadence”: “A chaste woman
sees no more than a man” (seppu wa nifu ni mamiezu).41 Her libidinal
body itself is Ango’s ideologue, as it radically subverts modern constructs
of rationality that should be actualized by well-regimented forms of the
body to reinforce rigid gender differences and divisions of labor under
patriarchy. According to Yōrō Takeshi, during the Meiji Restoration, the
human body became an instrument for positivist values, as exemplified by
military uniforms, physical training, and medical diagnoses.42 The subor-
dination of the body to the mind is also conspicuous in the realm of phi-
losophy and literary discourse since the eighteenth-century Edo period.43
Going against that restriction of the body, the Idiot is synonymous with a
primitive animal, an antithesis to a civilized mentality, to pragmatism, and
to utilitarian ability. Not only is Sayo unable to steam rice, she is incapable
of even waiting in line to receive rations.44 The narrative underscores her
existence as nothing but passive libidinal flesh:

She was always waiting. Merely from the fact that Izawa’s hands had
touched a part of her body, the woman’s entire consciousness was absorbed
by the sexual act; her body, her face, were simply waiting for it. Even in the
middle of the night, if Izawa’s hand happened to touch her, the woman’s
sleep-drugged body would show exactly the same reaction. Her body alone
was alive, always waiting. Yes, even while asleep.
 136 / decadent literature

When it came to the question of what the woman was thinking about when
awake, Izawa realized that her mind was void. A coma of the mind com-
bined with a vitality of flesh—that was the sum and total of this woman.
Even when she was awake, her mind slept; and even when she was asleep,
her body was awake. Nothing existed in her but a sort of unconscious lust.
The woman’s body was constantly awake and reacted to outer stimuli by a
tireless, worm-like wriggling.45

Thanks to the Idiot’s monstrous desire for sex and her indifference to oth-
ers, the protagonist’s vanity and petty self-consciousness stand out in the
narrative. Whereas Izawa constantly tries to escape his neighbors’ eyes
(seken no mie),46 the Idiot only remains “a lump of flesh.” The absence
of both her rationality and subjectivity suggests the impossibility of her
existing as the other (tasha) but only as a sexual organ.47 Therefore, her
metaphorical function, similar to the cult of Vajrayoginī, is to alleviate the
duality between the subject and the object and thereby push Izawa to real-
ize the insignificance of his excessive self-consciousness. In addition, the
Idiot’s status as “the madman’s wife” suggests her proximity to madness,
another clinical division between mental sanity and insanity.48 As Michel
Foucault describes it in Madness and Civilization (1961), the perception
of the insane in society changed significantly during the eighteenth cen-
tury. The condition of madness had been an integral part of society, but
the rise of positivism had separated it from the rest of society, drawing a
deterministic border between mental sanity and insanity.49 As if dodging
the commonplace perception of madness, after sneaking into Izawa’s tiny
compartment, the Idiot insistently remains in his closet.50 Her behavior is
a sign of retrogression to an animal-like nature, suggesting a quiet protest
against the societal gaze cast on abnormality. At the same time, her self-
confinement is an ironic display of her awareness that she is on the margins
of society. Such an implicit rationality is coupled with her elegance, which
is reminiscent of a Noh mask thereby alludes to a subtle sacredness.51 The
reference to Noh drama brings to mind popular plays such as Hanjo and
Sumidagawa wherein the insanity of women is a leitmotif that conceals
their rationality in order to recuperate their connection with the beloved.
Despite hints of an incipient rationality, the Idiot remains incapable
of communicating through language. This inability ensures her removal
from the socio-historical context, further reducing her to a primitive lump
of flesh.52 The absence of voice invites a feminist critique because she
appears to mirror male desire and phallocentric patriarchy. For example,
in “The Newly Born Woman,” Hélène Cixous argues that female passivity
is ingrained in the symbolic order of genders, counterbalancing male viril-
ity and activeness: “[e]ither woman is passive or she does not exist. What is
left of her is unthinkable, unthought.”53 Similarly, as Shōji Hajime states,
 decadence begins with physical labor / 137

the Idiot who does not possess a voice represents “quiescence,” and in this
she offers a contrast to Izawa’s agitated “mobility.”54 Nonetheless, the Idiot
remains even outside such a binary logic of genders, being perceived by
Izawa as merely “a bug”55 and “a mud doll.”56 Through such ready-made
similes of insignificance, she is again free from social contexts and thus
escapes the burdens of modern rationality. In stark contrast, obsessed with
the image of a rational self, Izawa is vexed by the presence of others. His
self-consciousness suppresses his genuine individuality and undermines his
originality in art yielding to epochal fads (jidai no ryūkō).57 Here again,
Izawa concretizes what Ango considers the element most characteristic of
Japanese history, the empty psyche of the masses who have renounced their
own will. Ango construes history as an aggregate of collective follies and
weak wills, and masked by a superficial rationality, Izawa represents the
collective mentality that distorts his genuine desire.
In relation to Izawa, the Idiot’s primitive flesh is the Grace, a divine
gift that defamiliarizes the absence of the man’s ontological substance.
Soon after meeting the Idiot, lacking any insight into this idiosyncratic
woman, Izawa quickly concludes that she is just innocent and honest, con-
vincing himself that her simplicity is the very quality he needs most.58
Metaphorically put, however, the Idiot’s unrestrained desire and child-like
peevishness are the personification of Ango’s precept “live, fall” as set out in
“Discourse on Decadence.”59 The novella is a poetic detour taken to reani-
mate this very thesis of decadence via the radical hyperbole of the Idiot’s
libido. In the climactic scene of the air raid, her pure survival instincts
explode, as displayed in her extreme fear and shrieking. Observing the Idiot
out of control, Izawa finds her total absence of inhibition to be abject.60
This instance offers an allegorical tableau of ahistoricity in the name of
the irrational, given that her presence transgresses social institutions and
the stages of human development. Stepping out of modern humanity, the
Idiot expresses a certain soteriological quality that potentially emancipates
Izawa from all kinds of societal constraints. Nonetheless, what the narra-
tive reveals is his adherence to the vanity of being a petty artist. Despite his
neighbors’ warnings, he refuses to run from the air raid:

“I’ll stay a little longer,” he said. “I’ve got a job to do, you see. After all, I’m
an entertainer and when I have an opportunity to study myself in the face
of death I’ve got to carry on to the very end. I’d like to escape, but I can’t. I
can’t miss this opportunity. You’d better run for it now. Hurry, hurry! In a
minute, it’ll all be too late.”61

Izawa’s self-aggrandizement is a petty play to divert the neighbors’ atten-

tion away from the Idiot with whom he is sleeping. But behind the scenes,
 138 / decadent literature

he nervously counts down the seconds to the point at which escaping the
raid becomes impossible.62 Here, Izawa’s fear shifts from the public arena
to his own life, which is threatened by American artillery.63 For the first
time Izawa draws on his own survival instinct, and thus he metaphorically
enters, in Deleuzean terms, a zone of indiscernibility wherein there is no
partition between human and animal. By now it is apparent that his petty
sense of shame is endangering his life. There, Ango’s third-person perspec-
tive intervenes in the narrative, referring to the war as a Grace that has
wrought a “healthy amnesia” (kenzenna kenbōshō) 64 in the Japanese people.
That is to say, in front of the life-threatening danger of the war, the national
doctrine that stipulated empty morality meant nothing and was left behind
the horizon of oblivion. The apocalyptic summit of the air raid is then a
radical rite of passage, which wipes off Izawa’s petty self-consciousness—a
metonymy of the collective Japanese mental condition of the time.
Izawa’s feeling of relentless suffocation and pressure can be understood
in terms of Foucault’s analysis of Bentham’s panopticism, a system that
deters prisoners’ attempt to escape by using their consciousness of being
observed.65 Izawa’s suffocation is due to the same self-consciousness, but
those who haunt him are only gossiping neighbors with no significance.
In this context, both the Idiot’s libidinal body and the physical crisis of
the war dislocate Izawa from mundane life condition. These narrative ele-
ments create an effect of defamiliarization, through which Izawa and the
reader see human reality as lascivious, petty, and empty. The subsequent
unfolding of narrative also reinforces this same point. Suddenly, the Idiot,
a primitive “lump of flesh,” turns out to have the will to live, a human
desire to survive and live with Izawa: “[T]his was the first sign of volition,
the first answer, that the woman had shown in these long, repeated hours
of terror during the day and night bombings.”66 Finally, Izawa escapes the
inferno with her and makes it to the outskirts of the city. Looking at the
Idiot who immediately falls asleep like a pig, Izawa recalls a childhood
experience of cutting into a live pig’s rump.67 Instead of screaming, the
animal had remained calm as if unaware of any pain.68 His daydream then
shifts to an image of two strangers engaged in sexual intercourse in which
the man is eating the woman’s backside. Although her body shrinks, she is
only absorbed by the sex.69
The grotesque images articulate Ango’s detached views on human real-
ity. To defamiliarize decadence, the narrative accumulates the primitive
traits of human beings, as though insisting that the sexual drive prevails
over other instincts. Nonetheless, only the closing of the narrative makes
it clear that humanity is not built solely on the flesh but entails will, hope,
and passion. Having escaped the danger, Izawa feels neither attached to
nor any affection for the woman, “[f]or he was devoid of any hopes for the
 decadence begins with physical labor / 139

future.”70 If we read the novella in the context of Ango’s postwar reflec-

tions, the idea of the bleak future goes far beyond a single individual’s
perception. In a soliloquy, Izawa represents the collective mindset during
the war:

The Americans would land, and there would be all kinds of destruction in
the heavens and on earth; and the gigantic love extended by the destructive-
ness of war would pass impartial judgment upon everything.71

It is noteworthy that the narrative repeatedly refers to the war as equal

to “gigantic love.” Positing the war as a sort of Grace, as in “Discourse
on Decadence,” Ango castigates the absence of subjectivity in the mass.
Ultimately, the novella offers no catharsis. In the abrupt last scene, what
the reader witnesses is the asthenia Izawa feels after the avalanche of
bombs: “There was no longer any need even to think.” 72 What “The Idiot”
extols is annihilation of rationality, in the ahistorical dystopia thanks to
the physical mass destruction by the war.

* * *

In the postwar literary discourse, other writers also considered annihila-

tion to be a cornerstone for historical change. In regard to decadence and
apocalypse, Takeda Taijun took an even more drastic position in the essay
“Metsubō ni tsuite” [On Annihilation] (1948). According to Takeda, wars
play an essential role in generating the world’s physiological operations on
a par with “digestion, menstruation, or yawning.”73 Even with her defeat
in World War II, Japan underwent only “partial annihilation” (bubunteki
metsubō), so that the nation’s expenditure of stored energies was not suf-
ficient for catharsis.74 Even so, the war at least offered a chance to open the
Japanese people’s eyes to “the more gigantic, the more eternal, and the more
holistic beings” instead of just to the national ideology and the political
institutions.75 To close this short essay, Takeda cites the first of the three
prophecies given by the celestials in Jātaka, the tale of the Buddha’s previous
life. The prophecy pertains to annihilation: it warns the common people
to show compassion and renounce egoism, as the world will be destroyed a
hundred thousand years from now,76 at which time, the universe is doomed
to collapse in the grandeur of history. What this prediction anticipates is the
emergence of the Buddha in a subsequent cosmic age. And, this first proph-
ecy is meant to induce an agnostically heightened wisdom, which points to
the great potential of annihilation in the world.77
For the vanguard thinkers of postwar Decadence and annihilation such
as Ango and Takeda, both the physical consequence of warfare and the
 140 / decadent literature

metaphysical construct of the apocalypse appear to play an integral part in

history. In their epistemic model, annihilation—a radical form of energy
expenditure, to put it in economic terms—is a much-needed rupture that
can rejuvenate the biorhythms of history. To this extent, decadence is a
restless phase that anticipates the irretrievable progression of history. In
this sense, the character “the Idiot” is an implicit pilot to the approaching
end. Nevertheless, as we have seen, she provides Izawa (and Japanese peo-
ple at large) with neither mercy nor catharsis. Within the circular motion
of history, the apocalypse effected by the war initiates the further down-
ward spiral of humanity; that is, the consequence of the defeat is the deca-
dence of postwar Japan itself. In this devastating vision of a ground zero,
how could Japanese people regain a sense of exuberance? How could deca-
dence facilitate a period of convalescence after defeat in order to generate
a renaissance of Japanese people’s subjectivity? Answers to these questions
must wait for the generation a few decades after the war, though a tentative
proposition can be located, as we shall see next, in another postwar case of
the literature of flesh.

From Survival Instinct to Pleasure: Tamura’s Gateway to the Flesh

Tamura’s nikutai bungaku (literature of flesh) expounds on his belief
that only the emancipation of flesh can relieve human beings of the
yoke.78 Ideologically resonant with Ango’s “Discourse on Decadence”
and “The Body Itself Thinks” (Nikutai jitai ga shikō suru), Tamura advo-
cates the ontological certainty of flesh and rejects all “thoughts” (shisō)
as fundamentally irrelevant to human existence.79 His position derives
directly from his five-year experience of the military life in China.80
This principle is unmistakable in his novellas, including Nikutai no
akuma [The Devil of the Flesh] (1946), Nikutai no mon [Gateway to the
Flesh] (1947), and Shunpu den [The Chronicle of the Spring Mistress]
(1947). In contrast to “The Idiot,” which reifies Ango’s dictum of
Decadence with a grotesque defamiliarized image of the body, Tamura’s
Gateway to the Flesh narrates the actual living body in full. From the
very beginning of the story, the third-person narrator accumulates a
series of vignettes that testify to the vivacity of postwar urban districts
where the resurgence of survival instincts is far more intense than those
that naturally permeated the people during wartime. Whereas Ango
asserts the necessity of decadence, Tamura unmasks a postwar reality in
which people began reconstructing everyday life at somatic and eco-
nomic levels. The modus operandi for the latter is underpinned by a
single fact: “There is neither law nor morality for people to rely on.”81
Insofar as the urban chaos is concerned, as John Dower documents the
 decadence begins with physical labor / 141

same postwar condition, Japan had entered a defining phase of social

decadence following the quasi-overnight corruption of wartime moral-
ity and frugality. What replaced those virtues were commodities that
promised to quench people’s thirst through prostitution, the black mar-
ket, the more moderate blue-sky market, and the kasutori culture of
garish eroticism.82 These belong outside the jurisdiction of the General
Headquarters of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (GHQ),
and precisely for that rhyzomatic vitality they are the symbols of the
new laissez faire economic spirit.
Gateway to the Flesh centers on a group of young female prostitutes
who live in a commune in an urban ghetto. The four girls, probably
war orphans, are frequently referred to as “animals” (kemono) with a
strong “survival instinct.” These bestial girls prey on men, whether office
workers, black-market operators, or factory owners.83 The girls’ sense of
morality lasted only during the war until they found themselves “work-
ing in munitions factories, getting stained with electric oil.” What has
remained to each girl after the war are only her body and her “fighting
spirit.”84 They are likened to animals even for their odor, due to their
habit of washing only their private parts.85 Given the animalistic quali-
ties, the girls embody a sense of postwar vitality in their chaotic everyday
lives, which are not subject to any clear social order. Nonetheless, the
paradox is that their communal life and prostitution are highly disci-
plined by the collaboratory order for “self-protection and survival.”86 To
sustain the order, the girls share certain rules: they do not inquire into
each other’s past lives, earn their money first of all, and curse the rest of
the world.87 The group’s solidarity is made possible by the strong sur-
vival instincts of each girl, which is equally translated into prostitution
as the sole means of making a living. As self-employed prostitutes, the
girls reject intermediaries such as pimps in order to trade in a way that
“directly connect[s] the producer and the consumer.”88 Here, the sur-
vival instinct is integrated with the capitalist impulse, which intends to
maximize profits. Each girl works as an entrepreneur by fulfilling the
responsibility of finding customers and selling herself. This mercantile
ethics holds the self-sufficient girls together, legitimizing their common
subjectivity as physical laborers.
Within this closed commune, prostitution constitutes the core of the
girls’ identity. Accordingly, in order to protect their business (shōbai),
the practice of offering sex to men free of charge is without exception
taboo. Thus, the men around them can be neither lovers nor boyfriends
but are at most allowed to be comrades who partake in the communal
life.89 On this ground, one of the girls, Kikuma Machiko, a 23-year-old
widow, falls foul of the group for conducting a sexual relationship with
 142 / decadent literature

a man without receiving payment.90 As a result, the group severely lynches

her. Another member Asada Sen, particularly denounces her, by bringing
up a paradoxically conventional moral issue: “Omachi (a nickname of
Machiko), have you ever thought about your late husband? How can you
do such a disgusting thing, if you thought about him who died on Iōjima
Island?”91 Her words represent the central tenet of the group; that is,
insofar as sex is a profit-making economic activity, it is a legitimate trade
that should be acceptable even to a late spouse. Machiko is considered
damnable by the group because she is a prostitute who has “indulged in
the secret pleasure of the flesh without receiving money.”92 This episode
could be seen as radicalizing Ango’s “On Decadence,” which denounces
the wartime moral code that prohibits widows’ liaison with other men.93
What the author Tamura astutely stresses here is the inquiry into money
in lieu of empty questions about morality. The capitalism is the sole
principle that governs the group, and so that the girls can think of their
bodies in terms of commodities and of very specific values: they estimate
their bodies as worth “40 yen a time,” the same as 400 grams of meat,
which can be purchased for the same amount. The equation leads to
the question as to whether they eat meat in order to sell their bodies or
whether they sell their bodies in order to eat meat.94 The meat they are
eating as this conversation takes place is from a stolen cow, and so it is
free. Yet, if 40 yen were to be invested, with the same earnings made
based on it, no profit would accrue from prostitution. Though the con-
versation takes place in a nonchalant way, it suggests an unwitting self-
dehumanization and the ironic result of mobilizing the survival instinct
without any gain. In fact, the emptiness of prostitution as a business
remains throughout the novella. Most significantly, the discipline insti-
tuted in the group is meant to protect the business of each member such
that no mercy can be shown to a transgressor. In the context of postwar
freedom, the group’s work ethics are ironically reminiscent of the war-
time austerity imposed on people by the nation’s military government. In
addition, more than money is at stake. For the sake of its economic ideol-
ogy, the group curtails its members’ freedom by even forbidding them to
seek pleasure from physical and emotional engagement with men. The
girls are subject to an unwritten law that forces them to accuse and hate
Machiko, and thereby show that they are entitled to enforce “the life
order” (seikatsu chitsujo).95
An unexpected rupture comes to the totalitarian group in effect when
Ibuki Shintarō, a returnee from the frontline, begins to share his life with
the girls. With his robust physique and presence like that of “a tribal king,”
he immediately captures the girls’ attention.96 Naturally, he destroys the
equilibrium of the group because the girls almost inevitably compete over
 decadence begins with physical labor / 143

him.97 Finding him irresistible, Suga Maya (Borneo Maya), the most con-
templative girl of the group, becomes erotically fixated on him:

Whenever his dark muscles moved, Maya took a deep breath. She superim-
posed the body of Kikuma Machiko onto him. Then, though it was due to
inebriation, she felt vertigo. Her brain lost its sense perception because of
jealousy. Her body was numb as if electrified, and her stomach throbbed
with erotic feeling. This kind of feeling was the first time for Maya.98

Having become sensually awakened, Maya immediately seeks to have sex-

ual consummation with Ibuki. In response to her aggressive seduction, he
responds to her in kind with an innate aggressiveness. During intercourse,
she experiences an unprecedented degree of sensation:

Borneo Maya was a perfect white beast. She stumbled, groaned, and roared
for the mystery, pleasure, and pain of her body in an almost sorrowful way.
She felt that her stomach was burning, melting, flowing like wax. She was
feeling this sense of fulfillment for the first time—no, Maya felt that she
was born for the first time into this world.99

Having engaged in sex without receiving financial compensation, Maya

must suffer the consequences in the form of a lynching. She is hanged in
midair, but even as she endures her punishment, what fills her mind is not
the physical pain but a sense of gratification at “being a dropout.”100 As
she loses her consciousness, the girl promises herself “not to renounce this
pleasure of the flesh, even if it means going to Hell.”101
Maya violates not only the economic principle of sex as a commodity
but also the group’s other unwritten law that insists on suppressing the
jouissance of the flesh. On the surface, the girls punish Maya for being
a traitor, but what actually drives them is jealousy over a comrade who
has “enjoyed the secret pleasure they have never experienced but instinc-
tively know.”102 It is only at this juncture of awakening to “pleasure” that
Gateway to the Flesh can fairly be considered unique in the postwar vein of
Decadent literature. Prostitution itself has nothing to do with decadence;
it simply articulates the survival instinct in the form of an economic trans-
action, though its significance tends to be likened to animalistic vitality.
On the other hand, Maya’s decadence is actualized through a process of
individualization, an active pursuit of pleasure coupled with doubts about
the existing economic paradigm. Unlike prostitution, which equals “the
struggle to live” (ikinga tame no tatakai),103 Maya’s “vita nova” (jibun no
shinsei)104 is possible given her will to attain carnal knowledge through
sexual pleasure. What differentiates prostitution from pleasure-driven sex
is clear here. The former is mediated by economic interest and, therefore,
 144 / decadent literature

creates a relationship based on a mathematical equation—as foreshadowed

by the juxtaposition of the price of the body with the price of a pound of
meat. In contrast, the latter is made possible by extra-material factors such
as volitional giving and receiving, eroticism, and affection irreducible to a
monetary figure.105 Exceeding any rational explanation, the pleasure is an
excess of its own potential to teach the girl about a world beyond the sur-
vival instinct. In this sense, prostitution is, in fact, a pretext in Gateway to
the Flesh, which ultimately depicts the girls’ awakening to the presence of
eros via the flesh. To dramatize this story of vita nova, the narrative begins
in a misleading way by portraying the postwar urban district through
images of jungle, survival, chaos, and unruly carnivalism. Together, these
images undermine any semblance of order, though the girls’ Amazon-like
prostitution clan is strict according to its own laws. In keeping with Ango’s
“Discourse on Decadence,” the undertaking of prostitution itself can be
viewed as a powerful reification of moral corruption for the sake of living.
Nonetheless, the order is a paradox reminiscent of Japan’s military regime,
or of its totalitarian structure of the nation during the wartime. The pseu-
do-militant regime provides the narrative with the dramaturgy of a politi-
cal oppression that suffocates the subtle human reality rooted in eros and
eroticism. Prostitution is—both Ango and Tamura would readily agree—a
healthy human activity rooted in élan vital, a basic survival instinct mani-
fested in an economic form. Unlike the basic human instinct, eros is not
simply presented here in the pleasure of sexual intercourse. Instead, it con-
ceals what Tamura calls the philosophy of flesh (“nikutai no shishō”), the
potential of expanding the survival instinct into a new realm of human
reality. That unfathomable realm is precisely what socio-political thoughts
(“shishō”) conceal from the eyes of common people. As Maya’s awaken-
ing makes evident, “decadence” (daraku) in Gateway to the Flesh refers
to a process of emancipating the self from the yoke of an economy that,
through the postwar milieus therein, makes physical survival imperative.
By virtue of carnal pleasure, the novella’s mission becomes apparent. It is to
recuperate a passion for one’s own flesh, situating the sensation at the core
of individual identity. Here, the living flesh itself is the labor, which resists
becoming subsumed under any socio-political regime.
 Ch a p t e r Si x
D ec ade nc e a s Ge n e ro si t y: S qua n de r
a n d O bl i v ion i n M ish i m a Yu k io’s
S PR I N G S N O W

Given its orchestration of history, cultural memory, and an apocalyptic

vision of the world, Mishima Yukio’s tetralogy, Hōjō no umi [The Sea of
Fertility] (1965–1970)1 represents a climax of twentieth-century Decadent
Japanese literature. With a narrative that leads to a gradual decay, the tetral-
ogy weaves a tapestry of encyclopedic knowledge of modern history and
religions, together with multifaceted cultural sources, and thereby reflects
what the author considers the constituents of decadence. The four stories
are connected to each other and thus create a sort of mandala, which illus-
trates the vicissitudes of respective modern socio-cultural phases in the
guise of fictional stories. Covering the end of the Meiji period through
the postwar 1960s, Mishima designs this ambitious work as a hermeneuti-
cal edifice of the world (sekai kaishaku) founded on the theory of reincar-
nation in Mahayana Buddhism.2 In each of the sequential four novels,
the protagonists repeat the process of death and rebirth, and, therefore,
experience karma in each given historical moment. This chain of death
and rebirth is witnessed by the secondary protagonist, Honda, whose con-
templative vision provides a metanarrative framework to the tetralogy. In
contrast, each of the four protagonists leads a life of impassioned action.
Each undergoes the cycle of rebirth, shortly after developing a distinctive
life philosophy and respective goal. With the exception of Isao in Honba
[Runaway Horses] (1969), who commits suicide, the protagonists live as
if they are making up for their own decadence and delinquency. Even the
vigorous will to power in Runaway Horses is presented as a radical devia-
tion from normalcy, and thereby explicitly endorses decadent narcissism
and its solipsistic worldview. Providing four archetypes of life experience,
Mishima expresses a holistic vision of decadence that moves toward anni-
hilation, preempting his own death in a fictional narrative form.
 146 / decadent literature

In the overarching structure, The Sea of Fertility renders the idea of a life
force and upholds the decadence of fictionality in a modern world driven
by rationality. This paradigm is cohesive to all four protagonists, each of
whom is trapped in the chain of reincarnation. They create ruptures in
the respective milieus, such that rebirth sets in motion a primitive vitality
incommensurate with the conventional social order. In this chapter, we will
examine this disruption by considering the subversive practices of economy
manifest in the wasteful consumption of life—a principal concern of the
entire tetralogy. All four protagonists are doomed to die young, and the
chain of death and rebirth is underpinned by an anti-utilitarian principle of
consuming bare life. The first novel in the tetralogy, Haru no yuki [Spring
Snow] (1967), is a highly wrought example of Decadent aesthetics in this
respect. Modeled on mid-eleventh-century fiction, Hamamatsu chūnagon
monogatari [The Tale of the Hamamatsu Counselor] by Sugawara no
Takasue no Musume, Spring Snow revolves around the forbidden relation-
ship between an aristocratic young man and a young woman betrothed
to a prince. The novel relies on the plot of classical melodrama; then, this
model is worthy of our attention because it allows the novel to interweave
socio-cultural decay with anti-rational economic practice, thereby lucidly
reifying the author’s vision of decadence. As we have seen in the previous
chapters, Spring Snow also centers on non-productive economic practices.
It clearly refutes the ideal proposed by Samuel Smiles and John Stuart Mill
wherein labor and productivity are necessary to the healthy operation of
a collective society. Simultaneously, by exhibiting sumptuous beauty and
sensuality set at the epochal threshold of modern Japan, Mishima implic-
itly claims his belonging to the genealogy of fin-de-siècle Decadence.

* * *

The Sea of Fertility drew critical attention after Mishima committed a

ritualistic suicide on November 25, 1970. The author’s stated desire was
to interpret the world through the esoteric epistemology of Mahayana-
samgraha (shōdaijōron), above all its doctrine of vijnapti-matrata (yuishiki
in Japanese, “consciousness-only”) concretized in the idea of reincarnation.3
However, as Nibuya Takashi points out, it is not the grandeur of history
per se that the author seeks to represent in the tetralogy. Through the four
connected stories of reincarnation, the narrative renders an “indefinable
reality” that undermines a “vulgarized Romanticism” rooted in nativist
imaginings of Japanese history.4 Underlying the narrative is an amorphous
phenomenal world that hovers halfway between purported reality and
interpretation.5 Accordingly, Spring Snow does not in essence concern the
specific socio-cultural conditions of a given historical moment. Thus, the
 decadence as generosity / 147

year 1912, in which the narrative is set, is depicted only as a transitional

phase from the austere Meiji to the effeminate Taishō period. In contrast to
the socio-economic pragmatism that governs modernity, a non-utilitarian
economy is instrumental to the narrative development, such that the novel
by no means celebrates production or acquisition from investment. Non-
practical consumption, in such forms of economic practice as squandering,
wagering, and destroying wealth, mobilizes the flow of life in the novel.
The subversive use of resources in Spring Snow attests to Mishima’s
philosophical allegiance to Georges Bataille and to fin-de-siècle Decadence
likewise. In La Part Maudite (1947) (partially translated into English as
Visions of Excess and The Accursed Share),6 Bataille argues that the bourgeois
mentality in capitalism displaced the archaic value of symbolic exchange
indifferent to the reproductive cycle of profit making. Bataille bases this
claim on Marcel Mauss’s observations in “Essai sur le don” (translated as
The Gift)7 regarding potlatch, a tribal practice based on prodigality, sac-
rifice, and excessive waste. These forms of nonproductive economy used
to be integral to ensuring social stability, as typically observed in Native
Americans’ potlatch practices, which involve obligatory giving, receiv-
ing, and reciprocating activities. This economic structure was integrated
into society in order to display a tribe’s bravery and generosity to other
tribal groups. The structure even included the destruction of wealth as
a pure opportunity to exhibit glory and pride. On the other hand, the
modern bourgeois economy undermined practices that do not lead to a
visible profit. Therefore, the opportunity to destroy wealth was severely
reduced, and the practice of excessive generosity was replaced by a “hatred
of expenditure.”8 Retrospectively resonant with Bataille, fin-de-siècle
Decadence also refuted pragmatic labor, calculative investment, and sys-
tematic production. Decadents were hedonistic and keenly aware of the
importance of fleeting pleasure, but they were also very conscious of the
necessity of labor if it were to fulfill their own aesthetic ideals and sensory
experience. Nicoletta Pireddu argues that these Decadents’ dispositions
are indicative of what nineteenth-century anthropology had discovered
to be the economy of unproductive expenditure, as observed in Paolo
Mantegazza, Vernon Lee, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and
Oscar Wilde,9 all of whom dissociated eroticism from any programmatic
outcome of productivity and envisioned it as an end in its own right.
On the other hand, nineteenth-century positivist discourses condemned
individualism as a dangerous rupture in what was claimed to be the organic
structure of premodern society. Citing Paul Bourget’s theory of decadence,
Max Nordau asserts that the overt individualism of the Decadents is inju-
rious to a healthy social life, the archenemy of a productive Gesellschaft.
An individual should be tamed as a social “cell,” and his or her energy
 148 / decadent literature

subordinated to a collective goal rather than to an egoistic self-sufficient

purpose.10 In the light of Nordau’s argument, the cult of individualism
among Decadents was outrageous for its refusal to use energy productively
toward a collective, utilitarian end. Decadence was, thus, referred to as
untamed entropy. Similarly, an excess of unusable energy weakened the
organic structure of society, effecting a chaos detrimental to the effective
functioning of the whole.11 Nordau regards Decadents and Aesthetes as
neurotic “ego-maniacs” whose entropy was responsible for their failure
to fit themselves for what a utilitarian society entails.12 According to his
diagnosis, egomaniacs represent both mental and physical degeneration,
and their extreme individuality is inadequate to the collective social vir-
tue of labor and productivity. An egomaniac “single organ” is prone to be
instinctive, and potentially triggers a collapse of the organic wholeness of
society.13 Parnassians, Diabolists, and Decadents are classified as egomani-
acs because their anti-naturalist style of art attests to their solipsistic vision
of the world.14 They tend to disregard the phenomenal reality of nature
because, according to Nordau, their impulsive nervous system is incapable
of digesting objective realities.15 Likewise, their art underpinned by “bas-
est instincts” and “pernicious[ness]”16 distorts an adequate image of what
the world is supposed to be. These positivist curses on the Decadents are
countered at least to some extent by postmodern ideas about social econ-
omy, which salvage nonproductive activities as an integral part of social
operations. At this juncture, Georges Bataille and Jean-François Lyotard
deserve our attention because their respective considerations of “cursed”
expenditure acknowledge the significance of this seemingly wasteful form
of investment.17 This invisible effect of expenditure is precisely what vexes
positivists like Nordau, in that a rational equation in mathematical terms
proves only loss. For our reading of Decadent literature, Bataille’s assertion
that “[h]uman activity is not entirely reducible to processes of production
and conservation”18 illuminates the understanding of economic practices
that are subversive in the context of capitalism. Departing from the princi-
ple of classical utility, Bataille radically contests the modern economy and
revitalizes loss and unproductive expenditure in a positive light. Mishima,
who did not have direct access to this Bataille’s theory, seems to have real-
ized this vein of idea in his Eroticism.19 The tetralogy is, no doubt, influ-
enced by this postmodern homage to general economy, a reconsideration
of what modernity left behind capitalist-driven social and economic
development.
The story of Spring Snow takes place in the last year of the Meiji era
(1868–1912), when the epoch gives way to the Taishō period (1912–1926).
In contrast with the early decades of the Meiji marked by the slogan of
“civilization and enlightenment,” the Taishō years were, in Tokutomi
 decadence as generosity / 149

Sohō’s description, the age of “the greatest [ . . . ] illness,” because of the

lack of “state ideals and national purpose.”20 In the cognitive map of mod-
ern history, the Taishō period is often associated with a pejorative image
of “powerlessness”21 or the age of decadence that arrives late to the mas-
culine age of Meiji as symbolized by General Nogi’s self-immolation. The
opening scene of Spring Snow calls forth this very zeitgeist, noting that
the protagonist, Matsugae Kiyoaki, is oblivious of Japan’s victory in the
Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), the nation’s milestone for the techno-
logical advancement and development of a modern military. From the
outset, Kiyoaki resuscitates a collective amnesia in regard to the nation’s
modernization efforts, and his presence insinuates Mishima’s historical
vision of the forthcoming Taishō era as “a weak-willed, lyrical” age of
effeminacy.22 As a sepia-colored photograph does, the narrative situates
the laborious age of the Restoration in the bygone past that can be recalled
only with melancholy and spleen.23
Kiyoaki, Mishima’s prominent decadent antihero, belongs to the gene-
alogy of fin-de-siècle Decadents who are bored with life and despise those
who do not share their aesthetic sensibility. Proud and arrogant, Kiyoaki
echoes Wilde’s Dorian Gray, a champion of aesthetes who boast of an anti-
utilitarian life philosophy.24 In Spring Snow, entrusted in childhood to
the family of Count Ayakura, Kiyoaki inherits an aristocratic heritage of
elegance. On the other hand, his biological father, Marquis Matsugae, is a
parvenu aristocrat who comes from a provincial family of the militant class.
Thus, Kiyoaki symbolizes the interface between masculine Meiji moder-
nity and feminine aristocratic traditions through which the coarseness of
his paternal legacy is tempered.25 This complicated background deter-
mines not only Kiyoaki’s artificial pseudo elegance, but also underwrites
the novel’s overarching theme of generosity for the other. Accordingly, the
narrative unfolds in explicitly economic terms, repeatedly reminding the
reader of Kiyoaki’s elegance as the most valuable legacy transmitted from
the Ayakura family. Kiyoaki is well aware of his own inauthenticity, such
that the entire story evolves around his efforts in quest of authenticity as
a genuine aristocrat. To fulfill the ideal of elegance, he rejects labor and
energy consumption in all their guises. His extreme individualism then
goes hand in hand with the belief that elegance can have nothing to do
with use or purpose:

His elegance was the thorn. And he was well aware that his aversion to
coarseness, his delight in refinement, were futile; he was a plant without
roots. Without meaning to undermine his family, without wanting to vio-
late its traditions, he was condemned to do so by his very nature. And this
poison would stunt his own life as it destroyed his family. The handsome
 150 / decadent literature

young man felt that this futility typified his existence. His conviction of
having no purpose in life other than to act as a distillation of poison was
part of the ego of an eighteen-year-old. He had resolved that his beautiful
white hands would never be soiled or calloused. He wanted to be like a pen-
nant, dependent on each gusting wind. The only thing that seemed valid to
him was to live for the emotions—gratuitous and unstable, dying only to
quicken again, dwindling and flaring without direction or purpose.26

In this passage, Kiyoaki stands out from the crowd of Decadent Japanese
heroes, especially those who fall into a state of dissipation with the vigor
of self-assurance and an absolute devotion to the cult of beauty. At the
beginning of the story, Kiyoaki’s decadence already displays the zenith
of elegance and individualism in modern Japanese literature. With this
premise, the novel sets in motion a Bildungsroman about this arrogant,
elegant youth, in order to articulate what Mishima sees in the essence of
decadence. For the decadent hero, the unconditional expenditure of his
resources means an ordeal, a necessary process to realize his aesthetic
ideal.
In Spring Snow, all the central actions in the narrative take place in a
frame of economy. This is most obviously the case with Marquis Matsugae,
whose every deed inheres in a display of monetary power. The most lavish
display is his spring party for which he spares no expense in entertaining
his guests, as exemplified by the dinner menu that offers a range of sump-
tuous gourmet cuisines.27 However, the parvenu aristocrat reveals what
is taken to be bad artistic taste by putting on an entertainment program
that jumbles Noh drama with geisha dance and silent movies.28 This pro-
gram reflects Mishima’s critique of the bourgeoisie: their affluence means
they can show off, but it cannot mask their absence of refinement. Count
Ayakura, a financial underdog, on the other hand, yields to Matsugae’s
arrogance. Granting Matsugae’s request, the count takes Kiyoaki into his
household without demanding any return.29 In so doing, Ayakura wields
the power of generosity, but in a quite subtle way. As the narrative gradu-
ally reveals, this generosity and investment make a powerful impact on
Kiyoaki, one that turns out to be tragic as in exhausting himself the pro-
tagonist hastens his own death. Through the power politics between the
two paternal figures, therefore, Mishima presents generosity, together
with elegance, as the most powerful attribute the genuine aristocrat can
exhibit.
In keeping with arguments offered by Mauss and Bataille, the rela-
tion between Matsugae and Ayakura affords an explanation of an archaic
economic practice based on expenditure rather than on the acquisition of
wealth. Expenditure, according to Mauss and Bataille, is closely linked
to the quantitative value system of conservation and reproduction.30 The
 decadence as generosity / 151

wealthy classes in primitive societies embrace the significance of generous

expenditure by integrating the sacrifice of wealth into communal occa-
sions such as “festivals, spectacles, and games.”31 These forms of expen-
diture were necessarily made at the cost of pain, and precisely for an
agonistic perseverance. Those who offer the wealth are entitled to glory, the
reward that “makes people the most rapacious.”32 Spring Snow emphasizes
the same dynamics of expenditure as displayed in the aristocratic power
politics in which wealth must be subjected to a series of destructive acts.
Be it money, body, or pride, each transaction must be settled with detach-
ment, forgetfulness, and gracious acceptance. For Matsugae and Ayakura,
these instances of generosity are a metaphorical practice of exchange that
sustains the equilibrium of power. Nevertheless, haughty Matsugae incites
Ayakura’s indignation by casually promising to marry off the count’s
daughter Satoko to “a bridegroom without equal anywhere in the world.”33
Matsugae proposes that “he” will prepare an exquisite wedding procession
and a “trousseau of golden satin,” such that Ayakura, the girl’s father, could
never afford.34 Deeply offended by these pointed insults, Ayakura plots to
destroy his own daughter’s virginity before Matsugae steps in to arrange
her wedding, entrusting his plan to his nurse and mistress, Tadeshina:

When Satoko grows up, I am afraid that everything will go exactly accord-
ing to Matsugae’s wishes, and so he will be the one to arrange a marriage for
her. But when he’s done that, before the marriage takes place, I want you to
guide her into bed with some man she likes, a man who knows how to keep
his mouth shut. I don’t care about his social position—just so long as she is
fond of him. I have no intention of handing Satoko over as a chaste virgin to
any bridegroom for whom I have Matsugae’s benevolence to thank.35

The motivation is pure revenge, but Ayakura’s plot sacrifices his own asset
at his own expense. This drastic measure seeks only the rival’s failure in
exchange for the loss of Ayakura’s own wealth, so to speak. This challenge
corresponds to the economic practices associated with potlatch as stud-
ied by Mauss. It refers to an act of gift-exchange and the consumption of
wealth as practiced among Native American peoples.36 Bataille also expli-
cates the social implications of potlatch, arguing that its purpose is that of
“humiliating, challenging, and obligating” the rival.37 Having accepted
the gift, the recipient incurs an obligation to make an even more extrava-
gant return to the giver. To overpower the other, potlatch entails “a sol-
emn destruction of riches,”38 and the squanderer acquires power precisely
because the consumption is dedicated to others.39 In Spring Snow, the two
aristocrats peddle a lavishness that expresses their own pride and desire for
glory, yet in a petty modern context obviously with no connection to any
 152 / decadent literature

sense of communal pride. At the very least, through his indifference to his
daughter’s virginity, a precious property in the patriarchal circle of nobil-
ity, Ayakura challenges the ascendancy of money generated by his rival
tinged with bourgeois mentality.
Unaware of the conspiracy, Kiyoaki and Satoko, who grew up together
in the same household as brother and sister, become sexually intimate. As
the story progresses, though unwittingly, they not only play their assigned
roles in Ayakura’s plot but also end up sacrificing their lives for their
liaison. Kiyoaki initially rejects Satoko’s desire for him, but realizes his
love for her when she and Prince Tōin are betrothed with the Emperor’s
approval.40 With the promise of becoming a princess, she has achieved a
status that Kiyoaki cannot match, and it is precisely this tantalizing dis-
tance that feeds his attraction to her. Satoko now represents for him “the
lure of the forbidden, the utterly unattainable.”41 In this narrative turn,
Bataille’s concept of taboo and prohibition is clearly present, and it ani-
mates Kiyoaki’s engagement in unconditional expenditure. By consuming
sexual love, Kiyoaki and Satoko are driven to wager social rank, body, and
mind, in exchange for jouissance. Their physical and mental resources are
consumed neither for reproduction nor acquisition, but only for the sake
of a precarious pleasure that is almost certain to disappear upon the ful-
fillment of desire. Coherent with Bataille’s unproductive expenditure, the
“libidinal economy” proposed by Lyotard acknowledges this surplus:

“Expenditures” are far from being [ . . . ] absolute liberations from the

reproductive cycle: the outpourings of pulsional intensities pouring towards
an alleged outside always give rise to a double process: on the other hand, a
more or less important proportion of these libidinal quantities is compen-
sated by a return, the daksina, payment for the lay, for the session, for words
themselves, when they concern a small change of language, the concept; on
the other hand, this process dissipates an irreversible and unusable quantity
of pulsions as heat, as smoke, as jouissance, in any cycle of this type. These
are on the circle, then, the effects of transmutation, barely interrupted by
expenditure as pure loss, that is, by extravagant jouissances.42

The aesthetics of decadence manifests itself in Spring Snow in accord with

the spirit of fin-de-siècle Decadents given that after the lovers’ sexual inti-
macy, each remains indifferent to locating any utilitarian purpose in their
pleasure. In material terms, their intercourse does not lead to any pro-
ductive outcome in the form of marriage or children. Discarding these
possibilities, they expend their energy exclusively for ephemeral pleasure.
Satoko soon finds herself pregnant, however, and to avoid scandal, she has
a secret abortion. Subsequently, she retires to a remote Buddhist monastery
and takes an oath to become a nun. The short-lived affair costs Satoko her
 decadence as generosity / 153

entire life, and her self-imposed excommunication separates her from the
privileged social status of the nobility. This loss of social identity is another
way of destroying individual wealth, an extreme form of dispossession.
Upon learning of Satoko’s oath, Kiyoaki hastens to the monastery, but
despite his entreaties, she refuses to see him again. Further, at the end of
Tennin gosui [The Decay of the Angel] (1970), the last novel of the tetral-
ogy, 60 years after the affair, Satoko, now in her 80s, briefly reappears
in the narrative and claims that she never knew Kiyoaki. Unlike prag-
matic potlatch, her amnesia expresses a complete detachment even from
the beloved. Her disavowal points not to an involuntary oblivion but to
a willingness to renounce her worldly life, feminine sexuality, and social
privilege. It is an implicit pronouncement of selflessness and dedication to
the other, implying that the spell cast by the vengeful father has been at
least figuratively broken.
Satoko’s detachment from worldly affairs exemplifies Mishima’s
Decadent aesthetics inasmuch as both ultimately refute the idea of use
in both material and emotive investments. Even as she enjoys a blissful
connection with Kiyoaki, Satoko understands that the pleasure can only
be ephemeral. She has no expectation of prolonging their intimacy: “I’ve
known supreme happiness, and I’m not greedy enough to want what
I have to go on forever.”43 As symbolized by the aborted fetus, Satoko’s
female body does not function for reproduction but exclusively for plea-
sure. Likewise, in Spring Snow, all purpose-oriented uses of the body are
thwarted. Kiyoaki’s sexuality also serves only for pleasure as his body leads
to none of productive outcomes. That is to say, the expenditure of semen
is a result of sexual ecstasy, but as symbolized by the abortion, their bod-
ies remain free from a cycle of reproduction and thus the lovers implic-
itly steps out of the utilitarianism inherent in societal demands. Pireddu
observes the same vein of generosity in the symbolic economy of fin-
de-siècle Decadence, where unproductive expenditure entails the investor’s
“forgetfulness” about and detachment from what he or she has invested.44
By the same token, throughout the tetralogy, Mishima projects the virtue
of detachment onto the plot, expressing, though he does not appear aware
of it, a fascination with the fin-de-siècle Decadent cult of pleasure that
stands against the bourgeois economy based on profit and reproduction.
Satoko’s amnesia in regard to her affair, though seemingly dissimulated,
reifies her own detachment. It is a gesture of extreme generosity indifferent
to what she has invested.45
In contrast to the heroine’s autonomy, which realizes Bataille’s notions
of “unproductive” and “unconditional” expenditures, the protagonist
Kiyoaki embodies multiple faces of the Decadent antihero who inherits
the fin-de-siècle susceptibility to pragmatic social milieus.46 Given also
 154 / decadent literature

Mishima’s obsession, it is obvious that the protagonist belongs to the gene-

alogy of proud and melancholic figures such as Andrea Sperelli in The
Child of Pleasure (1889) and Dorian in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).
Oversensitive, weak-willed, and prone to narcissism, these characters rep-
resent the archetype of the fin-de-siècle Decadent male. Despite his daring
act of “violating” the betrothed of the royal prince, Kiyoaki succumbs to
the Imperial authority without even attempting to resist it. Driven by com-
pulsive desire and emotion, he engages in a dangerous affair but in doing
so finds himself experiencing a sense of regret. In this turn of the story,
Kiyoaki’s soliloquy renders his lament for loss and repentance:

This year was mine—and now it’s gone! [ . . . ] I’ve been left alone. I’m
burning with desire. I hate what’s happened to me. I’m lost and I don’t
know where I’m going. What my heart wants it can’t have . . . my little
private joys, rationalizations, self-deceptions—all gone! All I have left is
a flame of longing for times gone by, for what I’ve lost. Growing old for
nothing. I’m left with a terrible emptiness. What can life offer me but bit-
terness? Alone in my room . . . alone all through the nights . . . cut off from
the world and from everyone in it by my own despair. And if I cry out, who
is there to hear me? And all the while my public self is as graceful as ever. A
hollow nobility—that’s what’s left of me.47

In economic terms, at this point in the novel, Kiyoaki still desires a return
for the love and time he has invested. At the same time, the soliloquy
reveals Kiyoaki’s vulnerability to both the patriarchal paradigm and the
aristocratic boldness of potlatch-like power politics. Then, the subsequent
narrative unfolds the process in which he symbolically learns, through his
dedication to Satoko, to adopt the principle of unproductive expenditure.
Out of desperation, Kiyoaki makes repeated visits to the monastery, even
though he knows that Satoko has already taken a religious oath. The scene
echoes the myth of Sisyphus bound to labor at a single unfinished task
forever as a divine punishment. Worn down by the physical toil of mak-
ing his way back and forth from the monastery, he collapses on the snowy
mountain road and finally dies in a train en route to Tokyo. And, thus, the
first novel in the tetralogy comes to a conclusion.
With this abrupt closure, the novel partially renders what “decadence”
means to Mishima. Kiyoaki’s premature death at the summit reinstates
the author’s fascination with early death, which constitutes one element of
his decadent aesthetics.48 It signals a variant of unproductive expenditure
in the form of ethical dedication to the other. Relevant in this regard is
Derrida’s Gift of Death, which posits death as an “absolute singularity”
irreplaceable and unique to the self.49 Insofar as death dwells in irreplace-
ability, it is individual responsibility that engages with the act of “tak[ing]
 decadence as generosity / 155

upon oneself. Within this context, death conceives the dual possibilities of
“giving and taking.” 50 In Spring Snow, the death of the protagonist at first
glance results from an excess of desire and transgression. Nonetheless, in
the toil of visiting his lover, this self-sufficiency gradually transforms into
the beginning of altruism and his desire turns toward dedicating his life
to the other. The shift parallels the notion of death as sacrifice, the philo-
sophical construct Derrida borrows from Emmanuel Lévinas: “the possi-
bility of dying of the other or for the other. Such a death is not given in the
first instance as annihilation. It institutes responsibility as a putting-oneself-
to-death or offering-one’s-death, that is, one’s life, in the ethical dimension of
sacrifice.”51 In this configuration, death implicates an economic relation,
conjoining the “absolute singularity” of one who offers life with the other
who receives death as a generous gift. Kiyoaki’s death is his own responsi-
bility, and semantically it becomes a gift for the other. His death originates
in the act of transgression against Imperial authority. However, his daring
taboo breaking, another form of potlatch destroying his resource, not only
challenges the rational other, but it also transgresses the self’s boundary.
His death is a result of the disequilibrium in this wager, an imbalance
between the cost of his life and the corresponding obligation of making a
return implicitly connoted to Imperial power. On a more intimate level,
there is his impulse to dedicate his life to the lover who has already, onto-
logically, sacrificed her life for him. Here, life becomes a symbolic catalyst
for the transmission of dedication. Kiyoaki loves her, and out of his sense
of indebtedness, he feels obliged to reciprocate his lover’s dedication by
making a return. His soliloquy reveals this sense of responsibility:

[I]f I [ . . . ] wasn’t able to see Satoko, I’d feel it was my fault. I’d tell myself it
was because I was insincere. [ . . . ] There’s no reason to have [ . . . ] regrets. I
have no other choice but to risk my life if I want to see her. To me, she’s the
essence of beauty. And it’s only that which has brought me this far.52

What we witness here is a transformation of his decadence underpinned

by arrogance and egoism. In a typical narrative pattern, fin-de-siècle
Decadents retain their personalities intact, remaining indifferent to the
external world with the exception of targeted objects of desire. Mishima is
no doubt fascinated with such Decadent self-sufficiency and the macabre
desire as exemplified in the image of Ayakura. In transforming Kiyoaki,
however, he shakes off the ready-made formula of decadent personae, and
instead projects the universal law of Panta Rhei, the phenomenon of things
in eternal motion, to mobilize the chain of reincarnation. In this sense, the
practice of unproductive expenditure in Spring Snow is inextricably linked
to a negation of an eternal material existence but preserves instead the
 156 / decadent literature

possibilities of the flow of consciousness.53 Then, death is an expenditure

for its own sake, equivalent to what Lyotard calls “a force” (puissance) with-
out the prospect of acquiring any profit from the investment of labor.54
Any use value of life is negated here, and that absence of meaning in death
and rebirth is what Mishima projects in the chain of reincarnation. At
any event, in Spring Snow, the surface value of life in utilitarian resource
is transformed into, in Lyotard’s sense, “an original gift, an irreversible
relation of inequality, making all equalities and equalizations illusory.”55
Just like Bataille, Lyotard acknowledges the entropic quality of labor (of
death): “[l]abor-force is exorbitant.”56 For Mishima, death generally plays
out as an excess that annihilates the tangibility of flesh. Simultaneously,
death exudes beauty as an excess of passion through the absence of the
lover who has already become a metaphysical existence. At the novel’s cli-
max, Kiyoaki wanders through the snowy Yamato plane like Sisyphus,
and in this scene physical labor and the sensual beauty of nature comple-
ment each other. It is the ancient poetic locus amoenus: ornamented by the
out-of-season snow, the man’s exhausted body appears at the center of the
mise-en-scène of the novel. Here, the weary man and nature expend their
physical resources equally, and thereby that dispensation fulfills nothing
but ephemeral beauty. Visualizing an excess of carnal desire and pleasure,
these images of expenditure inscribe the reality that all physical phenom-
ena are bound to evaporate. The visual images are the platform of excess
that renders the fate of unproductive expenditure, as nature ceaselessly dis-
penses its energy without any prospect of return.
As a notable example of postwar Decadent Japanese literature, Spring
Snow recuperates the ancient aesthetic value of what Mishima identifies
with tawayameburi (feminine elegance) —that is, the overarching ambi-
ence of the Shinkokin wakashū [New Collection of Poems Ancient and
Modern], an anthology of poetry compiled in the thirteenth-century. In
reference to the tradition, unproductive expenditure can be linked to the
narrative process of feminizing virility, as it is manifested in the mascu-
line impulse to transgress taboos yielding to sense and emotion. Shortly
before Kiyoaki dies, the third-person narrative reassures him that he has
been faithful to “emotion.”57 The value of emotion is also irreducible to
any material form of compensation, and thereby salvages the protagonist
from the guilt of transgression. Throughout the novel, Kiyoaki’s ontologi-
cal core is located in emotion where the diametrical opposition of agôn
and alea dissolves so that pleasure turns into a subjunctive mode of chance
freed from a rigid scheme of competition.58 The psychic condition of alea
renounces the vigor of the will, whereas the innate passivity of alea relies
on the daringness to wager resources even though the outcome cannot be
controlled. In Spring Snow, Mishima calls forth the dialectics between the
 decadence as generosity / 157

will and the unpredictability of destiny, and assigns prominence to the

latter. Kiyoaki’s effeminacy plays out through a synecdoche of late Meiji
Japan, the historical moment at which the virility of labor reached its peak
only to give way to the hedonistic ambience of the Taishō era. The erosion
of femininity is thus not arbitrary, but reflects the author’s consciousness
of history interpreted by the Buddhist preset of the phenomenal world as
ephemeral. Within these hermeneutical schemas, the world in Spring Snow
turns out to a downward mobility: human beings wearily renounce their
utilitarian wills and give in to the apocalypse. Resonating with Mauss,
Bataille, and Lyotard, Mishima envisions the modern world as an excess of
resources and desires. If it is to continue the chain of rebirth, the world is
in need of discharging that entropic energy in the service of transgression
and wager.

Mishima’s Indebtedness to Fin-de-siècle Decadence and Bataille

Mishima was one of the most proactive exponents of Decadent Japanese
literature in the 1960s and 1970s, in part through his association with
the literary circle Chi to bara [Blood and Roses] initiated by Shibusawa
Tatsuhiko, a prominent translator of the works of Bataille and of the
Marquis de Sade.59 In this circle, Decadent literature was engineered rather
discursively because Mishima incorporated Shibusawa’s theoretical grasp of
eroticism, anti-psychologism, and diabolism into his Romantic and lyrical
take on the genre. Nevertheless, his exposition of Decadence is clearly dis-
cernible compared with, for example, that of Buraiha [School of Decadence]
of Sakaguchi Ango, Dazai Osamu, and Oda Sakunosuke, who plunged
into postwar issues pertaining to social, political, and economic reality.
Unlike Buraiha’s exploration of eroticism via postwar Japanese ontology,
Blood and Roses with Shibusawa and Mishima privileged the pre-Freudian
notion of eroticism as the main concern of art. It is not an overstatement
to say that Bataille’s notion of eros had become the foremost antithesis of
Freud’s psychoanalysis, and it was almost apotheosized by the members of
Blood and Roses. Mishima was heavily influenced by Bataille’s eroticism
in its exploration of both the somatic and inner dimensions of human
experience. Espousing the position, in the magazine Blood and Roses, the
group members made a series of inquiries into “eroticism” in order to dis-
sect the essence of sexuality. In their theoretical understanding of Bataille,
the group understood eros as a notion independent from both biological
function and psychological reduction.60 According to Shibusawa, eroti-
cism belongs to the realm of surplus in human reality, and it can be likened
to a form of “play” and “luxury.” Ultimately, eroticism possesses no use
value and is irreducible to the objective facts of the body itself.61 The stance
 158 / decadent literature

is most clearly pronounced in the group’s manifesto published in the first

issue of Blood and Roses (1968), in which Shibusawa writes:

We are surely aware that a culture that dismisses eroticism is nothing but
an anemic, inauthentic one. As such we intend to use this magazine as
a critical device against current trends blanketing our culture: innocuous
eruditionism, ideological flunkeyism, and simply optimistic futurism that
have surrendered entirely to technology. From the viewpoint of eroticism,
an individual is always an existence disconnected from others. Even if an
illusion creates a momentary continuity, everything is born out of nothing-
ness; [without our acknowledgement of eroticism] the future gives birth to
nothing but a chaotic vision of Hell.62

Thus, the manifesto proclaims itself the enemy of scientific objectivism

and tawdry mass culture, which dislocated the significance of eros from
the modern consciousness. The unfathomability of eros traverses the limit
of scientific objectification and clearly disavows any overt inclination
toward positivism. At the level of neurotic interplay between civilization
and barbarism, the pre-Freudian recognition of eroticism appears to be
reminiscent of fin-de-siècle Decadence and on this basis innately offers a
critique of modernity. Consciously applying Bataille’s theory to literature
and visual art, Blood and Roses intended to demystify the human sensa-
tion of eros, which had been in danger of being subsumed by scientific
objectivism. Eroticism underlies the logic of unproductive expenditure,
and thereby upholds the manifest form of élan vital. It is untranslatable
in science but congenial to art, as it does not limit itself to representing
objective facts. In the light of the pure life force that presupposes no pur-
pose, the Freudian psychoanalysis that sets out benchmarks for normality
and abnormality is nonsense precisely because the a priori categories are
invalid.63 The manifesto further suggests that Freud’s sexual sublimation
merely enthralls moralists without directly addressing the somatic realities
of individual human beings.
The discursive construction of Decadence in Mishima is pointed out by
Shibusawa, too. As the founder and editor of Blood and Roses, Shibusawa
comments in his memoir about Mishima that the writer understood “deca-
dence” in quite broad terms. Mishima tended to bring a wide array of
literary tones into a single category of “ennui” and identified them with
the style of “decadence.”64 In regard to Mishima’s postscript to Hihyō
[Critique], a 1968 issue of the magazine dedicated to the theme of deca-
dence, Shibusawa points out that the writer was an avid reader infatuated
with the word “decadence.”65 Whereas his version of decadence was not
always lucid or consistent, Mishima embraced the idea as a hermeneu-
tical tool for apprehending history. He sketches out the raison d’être of
 decadence as generosity / 159

“decadence” thus: (1) it is a phenomenon common to the final stages of

every civilization; (2) it has held a cultural and ideological significance in
each historical period including in the context of Japan; and (3) it is an
epistemological index of history, from which every civilization including
Japan should explore a way out of degeneration.66
In Spring Snow, Mishima further complicated these ideas about deca-
dence with the notion of eroticism based on psycho-somatic experience.
There is also a confluence of the economic theme of unproductive expen-
diture in these two concerns; all these themes and motifs are closely inter-
twined in the antimodern vision of the late Meiji period. In the image
of the world moving toward the apocalypse, Mishima employs a number
of loan words and concepts from Bataille, such anthropological terms as
“prohibition,” “taboo,” and “impossibility.”67 These notions catalyze indi-
vidual lives, in that they make the continuity of life possible, even though
individual bodies are essentially “discontinuous.”68 In Mishima’s under-
standing, this force of eroticism, which conjoins two bodies, is unfath-
omable so that the “momentary illusion” belongs to the economy outside
an arithmetic reasoning.69 In the schema of eroticism, disjointed bodies
coalesce not to a reproductive end but to transgress the limits of biological
facts. Eroticism is essentially an ineffable experience that can be internal-
ized only by those who participate in the ephemeral moment. From the
viewpoint of economy, eroticism expounds on excess that emanates out-
side the physiological facts such as intercourse or orgasm. What animates
eroticism is, as Bataille puts it, an inner experience contingent upon con-
text that necessitates the notions of taboo and transgression as Mishima
keenly incorporates them in Spring Snow. With this intricate construct,
Mishima refutes a bourgeois economy and scientific positivism altogether.
The writer, therefore, undoubtedly belongs to the lineage of fin-de-siècle
Decadents, and he succeeds in transplanting the same vein of antimodern
discourse in postwar Japan. At this juncture, it is possible to draw a genea-
logical line from the nineteenth-century anthropological interests of the
premodern economy studied by Paolo Mantegazza, Bronislaw Malinowski,
and Marcel Mauss, the literary expositions of D’Annunzio,70 and the post-
modern rejuvenation of Mauss by Bataille. Mishima belongs to the end
of this lineage, above all because of his fascination with both the Italian
writer and the French philosopher. For them, a symbolic economy situated
outside the bourgeois pursuit of profit not only offers a hedonistic vision of
social operations but also plays an integral role in social protocols pertain-
ing to loss or squandering. Then, the nineteenth-century anthropological
discovery of a non-utilitarian economy coincides with Bataille’s notion of
“économie générale,” as both oppose the practice of “économie restreinte”
founded on reproduction and accumulation.71 When there is no need to
 160 / decadent literature

keep a balance sheet, in the scope of a general economy, excessive generos-

ity and expenditure are the legitimate modus operandi. The audacity of fin-
de-siècle Decadents and Mishima is underpinned by the general economy,
and the sovereignty promised by this unrestricted economy sustains their
erotic cult of beauty and individualism.

Transmission of Generosity through Malaise:

Mishima’s Homage to Fin-de-siècle Decadence
Mishima seems to be primarily influenced by D’Annunzio’s flamboyant
public persona. Similarly, his narrative also does not seem remote either
from the D’Annunzian cult of voluptuous beauty. Whereas there is no
evidence that Mishima had access to D’Annunzio’s The Child of Pleasure,72
Matsugae Kiyoaki of Spring Snow bears a striking resemblance to Andrea
Sperelli, the protagonist in the Italian novel. Each of these characters pos-
sesses the disposition of what Edward S. Brinkley calls a “healthy subject” 73
susceptible to external milieus and yielding to the will of others. Narcissistic
self-consciousness guards them against contemporary realities, and both
belong to a fading aristocratic line. Andrea embraces the motto of “Habere,
non haberi” (Possess, but do not be possessed),74 and, in his initial rejection
of Satoko, Kiyoaki behaves in a way that endorses this very credo. The aes-
thetics of self-preservation not only helps to protect Andrea and Kiyoaki
from external influences but also secures and cultivates a metaphorical
cocoon of individual domains. “The healthy subjects” are pure but naïve
and vulnerable to external contamination such as malice, vulgarity, and a
menacing power. Thus, it does not seem to be a coincidence that Mishima
and D’Annunzio equally present a metaphorical Bildungsroman in which
the protagonists face a number of pedagogical challenges from the others.
All the encounters, whether they hinge on women, power politics, or the
loss of love, are forced rites of passage that immunize the healthy subjects.
In the fin-de-siècle context, their naïveté means that they are bound to
contract contagious diseases transmitted by others in various economic
forms: excessive generosity, parsimony, and avarice, as well as absolute
indifference to both giving and receiving. For Mishima and D’Annunzio,
such susceptibility is an important quality of decadent antiheroes, whose
vulnerability to contagious disease promises their belonging to the lineage
characterized by the logic of aristocratic excess.
In Spring Snow, the dialectics between health and malady underlie the
surface plot. A metaphorical disease is ironically transmitted by the sen-
suality of Satoko, who is meek and rather submissive. She is far from the
fin-de-siècle archetype of the sexually aggressive and bloodthirsty female.
However, despite Satoko’s subdued nature, her role is precisely that of the
 decadence as generosity / 161

femme fatale whose allure motivates the protagonist to transgress social

norms. In the end, she outlives Kiyoaki, as he succumbs to her implicit
domination. Elena of The Child of Pleasure has the same effect on her lover,
Andrea, although she effaces her female subjectivity by her unfathomable
behavior.75 Whereas these femmes fatales possess beauty and voluptuous
sensuality, these physical dispositions are dispensed not for the goal of
reproduction but only for that of sexual gratification. Their bodies reify the
logic of unproductive expenditure, so that their sexuality contributes only
to the entropy of the biological function. What these women devour is the
virility of the male protagonists in exchange for an unconditional offer of
beauty and sensuality. Insofar as the novel makes this archetype of gender
politics possible, Mishima certainly designs Spring Snow as an offspring of
fin-de-siècle Decadence. Here, the author also implicitly participates in the
nineteenth-century current of classical positivism, particularly in regard
to Cesare Lombroso who posited women as innately ferocious and ata-
vistic compared with their male counterparts.76 According to Lombroso’s
criminological observation, female primitiveness contains a “germ of feroc-
ity” and affects male desire when a woman “provokes the primitive link
between desire and violence, between eros and blood.” 77 Notwithstanding,
Mishima shuns such a drastic representation of women, and instead assigns
to Satoko the metaphorical role of a meister, who implicitly guides the inex-
perienced Kiyoaki as he enters the unfamiliar social circle governed by
general economy.
As Barbara Spackman argues in her celebrated Decadent Genealogies,
the rhetoric of disease is a major theme that distinguishes fin-de-siècle
Decadence from Symbolism and Romanticism. In her analysis, this rheto-
ric is prevalent in the vanguard works of the period, such as D’Annunzio’s
trilogy I Romanzi della Rosa [The Novels of the Rose], Baudelaire’s essay
“Le peintre de la vie modern” [The Painter of Modern Life], and J. K.
Huysmans’s A rebours [Against Nature], as well as Nietzsche’s preface to
the second edition of The Gay Science, and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria.
The rhetoric of disease, according to Spackman, places emphasis on the
immediacy of somatic experience, clearly differentiating between itself
and the post-Freudian discourse meant to explore the realm beneath con-
sciousness.78 Mishima never openly acknowledged D’Annunzio’s influ-
ence on his work, at least not in regard to his aesthetics of Decadence.
In reality, too, Mishima’s fascination with the Italian poet-writer was
mostly limited to appropriating a public persona of D’Annunzio in social
and political arenas.79 Even so, we can still trace significant affinities
between the two, above all in Mishima’s frequent use of somatic motifs
such as sexual desire, disease, suicide, homicide, and convalescence, and
the material dimension of the body contemplated in Spring Snow and
 162 / decadent literature

in Taiyō to tetsu [Sun and Steel] (1968), among other works. For both
writers, corporeality predicates a powerful trope that is at the heart of
a dramaturgy worthy of driving the narrative of the general economy.
Andrea Sperelli’s convalescence follows an injury sustained in a duel over
a woman, staging “the scene of artistic creation, [ . . . ], and that of sick-
ness as the production of mere symptoms, of hysterical conversion.”80 A
disease implies the body’s temporal withdrawal from itself, a giving in to
the other. Paradoxically, this interstitial phase is the factor that advances
the artistic self. Abandoned by his lover, Kiyoaki also undergoes a period
of convalescence, during which he recovers from the physical and mental
damage he has faced.81 The period of convalescence follows an excruciat-
ing release of physical energy, in anticipation of a full recovery character-
ized by a new level of vitality. The phase can be likened to a liminal state
in which a simple arithmetic equation between discharged energy and
recovery is not an only possibility, but through which a certain surplus
can be expected. The whole process of convalescence implies a qualitative
transfiguration of invested energy, as Spackman calls it, “a ‘purer’ con-
templation” and “a sort of secular conversion” in an ontological sense.82
During the period of recovery, bodily investment, via sexual intercourse,
injury, and illness, sharpens the subject’s naiveté into an aesthetic ideal.
Finally, a keener insight to the others, and to the community he enters,
feeds the psychological growth of the decadent subject.
Kiyoaki’s energy consumption is, though implicitly, under the con-
trol of Satoko’s femme fatale-like power exercised through the intimacy
they share. She lures him both sexually and emotionally, fueling his
desperation by possessing and repossessing him. However, their sexual
gratification is not just evanescent; it also underlies the unconditional
squandering driven by malaise fin de siècle. In the novel’s implicit scheme,
Kiyoaki is a victim forced to give in to the sadistic impulse of aristocrats,
as symbolically marked by his physical death, which, in turn, attests to
the excessive consumption of the self. Through the labor of eroticism and
the transgression of a taboo, the return is neither material nor everlasting,
but jouissance and his martyrdom for the cult of beauty. Whereas beauty
reverberates in the recipient, that sensorial experience neither conserves
nor produces any tangible outcome. It simply discharges the effect for a
transient ecstasy.
In Spring Snow, as in fin-de-siècle Decadent novels, the image of the
hermaphrodite often reifies the abstract notion of a general economy in
excess. From the viewpoint of scientific positivism, dual sexualities within
one body are under the influence of degeneration and sexual confusion
indicative of “an atavistic return to the period of hermaphroditism.”83
Accordingly, the manifest form of hermaphrodites was considered a vexed
 decadence as generosity / 163

deviation from normal sexuality, a subversion of distinct biological gen-

ders. But this bodily deviation served Decadents’ fascination with excess,
precisely because the asexual excess was viewed as an embodiment of a fin-
de-siècle delirium indifferent to biological reproduction. In The Child of
Pleasure, the poet-aesthete Andrea is introduced as the voluptuous author
of The Story of the Hermaphrodite, which imitates the style of Poliziano’s
Story of Orpheus and represents the “delicacy, power and melody” of “the
choruses of hybrid monsters—the Centaurs, Sirens and Sphinxes.”84 These
legendary creatures mirror the fin-de-siècle anxiety over gender ambigu-
ity, reflecting largely male fears of empowered women. In Spring Snow,
too, there is a remnant of hermaphroditism, though it does not provoke
fear. By the pretext of Kiyoaki’s narcissism and love for beauty, here again,
Mishima insinuates Bataille’s theory of eroticism as a catalyst that con-
nects individuals:

At that instant, although totally engrossed, he was still keenly aware of his
own good looks. Satoko’s beauty and his own: he saw that it was precisely
this fine correspondence between the two that dissolved all constraints and
allowed them to flow together, merging as easily as measures of quicksilver.
All that was divisive and frustrating sprang from something alien to beauty.
Kiyoaki now realized that a fanatical insistence on total independence was
a disease, not of the flesh, but of the mind.85

The state of being one temporarily defies the harsh reality of living in
solitude, and mitigates the decadent man’s narcissism. In this narrative
turn, Mishima fully embraces the biopolitics of Bataille by rephrasing the
concept of eroticism. He construes its merit as “[t]he deconstruction of the
regulated life that establishes an order of discontinuity prevalent in our
limited individuality.”86 This idea of eroticism accords with the workings
of the anti-modern ethos that permeates Spring Snow: it “engrosse[s]” the
individuals and dissolves them into something diaphanous, and that is the
end of the mission of eros.
Despite his fascination with fin-de-siècle Decadence, Mishima was prob-
ably not cognizant of the integral role played by the theme of unproductive
expenditure. It appears that he intuitively captured the compelling theme
inductively by reading the genre. Furthermore, his idea of decadence was
inspired by images of a declining civilization, above all that of the Roman
Emperor, Heliogabalus, whose name Mishima had learned from Gibbon’s
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.87 Based on a discursive
assemblage of various sources, however, Mishima also postulated that a
socio-cultural decline promotes individuals’ self-assured deterioration and
cognitive self-assessment. Nearly ten years before he began to write the
 164 / decadent literature

tetralogy of The Sea of Fertility, the writer had sketched out his own ideas
pertaining to decadence:

It is inappropriate to conclude that decadence is an obsolete trend. That

is a thought of literary historians who consider the movement as a reflec-
tion of only the zeitgeist of the late nineteenth century. In any age and
any nation state, we find literary tendencies that desire a perennial decay.
Nonetheless, such desires do not render the vitality and the spirit of destruc-
tion. Decadent aesthetics comes to life only when the subject is degenerate
enough to ripen his sensitive life. It is at this time that his intellectual pride
can affirm his deterioration.88

Mishima’s view of decadence is applicable not only to the tetralogy but also
to his other works, such as Forbidden Colors, and his semi-autobiographical
novel, Confessions of a Mask. Above all, Spring Snow is of paramount signifi-
cance, as the novel aestheticizes the downfall of the masculine subject in the
wake of modernity, compensating it with an ascendant feminine elegance.
The zeitgeist rendered in effeminacy is the novel’s speech act, which articu-
lates the collective consciousness of the given historical moment passing the
peak of masculine vigor and entering a new phase of dissipation. The nar-
rative situates itself in this transitional phase, and at this very moment the
practice of unproductive expenditure announces only the arrival of peren-
nial decay in the labor of failed reproduction and unfulfilled royal mar-
riage. In this configuration of the epochal threshold, Mishima implicitly
claims his legitimacy via the poetics of depravity, that is, his place in the fin-
de-siècle lineage in the national context. In Spring Snow, the generational
shift from the bourgeois aristocrat Matsugae to the decadent Kiyoaki signi-
fies an atavistic return to the past, which endorses a graceful resurgence of
the old lineage. In this sense, the father is the one who represents the essence
of Meiji masculinity through his upward mobility and the rise of capitalist
power. In turn, Kiyoaki is an unexpected mutation, the result of the ready
contagion of Ayakura, who embodies the general resentment of modernity
in the guise of aristocratic refinement. Tacitly centering on the transmis-
sion of elegance and generosity, the novel puts its naïve protagonist through
a metaphorical rite of passage, and his transmutation is the very effect of
that narrative. In fact, in the process of transforming himself from homo
economicus to homo eroticus, and finally to homo ludens, Kiyoaki dares to
squander his life in the mentality of alea. As reflected in the title, “spring
snow” is the ultimate symbol of ephemerality in eros, which though tran-
sient pleasure is worth wagering one’s life for. The expenditure is rewarded
by pleasure for its own sake, be it aesthetic or sexual. It is a return of generos-
ity that claims no use-value, but is doomed to evaporate with each passing
second. This evanescence in life within perennial decay is ultimately the
tetralogy’s defining theme.
 Ch a p t e r Se v e n
Ca pi ta list Ge n e ro si t y: D ec ade nc e
a s Gi v i ng a n d R ec e i v i ng i n Sh i m ada
M a sa h i ko’s D E C A D E N T S I S T E R S

Taihai shimai [Decadent Sisters] (2005) by Shimada Masahiko (1961–)

invokes Ango’s “Discourse on Decadence” and overtly revitalizes
Tamura’s nikutai bungaku. Published six decades after World War II,
Decadent Sisters demonstrates that Shimada’s idea of decadence does not
remain ensconced in the revolutionary post-lapsarian narrative follow-
ing Japan’s defeat. The novel portrays a rebellion against wartime moral
codes and a bare manifestation of basic survival instincts. In revisiting
the nation’s shame, the novel stands on the author’s revisionist take of his-
tory, which can be insinuated only through the issue of taihai (decadence,
degeneration). As the thematic predecessor, postwar Decadence, above
all Tamura’s nikutai bungaku, outspokenly depicts the awakening of bare
life1 to the conditions of a self-conscious homo economics. In exactly this
vein, Decadent Sisters defies the frantic age of survival and the guilty turn
against morality. In revisiting postwar homo economics, and thus offering
a historical narrative, however, the novel has much to do with contempo-
rary issues pertaining to transnational cultural dialogues and capitalist
economy via postwar prostitution that catered to GIs. The “decadence” of
the novel’s title is misleading, as it deludes the reader through the rheto-
ric of catachresis. As the next pages articulate, the figurative significance
of “decadence” is inextricably linked to economic laissez faire, which
opens up limitless possibilities for reconciling the disgrace imposed by the
nation’s former enemies. As the narrative develops, the idea of decadence
transmutes to a surprisingly holistic structure of human interaction medi-
ated by monetary transaction. Offering the body as a way to penetrate the
other, Shimada presents history as nothing but a product of, to borrow
Lyotard’s term, the logic of the libidinal economy.2 Akin to an irresistible
sexual drive, the libidinal economy finds its roots in carnal desire but
resists any Freudian understanding of desire as expressed in archetypal
 166 / decadent literature

models such as the Oedipus complex. Instead of molding desire in objec-

tive or formalistic terms, this libidinal economy endorses unmediated
cravings, and as such does not function through simple mathematical
equations like investment and return, commodity and compensation,
or labor and wage. The libidinal economy operative in Decadent Sisters
further acknowledges the surplus values of affective, emotive, and peda-
gogic dimensions in prostitution. Then, what do these extra-material fac-
tors offer to “decadence”? Generally considered free values immanent to
human interaction, they are universal virtues. The female characters of
Decadent Sisters are given the epithet of “decadent” because their affective
labor is not unconditional but always conditioned by their economy of
happiness, whether in the pursuit of money, love, or long-term partner-
ship. Through the motif of prostitution in Decadent Sisters, first and fore-
most, Shimada does not underscore the binary polarities of the winner and
the defeated, but sheds light on the politics of capitalism and a utilitarian
ethics of labor. In the postwar context, “decadence” (taihai, daraku) also
turns back to the pessimistic implications of the historico-cultural epi-
thet, and replaces it with a more literal sense of a moral downfall from
conventional norms and ethics. A great emphasis is placed on exuberance,
which is kindled by a utilitarian effort to use the body and the mind.
These fictional twists of pragmatism are generally foreign to postwar left-
ists who, instead, attempted to reconstruct subjectivity through realism.3
Shimada’s attempt is highly ludic in this sense, and succeeds in construct-
ing his revisionist vision of the occupation period.

Pragmatic Generosity: Affective Labor

Is Not Free But in Need of Outcomes
As the title suggests, Decadent Sisters consciously rejuvenates the post-
war literary discourse on decadence. The novel’s overarching ideology
unequivocally refutes, in spite of the uplifting tone of the narrative, soci-
etal conventions and patriarchal doctrines. Sixty years after Japan’s defeat
in World War II, the novel fictionalizes a collective mentality in the ser-
vice of reconstructing life literally from the ground up, and thus echoing
Ango’s thesis, “live, fall.”4 As discussed in Chapter 5, Ango’s postwar posi-
tion pivots on a daring abandonment of the morality that was fictionally
codified by and integrated into the national ethos during the wartime.
Japan’s defeat had brought, Ango writes, “the matrix of truth called deca-
dence” (daraku toiu shinjitsu no botai), such that for the first time the birth
of unrestrained human beings became possible.5 Even though there is no
clear reference to Ango, his dictum remains too powerful to disregard in
Decadent Sisters so consciously termed “decadent.” Though his writing
 capitalist generosity / 167

appears to develop Ango’s postwar ontology, Shimada eschews any ambi-

guities in order to move forward from an abstraction to a concrete praxis
of labor, and further to a value-creating process that affirms the life to be
lived. The novel centers on a number of young girls who engage in sponta-
neous (that is, at least not physically forced) prostitution for American GIs
as a way to survive economically. By focusing on what is a taboo subject
for the defeated nation, Shimada, like Ango, reshuffles widely embraced
conventions relating to gender, sexuality, and family that are by and large
based on the rigid Meiji civil code. Simultaneously, Decadent Sisters can
be seen as reminiscent of Tamura’s nikutai bungaku, the principal concern
of which shifted from the bare issue of survival to the reestablishment of
a male–female partnership beyond carnal instincts. Rooted in Shimada’s
leftist concerns, the novel depicts the postwar reality that drives the girls
into a forced state of decadence. It can be argued here that insofar as their
moral corruption is not innate to them, “decadent” is not an appropri-
ate adjective but rather an ironic catachresis. To this extent, as Kobayashi
Takayoshi interprets it, the novel steps out of the paradigm of the postwar
ideologue, and instead creates an exuberant love story that articulates mul-
tiple spectrums of human experience brought by the war. With a relatively
lighthearted narrative tone, the novel ultimately celebrates the continua-
tion of history made possible by flesh and eros.6
The series of erotic events narrated in Decadent Sisters interweave affec-
tion, survival instincts, and utilitarian efforts in economic practice. Love
and sex are constantly consumed not only for their own ends but also as
value-added labor. Far from utopic, all the erotic liaisons in the novel can
be equated to a laborer-client binary, whose relations are constantly medi-
ated by fair economic trade. In the postwar context, the act of prostitution
inevitably maps out the power relations between the victorious and the
defeated, clearly implying that a giver of sexual labor is forced to serve an
arrogant recipient.7 According to Duus Masayo, the Japanese Recreation
and Amusement Association (RAA), which set up comfort facilities, that
is brothels, articulates the winner’s expectations and the loser’s subservient
posture in a dramatically binary way.8 As a symbolic marker of the defeated
nation, prostitutes in serving GIs tended to assume an underdog status, not
only vis-à-vis the Americans but also within the domestic reality of Japan’s
socio-economic hierarchy. According to historical fact, the Japanese gov-
ernment spontaneously implemented the RAA project, legitimating it as a
“breakwater” designed to protect “the daughters of decent families” (ryōke
no shijo o mamoru bōhatei).9 Behind the façade of dictums such as the
“New Woman” (shinjidai no josei) and “the future you create yourself”
(anata ga jibunde kirihiraku mirai),10 young girls were driven into sex labor
as it was their only source of income. In this light, comfort women as
 168 / decadent literature

sexual laborers have nothing to do with decadence. Out of pure necessity

to survive, those women utilized their own bodies as the only capital. The
postwar economic situation for them offers little space to negotiate with
the issue of morality.
On the other hand, Taihai (Decadence) is a slightly ambiguous adjective
for describing the protagonist sisters, Kumiko and Yukiko, in Shimada’s
Decadent Sisters. Decadence, as an epistemological benchmark, presup-
poses self-knowledge or self-consciousness and a distance from a value sys-
tem accepted by civilized society. As both prostitutes and business owners,
Kumiko and Yukiko deviate from the quasi-universal norm that considers
prostitution as base, even abject. According to the vague classification of
the RAA, they are considered the daughters of a good family (“ryōke no
shijo”) who deserve the government’s protection. At first, Yukiko, the older
sister, is shocked by Kumiko’s idea of transforming their parents’ home into
a brothel in order to offer comfort services to GIs.11 But Yukiko quickly
accedes and takes on the task of managing the facility. These events are not
arbitrary but underscore the sisters’ prostitution as a business undertaken
of their own free will.
The sisters deserve the epithet “decadent” for one clear reason. They
are objectively decadent because they take on the business of prostitution
as both practitioners and entrepreneurs without any sense of guilt. The
sisters are not only subversive in the light of history, but also figuratively
destabilize the semantics of prostitution by bringing affective factors into
the domain of profit-making. With the addition of extra-material values
to labor, their paid service diminishes the enmity between Japan and the
United States; therefore, the sisters are fictional agents that mitigate a gen-
erally assumed power relation between client and prostitute. Reflecting the
timeline of real history, in March 1946, the sisters find the right moment
to open their brothel named “Spring House.” It is the time when the RRA
facilities ban GIs from visiting in a bid to prevent the spread of syphilis,
and a new demand for private brothels arises.12 Unlike the public comfort
facilities run by the government’s subsidiaries, Spring House is situated
outside the political machine meant to protect the national polity by pro-
viding a collective sexual service. The sisters are motivated to operate the
house out of pure economic necessity, and in that respect they join those
who are active in the black and blue-sky markets. Of the two sisters, six-
teen-year-old Kumiko is equipped with a keen instinct to survive the post-
war chaos coupled with a strong determination to reduce the debt left by
their father, Kunio.13 Having reached adolescence, she is sexually mature
but still a virgin.14 With this pretext, the novel sets forth a Bildungsroman
that depicts her gradual transformation, following not only her develop-
ment as a sex worker and entrepreneur but also as a female who learns the
 capitalist generosity / 169

value of giving her body and affection to the other. Her social self develops
as she works in the spirit of homo economicus, not driven by greed but by
the urge to shake off the burden of debt. Having learned of her family’s
troubles, Kumiko prepares to become a prostitute by forcing herself to lose
her virginity. For this self-made rite of passage, she randomly chooses a GI
in a public park. At the very moment of the first intercourse, a series of
thoughts hover in Kumiko’s mind:

This is the route my mother also took before me, and my father also has
done the same thing to girls of the same age as me, his daughter. This is not
against filial piety for my parents. In short, because of those parents, this
daughter now exists. Now I am about to depart from them. Unless I lose
my virginity, I cannot live alone in ruin. Within five or six minutes, I, too,
can obtain a license to be a woman of darkness […].15

In excruciating physical pain, Kumiko tells herself that it is her “gift to

America.”16 In many social conventions offering virginity to a stranger,
without either emotional attachment or financial incentive, would be an
idiotic waste. Her intentional loss of virginity is an excess of generosity
that can expect neither a fair return nor any fair exchange. The point is
figuratively touched on by the GI who offers her only a pair of panty-
hose. Haruko (Oharu), a twenty-year-old prostitute with whom Kumiko
becomes acquainted on the street, reproves her, on the ground that her
waste of virginity inappropriately lowers the market value of the other
girls.17 Her teaching is solely based on economic concern but not on moral-
ity, and it, therefore, opens Kumiko’s eyes to the idea of the body as capital.
The girl’s first transaction takes place at the level of what Jean Baudrillard
calls death, an economic form “in which the determinacy of the subject
and of value is lost.”18 In exchange for her virginity, she receives empti-
ness. The result is the death of the naïve teenager who had once romanti-
cized the idea of losing her virginity as though she would be Cinderella at
the ball.19
The subsequent narrative portrays Kumiko’s further awakening as a
full-fledged prostitute as well as an entrepreneur. Her diary records various
job-related learnings, such as how to make customers ejaculate smoothly
and how to protect herself from their heavy body by using camellia oil.20
The other entries describe an episode in which she intimidates a customer
who tried to leave without paying,21 and the profits of the day.22 Her
growth owes much to Haruko’s manifesto-like statement that posits pros-
titution as a profit-making business:

From now on, we will use the occupation army’s wallet. Tokyo was occu-
pied by Americans, but we will occupy their hearts and wallets.23
 170 / decadent literature

The passage expresses both the economic and political imperatives that
govern Decadent Sisters. It reinforces the girls’ work ethic, legitimizing the
labor of prostitution literally as a “physical battle of flesh” (nikudansen) as
an adequate consequence of the nation’s defeat.24 On a subtextual level, the
girls’ work conveys a desire to develop a new relationship with the former
enemy, one based not on servitude but on fair economic trade. Finally, the
manifesto alludes to the philosophy of their prostitution, a value-added
commodity that goes beyond mere sexual intercourse. It should captivate
Americans’ hearts, not just their bodies. Aware that this non-material
dimension of her labor benefits both the customers and the sex workers,
Kumiko consciously incorporates it into her approach: “Look at their eyes,
talk a lot with them, laugh together, and we need to capture their hearts
by means of occasional coquetry and crying. That is totally reasonable.”25
The girl’s education, therefore, transforms her experience from that of a
desperate sex laborer to a locus for building a new social relationship with
the GIs.
Placing an emphasis on affective labor, Decadent Sisters implicitly
proposes ways to overcome Japan’s defeat, transforming this purport-
edly decadent business to a kind of fair economic practice. Nonetheless,
the novel does not rest on a utopic vision of the epoch. It rather reflects
Shimada’s historical revisionism underpinned by his denouncement of
the war. Unlike the protagonist sisters who are self-motivated in busi-
ness, Yukiko and Sachiko are portrayed as more subdued victims of the
war. Yukiko was forced to separate from a would-be lover because of the
conscription, whereas Sachiko had no choice but to work for a comfort
facility operated by the government. With these examples, the novel
implicitly denounces the nation’s engagement with the war. It deserves
people’s rancor as it made a direct impact on individuals’ physical and
emotional lives. Mitigating Ango’s terms, Shimada writes that the most
devastating aspect of the war was its prohibition of love and its negation
of female sexuality.26 In a tone of censure, the third-person narrative
continues: “The war deprived women of sex appeal and banned love.
Such a country is bound to pass. Even facing air raids or with nothing
to eat, perhaps girls should have kept falling in love [with men].”27 In
order to overcome the past and launch her postwar life, Yukiko, too,
steps beyond what had once been her limits. She consummates her love
with her former would-be lover, Gotō, who has returned to her from the
war. He is psychologically traumatized as he failed to fulfill his mission
as a suicide bomber in the special attack force (kamikaze tokkōtai). To
heal his pain of being a traitor and in hope of establishing a new life
together, Yukiko dedicates her body and love to Gotō: “I would like to
do many things for you, instead of only crying.”28 It is worth noting that
 capitalist generosity / 171

their first embrace is marked by Yukiko’s reflections on sexuality in a

historical context:

It occurred to her that she was also about to take the secret pathway that
everyone took. Mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, too, under-
went this darkness. That is why I was born. All the ancestors back in the
Edo period, the Muromachi period, the Heian period, and further the
Stone Age, followed their instincts and had intercourse with men. I am
about to join the end of this operation of love that has continued for some
thousands of years. No doubt, mother and grandmother must be observing
the situation of this room from the peephole of the other world.29

In Yukiko’s mind, the war is damnable as it cut off the chain of human
instincts and halted the continuation of life. But to recuperate the chain of
life is not love’s only end. Through Yukiko’s voice, the narrative unmasks
the utilitarian dimensions of human sexuality obscured by wartime asceti-
cism. She represents Japan’s collective resentment, as she regrets that the
war has deprived her of years she could have spent with Gotō. Instead
of happiness, the war has compensated the people by offering only an
empty idea of national polity.30 Like Ango’s position in “Discourse on
Decadence,” for Yukiko, such a political delusion lacks substance as it
has no relevance to the emotional and corporeal aspects of human reality.
Hence, she decides to act by “admiring and praying for someone who is
physically close,” instead of worshipping the Emperor.31
Though temperamentally quite different from each other, Kumiko
and Yukiko, each constitute a side of Janus’s mirror, which itself reflects
the rise of pragmatism in postwar mentality. They work in the interest
of their own well-being and extend that ambition to the effective use of
body and affection for their respective partners. This can be seen as a
backlash against the wartime doctrine of self-restraint and the apotheo-
sized Emperor, who appropriated the people’s resources in symbolic and
material senses. However, in their respective efforts, the sisters encounter
social barriers. As time goes by, Kumiko’s emotional attachment to Peter,
one of her GI customers, grows, but she is unable to ask him to marry her
and eventually commits suicide by cutting her wrists.32 In this, she is remi-
niscent of Madam Butterfly, who goes through a cycle of renouncement,
detachment, and self-pity. Kumiko restages the fate of her mother, who
engaged in an illicit relationship that appears to have ended in tragedy.33
For Yukiko, the consummation of her love does not result in any simple
happiness but marks a new round of afflictions. When her relationship
with Gotō deepens, he is suddenly arrested for the homicide of a former
colonel who had embezzled funds from the military. The dead man had
been in charge of the suicide squad, and it was he who had commanded
 172 / decadent literature

Gotō to undertake what turned out to be a failed suicide mission.34 As a

result of Gotō’s imprisonment, Yukiko finds herself waiting for him again.
From jail, he sends her a letter in which he wonders whether she has forgot-
ten him. As she reads it, Yukiko restates her position: “Don’t underestimate
me […]. I will never forget. Together with my anger, I will wait for [his]
return.”35
As the sisters set about the process of reconstructing their postwar
lives, the presence of their father, Miyamoto Kunio, represents the poi-
gnant passing of history, as his patriarchy in real terms came to an end
with Japan’s defeat in the war. During wartime, Kunio—whose full name
translates to “the nation’s man under Imperial authority”—produced pro-
paganda films in support of the government’s war effort. At the end of the
war, he was commissioned by the Ministries of Finance, Foreign Affairs,
and Transportation to recruit comfort women, most of whom were virgins,
from among the general public.36 The government-run comfort facilities
were set up to show, on the surface, good faith with the United States and
to offset the possibility that the GIs would perpetrate a mass rape through-
out the country.37 In working on this task, Kunio interviews a rural girl,
Sachiko, who applies for a position out of desperation. Following his sug-
gestion that she offer her virginity to someone she likes before becoming a
comfort worker, Sachiko asks Kunio to deflower her.38 In the meantime,
although later released, Kunio is detained by the GHQ for the bizarre
felony of eating an American soldier’s flesh—an image that foreshadows
his house turning into a brothel.39 To deepen his misery, a former sub-
ordinate betrays him. All these out-of-the-blue episodes appear to be a
farce through which patriarchal power is metaphorically stripped away.
In sum, Kunio embodies a negativity founded on disgrace, misconduct,
absence, and loss. Therefore, Decadent Sisters not only fuels the girls’ post-
war attempts to revitalize their lives, but also inscribes the powerlessness of
Japanese males and the mortification of the country in the face of defeat.
“Japanese fathers” had dedicated their energy to the nation; nevertheless,
they had utterly failed to fulfill their own material and emotional needs as
human beings. Their daughters are precisely the antithesis to such repres-
sion. To represent the nation’s dying patriarchy, Kunio is depicted as a
latecomer to the postwar will to survive. He is a powerless bystander who
must witness the new principles of the libidinal economy operative in his
own household.40
Decadent Sisters breaks through the wartime negation of sexual and
material desires in the form of mercantile effort. From the perspective of
economy, the novel extols utilitarianism in relation to the use of affection
and of the body. A prominent example is Kumiko’s laissez-faire spirit, in
that prostitution is divested of sentimentalism and moral issues, and is
 capitalist generosity / 173

instead shown as part and parcel of the social economy. It is no different

from any other mercantile effort in the postwar black and blue-sky markets.
Nor is it any different from entertainment such as movies and erotic pub-
lic shows. Likewise, Spring House functions according to profit-making
capitalist logic, made possible by investing capital—the body and physical
energy for sexual labor—in the business operation. This participation in
the social economy has great importance in the postwar context, above all
in the process the subjectivity of the laborer is reconstructed. In regard to
the formation of the subjectivity of laborers, once again, as in Chapter 4, we
can take into consideration what Marx called “the horizon of nonwork.”
According to Hardt and Negri, nonwork refers to the productive sphere
that goes beyond traditional labor theory and entails an assessment of the
process of production.41 On this basis, labor is construed as a “value-creat-
ing practice” mobilized by social subjectivity and by society itself.42 Then
labor is not just any activity, but it should be recognized as the process of
producing value that is socially and historically conditioned. When labor is
situated in this way, the prostitution in Decadent Sisters becomes not only
a matter of sex. Instead, it appears as a value-added kind of commodity.
Insofar as value is conditioned by socio-historical milieus, the value created
out of labor entails a consideration of the postwar relationship between
Japan and the United States. In the first place, prostitution makes visible
the assumption that the winner has the privilege of violating the defeated.
By sexually dominating Japanese virgins—the Imperial subjects strictly
tied to the moral code of chastity—the United States demonstrates its
power to trample on Japan’s masculine pride, subjugating it to the position
of an effeminate servant.
The value of commodified female bodies in postwar comfort venues
can be read through the semiotics of domination. Nonetheless, Decadent
Sisters traverses a general perception of postwar sex workers, which tends to
be reduced to the dialectics between the winner’s arrogance and the loser’s
subservience. The labor that Kumiko and her colleagues provide at Spring
House is not limited to arousing their customers’ libidinal drives or to
having sexual intercourse with them. On the contrary, as Negri and Hardt
acknowledge, the gender division of labor when subjected to feminist anal-
ysis can be read as showing that the girls are capable of offering their cus-
tomers “affective labor.”43 As noted earlier, Kumiko’s diary entries record
the aspect of labor that involves affective interactions with the customers.
Thanks to her generosity, a GI is afforded a glimpse of Japanese culture
because she teaches him a little about tea and kanji characters. The interac-
tion brings a joy to him and helps him not to feel homesick, while Kumiko
also feels a sense of fulfillment. Another GI, Bob, a frequent customer,
expresses his genuine sadness because he needs to leave for Texas soon.
 174 / decadent literature

In response, Kumiko offers a meticulous blowjob that even makes him

cry.44 Sachiko also connects with her customers in affective ways. Despite
the language barrier, by attentively listening to a black soldier, she also
finds a way of pleasing him.45 Yukiko does not work as a prostitute herself
but sustains her deeply emotional relationship with Gotō who is on the
run to escape his guilt.46 Even the sisters’ father, Kunio, finds an almost
soteriological hope in Sachiko’s body and gentle simplicity, despite the fact
that it is he who initially sent her to a government’s comfort facility.47
These details of the extra-material dimension of female labor are no less
important to the process of renewing the collective psyche of the defeated
nation soaked in chaos, rancor, and greed for money and sex. Throughout
Decadent Sisters, juxtaposed with the coarse social conditions of the time,
the girls’ affective labor constitutes a kind of revisionist wish-fulfillment
on the part of the author Shimada. Magnifying the individual cases of
intimacy, the novel redirects the official outlook of postwar history, which
has been outlined by the geopolitical relations between Japan and the
United States. In so doing, Decadent Sisters salvages the surprisingly posi-
tive perceptions of the other from the perspectives of both the winner and
the loser. There, a new social network arises in the hope of reconciling the
fierce enmity, precisely through the immediacy of the individuals’ body
and emotions. In a dialogue with Karatani Kōjin, Shimada states that it is
possible for people to lead a life alternative to orthodox industrial capital-
ism by “using one’s body and circulating it as though currency.”48 Through
such lives, Shimada proposes that it is possible for people to create a univer-
sal bond, rather than connecting exclusively with a single partner or with
biological parents.49 This utopic idea seemingly originates in Shimada’s
sympathy for Communism, and it is reflected in Spring House, a shared
space for communal life and labor. The fluidity likened to currency assigns
a meaning to a wider ontological notion that has the potential to break
through the postwar decadence rooted in the defeated nation’s self-pity.
Without the aggressive survival instinct prevalent in postwar literature of
the flesh, Decadent Sisters suggests that living through the defeat—a meta-
phor for history itself—entails a sort of exuberance, which daringly over-
turns the old paradigm of austerity and moves forward to a new logic of
survival based on fair economic trade. As Haruko symbolically puts it, the
defeated Japan’s new goal is to “use the Americans’ wallets” by captivating
those customers, but not by just offering obsequious sexual labor. What
underlies the statement is the value-creating principle of late capitalism, a
revisionistic response to the national shame hammered out by the author’s
leftist perspective. In the novel, “decadence” is a tricky epithet because
those decadent subjects are in fact a collective life force that embodies “liv-
ing labor.” Here again, the key concept in mobility is a surplus value, an
 capitalist generosity / 175

excessive energy spurred out of a matrix of human activity. The virtue of

Decadent aesthetics is to remain indifferent to that excess, generously let-
ting it evaporate for no purpose. Taking an exactly opposite view, Shimada
shows the ways in which that excess can be left unwasted in various dimen-
sions of human life, by bridging the unbridgeable gulf between nation-
alities, ethnicities, and politics, through the utilitarian ideal embedded in
capitalism.
 Conc lusion
Towa r d Ja pa n e se D ec ade nc e :
Th e D y na m ic s of En e rg y f rom Wa st e
to Li v i ng Labor

Throughout the twentieth century, Japan saw the steady development of a

Decadent literature due largely to the inception of individualism in social
life. As we have seen in our discussion of a number of notable cases, in the
wake of the Naturalist I-novel, “decadence” was adopted as a loanword
from fin-de-siècle Decadence. Japan’s European counterpart had flour-
ished by breaking with centuries of cultural tradition in the late nineteenth
century, side by side with the epochal consciousness that the continuity
had passed its peak. That historical consciousness was certainly foreign to
Japan, whose process of modernization in the realm of literature and art
had barely begun. Therefore, Japanese Decadent literature was intermit-
tently subject to European influence, but properly speaking, its lineage
cannot be considered an offshoot of the pan-European cultural movement.
Instead, “decadence” and “decadent” became a new ideological vocabulary
that helped Japanese writers in their efforts to develop their own self-reflex-
ive narrative style. Whereas in Europe, the precondition of the Decadent
movement was a mature civil society within which individuals could claim
their own place and style, for Japanese writers across the literary schools,
“Decadence” played a role akin to a speech act that provided them with a
socio-cultural platform from which a new subjectivity could be born. To
the same extent, an array of Japanese writers was deeply fascinated with
fin-de-siècle Decadent aesthetics for its flamboyant play of language and
artificiality that extolled a highly subjective view of the world. However,
with some exceptions, particularly in Taishō Decadence, Japanese writers
did not collectively assimilate European Decadence mainly because of the
limited relevance of the motifs and themes to the context of Japan. They,
instead, considered being “decadent” to be a foundation of the modern
self, and specifically employed the disposition in fiction as an effective dra-
maturgy, with the hope that the tentative state of dissipation and neurosis
 178 / decadent literature

would not be perpetuated. Such an interstitial phase, however, was essen-

tially rhetorical in that it suspended a positive outcome and thereby set a
series of pedagogical stages in the narrative.
Literature is a medium inextricably linked to the local conditions of
culture, history, and society. The genre of Decadent literature is, of course,
no exception. As we have observed, Decadent literature of twenty-century
Japan has in one way or another evolved around the implicit theme of
economy. Above all, the practice of excessive generosity is a frequent motif.
It certainly reflects Japan’s particular concerns in regard to the modern
transition to capitalism, cultural maturity, defeat in the war, and recoveries
thereafter. In the form of fiction, what these motifs reveal is the psycho-
logical disquietude Japanese writers felt in the turbulent twentieth century.
Without a clear sense of authenticity, this phase of decadence, as shown
in Satō Haruo’s A Pastoral Spleen, can be likened to a period of conva-
lescence in which ontological uncertainty grapples with external reality,
with an anticipation of the birth of the new aesthetic self. The state of
decadence equals a sort of liminality in which conventional norms and
values momentarily come to a halt. Subversive acts of dissipation can be
situated in this subjunctive phase of “as-if,” underscored by a play of the
imagined self. The period of decadence has a carnivalesque significance,
and it manifests itself in transgressive deeds such as adultery, debauchery,
squandering, suicide attempts, and excessive self-indulgence with objects
of desire or imagination.
The theme of labor and economic practice in Japanese Decadence
reminds us of the presence of resources unusable for an ordered society;
therefore, the literary discourse is a social niche that can salvage those
“accursed shares” dismissed as the useless. As Bataille and Lyotard each
argue, surplus energy accumulated in a society must be discharged in order
for that society to sustain itself. Decadents are those who are intuitively
cognizant of that law of thermodynamics in social operation. Despite chal-
lenging moral conventions, their anti-modern practice of general economy
(unconditional expenditure) plays an integral role in encouraging the
healthy continuation of society. As Sakaguchi Ango notes in “Discourse
on Decadence,” the political machine of wartime Japan—and of any civi-
lized society—had a totalitarian tendency that entails the constituents’
conformity to certain norms and values. In Paul Bourget’s view, to sustain
a healthy society, deviant individuals must be subjugated to the whole, by
directing their energy toward the fulfillment of a collective social goal. This
classical conformist model is precisely what Japanese Decadence refutes by
means of defiantly discharging energy and resources. As the chapters of
this book show through a number of examples, “decadence” is initially
an impulse that drives individuals outside the organic wholesomeness of
 conclusion / 179

utilitarian society. Their energy follows one of three major trajectories.

First, as typically shown in Naturalist I-novels, energy that remains out-
side the circuit of productive labor is simply wasted with no significant
outcome. Second, energy useless for collective society can be invested
exclusively in the pursuit of individual pleasure. An artificial paradise in
Taishō Decadence exemplifies this type of private labor. The negation of
collective happiness is compensated for by one’s own pleasure, oftentimes
in reified images of an object such as a modern hermitage or a Pygmalion-
like idol. Third, in lieu of personal pleasure, some Decadents invest their
energy unconditionally for altruistic purposes. This style of labor is not
innate to Decadents but involves a process of learning and maturity, and
therefore narrative may take the form of Bildungsroman, as is typical of
late Decadent novels, including Spring Snow and Decadent Sisters.
More holistically, there is a significant difference between European
Decadent literature and Japanese Decadent literature. For the former,
which is profoundly conditioned by moral views in Christianity, par-
ticularly those of Catholicism, dissipation and delinquency tend to be
castigated, and end up with allegorical consequences such as decadents’
banishment from society, death, and emotional catastrophe. Huysmans’s
A Rebours and Wilde’s Salome build their narratives on solipsistic desire,
and ultimately confirm the dangers of excessive individualism. These ego-
driven Decadents chose to live on the margins of society, and in so doing
they can preserve their own aesthetic ideals from the banal modern world.
Unlike the utopic self-seclusion made possible by the solipsism, Japanese
Decadents display their nonconformist attitudes from within society. Free
from religious tenets, indulgences with objects of desire are intricately con-
nected, not to their strong ego per se but rather to material conditions
of the society. Japanese Decadence is less aesthetically motivated than its
European counterpart, and its main mission is to unmask the dilemmas of
a collective society that has relegated nonconforming energies to the state
of the useless. The gap between ideals and realities is the cause of deca-
dence, and therefore the fiction takes a refuge in order to revitalize a pri-
vate domain of pleasure. But pleasure is almost always simply a milestone
for the birth of the socialized self. In contrast with the Baudelairean exalta-
tion of individuality, the Japanese writers envision an individual “artificial
paradise” as a platform based on which social identity and subjectivity can
paradoxically be fostered. Then, what mediates the self-knowledge is labor,
regardless of styles and methods.
Shedding light on the theme of subversive economy, this book has dem-
onstrated the possibility of tracing the genealogy of Japanese Decadent
literature. The focus is experimental and limited to the twentieth century,
but within the limit we have seen a common thread in this discursive genre,
 180 / decadent literature

a subtle continuity and dialogic interaction built around the consciousness

of being “useless.” What is clear by now is that the works examined herein
center troubled “decadent” protagonists whose energy and resources are
wasted within the contemporary circle of production and productive labor.
Their excess of individualism is incongruous with the modern society built
on capitalism, pragmatism, and utilitarian ideals. The writers take refuge
in individual autonomy, metaphorically acting as private laborers who are
willing to dispense energy and resources for their own value systems. This
praxis of labor itself is a kind of manifesto, which always conceives a poten-
tial to develop the self and subjectivity. Similar to Italian Decadentism,
Japanese Decadence does not presuppose any quiescent ontological final-
ity; instead, it almost intuitively presents that downward mobility can fos-
ter the aesthetic, as well as social, self, mainly through the virtue of loss
and consumption. In the context of modernity, the question of the self is
woven into Japan’s everlasting identity crisis vis-à-vis the West, as dem-
onstrated in almost all the works examined in this study. As in any other
culture, decadence appears perennially in Japan and its literary discourse.
Nonetheless, there are not always pejorative implications in the phenom-
ena. Collectively, twentieth-century Japan experienced a considerable
degree of energy consumption, as recalled in the survival from the war,
economic crisis, and domestic as well as international political tensions.
As in Ango’s radical assertion, the perpetuation of full-fledged decadence
might hold a soteriological key for Japanese Decadents, as such a daring
attempt recuperates an exuberance that has no interest at all in a use value
designed to prop up society. Ultimately, Decadents’ idle labor is a living
labor. Regardless of its temperament, the labor can be a political or ideo-
logical act. In the limit of collective social life, their dispensation of energy
anticipates the advent of individual autonomy.
 No t e s

Introduction The Making of Decadence in Japan

1. Nakao Seigo, “Regendered Artistry: Tanizaki Junichiro and the Tradition of
Decadence,” (Ph.D. Diss. New York U, 1992), p. 53.
2. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994,
p. 122.
3. Ibid., p. 123.
4. Ibid., p. 130.
5. Kamishima Jirō, Kindai nihon no seishin kōzō [The Structure of the Modern
Japanese Mind]. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1961, p. 183. Kamishima introduces the
word “reiki” (encouraging reinforcement) to describe the acculturation pro-
cess that appeared to further the social phenomenon of decadence in late
Meiji Japan. He argues that individualism, the decay of conventional ethics,
the corruption of public morals, and a collective neurosis, etc., were ubiqui-
tous by the end of the Meiji period. According to Kamishima, these social fac-
tors already existed in pre-Meiji Japan, but became more visible in the 1900s.
These indigenous factors were not transplanted but simply “reinforced”
through contact with the West.
6. In reality, Ariwara no Narihira lived in the ninth century (825–880). Ise
Monogatari offers a fictional version of Narihira and places him in the context
of the year 950 or thereabouts. Karaki traces Narihira’s decadent image not on
the basis of biographical facts but via the fictional image created by the author
of Ise Monogatari. See Karaki Junzō, Muyōsha no keifu. Tokyo: Chikuma,
1960, p. 10.
7. Fujiwara no Kusuko (?–810), a daughter of Fujiwara no Tanetsugu and the
wife of Fujiwara no Tadanushi, was Emperor Heijō’s mistress. She and her
brother, Fujiwara no Nakanari, vehemently opposed the Emperor’s decision
to leave the throne. After retiring, the Emperor returned to Heijōkyō, but
because of an amendment to the law related to the Inspector General (kansa-
tsushi) that was initiated by Emperor Saga, the two emperors confronted
each other. By using her political power, Kusuko intensified the antagonism
between them by encouraging Emperor Heijō to declare the Heijō sento (the
re-establishment of the capital in Heijō, today’s Nara). However, they were
besieged by Emperor Saga’s military force, and when their attempt at striking
back with the support of the Eastern squads became known, Saga was quick
 182 / notes

enough to prevent the plan. Consequently, Emperor Heijō was forced to enter
the priesthood, and Kusuko committed suicide. For more details about the
Incident of Fujiwara no Kusuko, see John Whitney et al., eds., The Cambridge
History of Japan vol. 2: Heian Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999, pp. 33–4.
8. Ibid., p. 10.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 15.
11. Ibid., p. 19.
12. Ibid., p. 59.
13. Ibid. The Mahāyāna Buddhist belief in mappō (the law of the end of the world)
had a profound impact on the pessimistic worldview that had dominated
medieval Japan. According to this belief, Japan had entered the age of mappō
in 1052. People saw the rise of militant powers, including the Miyamoto and
Heike clans’ hegemonies over the Imperial court in the late eleventh century,
and the subsequent foundation of the Kamakura shogunate (1185–1333) as an
inevitable manifestation of mappō. For a concise description of the concept of
mappō, see “Part III, The Medieval Age: Despair, Deliverance, and Destiny”
Sources of Japanese Tradition Vol. 1: From Earliest Times to 1600. Theodore De
Bary et al., eds. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, pp. 206–7. The
idea of mappō has influenced people since the late Heian period, and Karaki
suggests that the same historical consciousness was passed down to the era of
war of the late fifteenth century.
14. Ibid., p. 59.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Orikuchi Shinobu, “Nihonbungaku hassōhō no ichimen: haikai bungaku
to inja bungaku to” [A Dimension of Ideas in Japanese Literature: Haikai
Literature and Recluse Literature], Shōwabungaku zenshū vol. 4 [The
Complete Collection of Shōwa Literature, vol. 4]. Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1989,
p. 235.
19. Ibid., p. 237. Orikuchi’s definition of inja is rather broad and discursive,
inclusive of those who have drifted away from their social circles such as the
buraikan (vagabonds or ruffians) or the kabukimono (lower-class artists).
20. Ibid., p. 235.
21. Ibid., p. 242.
22. Ibid., p. 237.
23. Ibid., pp. 240–2.
24. Ibid., p. 242.
25. Karaki Junzō, Muyōsha, p. 102.
26. Ibid., p. 103.
27. Ibid., p. 106.
28. Ibid., pp. 94–8.
29. Edward Seidensticker, Kafū the Scribbler. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1965), pp. 27–8.
30. For details of Taigyaku Jiken (the High Treason Incident), see the discussion
of Kafū’s decadence and the note 24 in Chapter 3.
 notes / 183

31. Nagai Kafū, “Hanabi” [Fireworks], in Nihon kindai bungaku hyōronsen:

Meiji/Taishō hen [A Selection of Modern Japanese Literary Criticism: Meiji &
Taishō Edition], eds. Chiba Shunji et al. Tokyo: Iwanami, 2003, p. 292.
32. Katagami Tengen, “Mukaiketsu no bungaku” [Literature Without Solutions],
Nihon kindai bungaku hyōronsen: Meiji/Taishō hen [A Selection of Modern
Japanese Literary Criticism: Meiji & Taishō Edition], eds. Chiba Shunji et al.
Tokyo: Iwanami, 2003, p. 128.
33. Washburn, Dennis C. The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 5.
34. Akagi Kōhei, “Yūtōbungaku no bokumetsu” [Eradication of Decadent
Literature], Nihon kindai bungaku hyōronsen: Meiji/Taishō hen, eds. Chiba
Shunji et al. Tokyo: Iwanami, 2003, p. 245. In “Anatomy of the I-Novel,”
Hirano Ken makes distinctions between the shinkyō shōsetsu (state-of-mind
novel) and the shishōsetsu (I-novel) in Naturalist writing. According to Hirano,
the former can be characterized as a “harmonious type,” whereas the latter is a
“destructive type.” Those criticized by Akagi, such as Chikamatsu Shūkō and
Kasai Zenzō, belong to the destructive type whose writing centers on a wanton
life style and desires and they ascribe to the narrative method of “non-ideal”
and “non-solution” espoused by Naturalism. For details, see Tomi Suzuki’s
Narrating the Self. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 62–3.
35. Ibid., p. 236.
36. Ibid., pp. 238–9.
37. Karaki Junzō, Muyōsha no keifu [A Genealogy of Useless Men]. Tokyo:
Chikuma, 1964, p. 74.
38. Akagi, “Yūtōbungaku,” pp. 240–2. Another polemic on yūtōbungaku relates to
Kobayashi Hideo’s critique of the I-novel. He argues that the Japanese I-novel
(and thus Naturalism) failed to address the shakaikasareta watashi (socialized
“I’). See Kobayashi Hideo zenshū vol. 3. Tokyo: Shinchō, pp. 121–2.
39. Ibid., p. 246.
40. Ibid., p. 239.
41. Ibid., p. 244.
42. Yasunari Sadao, “’Yūtōbungaku’ bokumetsu fukanō ron” [The Impossibility
of Eradicating ‘Decadent Literature’], Kindaibungaku hyōrontaikei vol. 4
[A Collection of Modern Literary Criticism, vol. 4]. Tokyo: Kadokawa, 1971,
p. 271.
43. Ibid., p. 271.
44. Ibid., p. 272.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., p. 273.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., pp. 273–4.
49. Miyamoto Yuriko, “1946nen no bundan: Shinnihon bungakkai ni okeru
ippanhōkoku” [The Literary Circle of 1946: General Reports to the
Association of New Japanese Literature], Miyamoto Yuriko zenshū vol. 17.
Tokyo: Shinnihon Shuppan, 1979, p. 190.
50. Ibid., pp. 202–4.
51. Miyamoto Yuriko repeatedly employs the term “Decadentism.” I retain it
in my translation, although it should be considered equivalent to the more
widely recognized term, “Decadence.”
 184 / notes

52. Ibid., p. 190. My translation.

53. Ibid., p. 196.
54. Ibid., p. 202.
55. Ibid.
56. Miyamoto distinguishes between the European (French) bourgeoisie and
the Japanese bourgeoisie. Unlike the European (French), the Japanese bour-
geoisie is not entirely independent of semi-feudalism, such that the laboring
classes of the latter have the potential to establish the ideal of modern democ-
racy. She implies that the Japanese bourgeoisie is immature and that Japanese
Decadent literature is a repository for their ideological shortcomings. See,
ibid., p. 204.
57. Ibid., p. 202.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid., p. 196.
60. Kobayashi Hideo, “Shishōsetsuron” [On the I-Novel], Kobayashi Hideo zenshū
vol. 3. Tokyo: Shinchō, 2001, p. 382.
61. According to Noda Utarō, fin-de-siècle Decadence was welcomed by the
Aestheticists of Pan no kai, who understood it as “the liberal thought against
obsolete feudalism,” instead of as a socio-cultural movement that refuted the
bourgeoisie. See Noda Utarō, Nihon tanbiha bungaku no tanjō [The Birth of
the Japan Aesthetic School]. Tokyo: Kawade, 1975, p. 5.
62. Karaki Junzō, Shi to dekadansu [Poetry and Decadence]. Tokyo: Sōbunsha,
1952, p. 32.
63. Ibid., p. 39.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., pp. 12–13. My translation.
66. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Case of Wagner,” The Birth of Tragedy and the Case
of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1967, p. 170.
67. Ibid.
68. Karaki, Shi to dekadansu, p. 12.
69. Nietzsche’s philosophy was introduced to Japan by Tobari Chikufū
(1873–1955), Takayama Chogyū (1871–1902), and later by Morita Sōhei
(1881–1949) via his reading of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il trionfo della
morte [The Triumph of Death] (1894), which centers on Nietzsche’s will
to power and Übermensch. In Chapter 2, we will return to the issues of
Nietzschean decadence in conjunction with Morita Sōhei’s Baien [Sooty
Smoke] (1909).
70. Ibid., p. 38.
71. Ibid., pp. 38–9.
72. Karaki, Shi to dekadansu, p. 32. Karaki refers to Paul Valéry’s idea of history
as dichotomous, wherein primitivity is the age of facts and order is the age of
fictionality, as noted in Valéry’s “Preface to Persian Letters.”
73. Ibid., p. 39.
74. Ibid., pp. 39–40.
75. Ibid., p. 39.
76. Richard Dellamora, “Productive Decadence: ‘The Queer Comradeship of
Outlawed Thought’: Vernon Lee, Max Nordau, and Oscar Wilde,” New
Literary History 35.4 (2004): pp. 529–46.
 notes / 185

77. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx–Engels Reader, ed. Robert C.
Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978, p. 204.
78. Ibid., p. 205.
79. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur.
New York: International Publishers, 1970, pp. 109–14.
80. The chapters especially relevant to my analysis include “The Origins of
Capitalism and the Reformation” and “The Bourgeois World,” in Part 4,
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share vol. 1. New York: Zone Books, 2007,
pp. 115–42.
81. Ibid., p. 29.
82. Ibid.
83. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekel. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1983, p. 124.
84. Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, p. 201.
85. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Preface—Dionysus,” Labor of Dionysus:
A Critique of the State-Form. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1994, pp. 1–2 of “Preface.”
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid., pp. 7–11.
88. Charles Baudelaire, On Wine and Hashish, trans. Andrew Brown. London:
Hesperus, 2002, pp. 15–25.
89. Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination: 1880–1900, trans. Derek Coltman.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 179.
90. Ibid., p. 166.
91. Maruyama Masao, Fukuzawa Yukichi no tetsugaku [The Philosophy of
Fukuzawa Yukichi], ed. Matsuzawa Hiroaki. Tokyo: Iwanami, 2004, pp. 7–10.
92. See Fukuzawa Yukichi, “Gakumon no dokuritsu” [The Independence of
Learning], Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshū vol. 5. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1959, p. 377.
93. Ibid., p. 57.
94. Ibid., pp. 370–1.
95. Fukuzawa Yukichi, Gakumon no susume [An Encouragement of Learning].
Tokyo: Iwanami, 2005, pp. 147–8.
96. Maruyama, Fukuzawa, p. 48.
97. Ibid., pp. 43–4.
98. Thomas R. H. Havens, “Comte, Mill, and the Thought of Nishi Amane in
Meiji Japan,” The Journal of Asian Studies 27.2 (1968): p. 225.
99. Ibid., p. 228.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid., p. 224.
102. Hasegawa Tenkei, “Genmetsujidai no geijutsu” [Art in the Age of
Disillusionment], Nihon kindai bungaku hyōronsen: Meiji/Taishō hen, eds.
Chiba Shunji et al. Tokyo: Iwanami, 2003, p. 120.
103. Ibid., p. 120–2.
104. Ibid., p. 129.
105. Kinoshita Mokutarō, Kitahara Hakushū, Nagata Hideo, Hirano Banri,
Takamura Kōtarō, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, and Yoshii Isamu were the principle
members of the group.
 186 / notes

106. Noda Utarō. Nihon tanbiha bungaku no tanjō [The Birth of the Japanese
Aesthetic School]. Tokyo: Kawade, 1975, p. 16.,
107. Ibid., p. 11.
108. Ibid., p. 9.
109. Noda asserts that the members of Pan no Kai advocated the aesthetic prin-
ciple of fin-de-siècle Decadence, while practicing a self-indulgent lifestyle as
though it constitutes the core of Decadent aesthetics. Ibid., p. 10.
110. Ibid., p. 11
111. For the translated literary works included in the first issue of Subaru, see
Noda, Nihon tanbiha, p. 340.
112. Itō Sei, Nihon bundanshi vol. 13: Taitōha no hitotachi [The History of
Japanese Literary Circles Vol. 13: People of the School of Decadence].
Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1996, p. 230.
113. Noda, Nihon tanbiha, p. 102.
114. Ibid., p. 182.
115. Ōoka Makoto, Eureka 2.11.10. Tokyo: 1970, cited by Kawamoto Saburō in
Taishō gen’ei [Taishō Illusions]. Tokyo: Shinchō, 1997, p. 25.
116. Kawamoto Saburō. Taishō gen’ei [Taishō Illusions]. Tokyo: Shinchō, 1997,
p. 31.
117. Ibid., pp. 306–7.
118. Ibid., p. 308.
119. Ibid., p. 302.
120. Miriam Silverberg, Erotic, Grotesque, Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese
Modern Times. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2006, pp. 4–5.
121. Ibid., pp. 4–5.
122. Nii Itaru, “Modan eiji to modan raifu” [Modern Age and Modern Life],
Gendai ryōki sentan zukan Tokyo: Shinchō, 1931, reprinted in Shimarumra
Teru, ed., Korekushon modan toshibunka vol. 15 Ero guro nansensu [Collection
of Modern Urban Culture vol. 15: Erotic Grotesque Nonsense]. Tokyo:
Umani, 2005, p. 263.
123. Ibid., p. 266.
124. Yokomitsu Riichi, “Neo baabarizumu towa” [What is Neo-barbarism?],
Chūōkōron 46.11. Tokyo: Chūōkōron, 1931: pp. 244–5, reprinted in
Shimarumra Teru, ed., Korekushon modan toshibunka vol. 15: Ero Guro
Nansensu, p. 612.
125. Ibid., p. 612.
126. Silverberg, Erotic, p. 5.
127. Hashikawa Bunzō, Nihon Romanha hihan josetsu [The Prolegomena to the
Critique of the Japan Romantic School]. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1998, p. 18.
128. Ibid., p. 38.
129. Yasuda Yojūrō, “Bunmeikaika no ronri no shūen nitsuite” [On the Demise of
the Logic of the Meiji Restoration], Yasuda Yojūrō senshū vol. 1 [A Selection
of Yasuda Yojūrō’s Work vol. 1]. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1971, pp. 426–7.
130. Ibid., p. 425.
131. Ibid., p. 428.
132. Ibid., p. 427.
133. Ibid., p. 429.
 notes / 187

134. Yasuda does not specify the literary groups or circles subjected to his critique,
but it is possible to surmise that his critique is directed at Taishō kyōyōshugi
(Taishō Eruditionism) in general, and most probably at the writers of the
Shirakaba ha (School of White Birch).
135. Ibid., p. 429.
136. Yasuda Yojūrō, “Imada kagayakazaru reimei” [The Dawn Yet to Shine],
Yasuda Yojūrō senshū vol. 1 [A Selection of Yasuda Yojūrō’s Work vol. 1].
Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1971, p. 434.
137. Takahashi Isao, Kibenteki seishin no keifu [The Genealogy of Sophism].
Tokyo: Sairyū, 2007, p. 157.
138. Ibid.
139. See Yasuda Yojūrō’s “Konnichi no romanshugi” [Today’s Romanticism],
cited by Takahashi Isao, Kōseijutsu toshiteno taihai [Decadence as the Art
of Rehabilitation]. Tokyo: Sairyū, 2007, p. 141. The essay includes the
manifesto-like claim of the Japan Romantic School’s ideological stance
expressed in figurative language: “Today we are driven by an invisible force
to choose decadence over the utilitarian pragmatism of Japanese society and
its humanitarian democracy. We know today’s transgression and deception,
and therefore realize the glory of the past. We just do not intend to construct
a bright future at a metaphysical level, by calling forth our golden past. We
love our vitality and rejoice in today’s decadence, instead of longing for a
healthy will or conscientiousness” (my translation).
140. Literary decadence is in part identified with subversive styles of rheto-
ric deviating from conventions. A notable study includes Julian North’s
“Defining Decadence in Nineteenth-century French and British Criticism,”
Romancing Decay, Michael St. John ed. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999, pp.
83–94. Commenting on Désiré Nisard’s Études de moeurs et de critique sur
les poètes latins de la décadence (1834), North states that literary decadence
subverts Classical morality and aesthetics and replaces them with descriptive
details and erudite exhibitions. As a result, the style stifles “content.” Citing
Matthew Arnold’s preface to Poems (1953), North states that the autono-
mous operation of language threatens a common cultural heritage and so
brings decadence into writing. See pp. 85–93.
141. See Robert E. Carter’s “Introduction to Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku,”
Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku, trans. Seisaku Yamamoto and Robert E. Carter.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996, pp. 1–6.
142. Tetsurō, Watsuji Tetsurō’s Rinrigaku, p. 9.
143. Ibid., p. 25.
144. Ibid., p. 26.
145. Ibid., p. 33.
146. Ibid., p. 309.
147. Also see Part III, Chapter 8, “Rinrigaku no shosetsu sono 4” [Theories of
Ethics, Part 4], in Nishida Kitarō, Zen no kenkyū [An Inquiry into the Good].
Tokyo: Iwanami, 2003, pp. 167–82. In 1911, nearly 40 years before Watsuji’s
Rinrigaku, Nishida also rejects the sheer formulation of individualism based
on the pleasure-seeking nature of human beings. Refuting Bentham’s and
Mill’s qualitative theories of pleasure, Nishida argues that there are altruistic
interests and ideals beyond the egoistic pursuit of pleasure.
 188 / notes

148. In “On Decadence,” Sakaguchi does not refer to “daraku” (literally “fall”
or “downfall”) by the word, dekadansu (decadence). However, in another
essay, “Dekadan bungakuron” (“On Decadent Literature”) published in the
literary magazine Shinchō in 1946, Sakaguchi employs the word in katakana
(ᄽᄡᄶᅩᄯ) and explicates the notion of “daraku” that he had outlined
in “On Decadence.” Thus, he appears to equate dekadansu with daraku,
signifying the absence of human realities and dissimulation for the sake of
empty moral values in the Japanese mentality. See the essay in Sakaguchi
Ango zenshū vol. 4. Tokyo: Chikuma, 1998, pp. 207–17.
149. Sakaguchi Ango, “Darakuron” [On Decadence], Sakaguchi Ango zenshū vol.
4. Tokyo: Chikuma, 1998, p. 55.
150. Ibid., p. 55.
151. Ibid.
152. Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, Erosu no kaibou [The Anatomy of Eros]. Tokyo:
Kawade, 1990, p. 38.
153. Ibid.
154. Shibusawa, “Chi to bara sengen” [The Manifesto of Blood and Roses], Chi
to bara korekushon vol. 1 [The Collection of Blood and Roses Magazine
vol. 1], Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, ed. Tokyo: Kawade, 2005, pp. 14–15. My
translation.
155. Georges Bataille, Erotism, trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights,
1986, p. 37.
156. For example, the first issue of Chi to bara features essays including Shibusawa
Tatsuhiko’s “Gōmon ni tsuite” [On Torture], Inagaki Taruho’s “Aphrodite/
Urania,” Mishima Yukio’s “All Japanese Are Perverse,” Tanemura Suehiro’s
“Dokushinsha no kikai” [Bachelors’ Machinery]. Visual works include pho-
tography by Hosoe Eikō and paintings by Paul Delvaux, among others.
157. Francesco Bruno, Il decadentismo in Italia e in Europa. Naples: Edizioni
Scientifiche Italiane, 1998, p. 17.
158. Emilio Gentile, “The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism
to Fascism,” trans. Lawrence Rainey, Modernism/Modernity 1.3 (1994):
p. 51.
159. Walter Binni, La poetica del decadentismo. Florence: Sansoni, 1968, p. 45.
160. Mario Praz, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. Milan:
Rizzoli, 2009.
161. Ibid., p. 53.
162. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde,
Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1987,
p. 216. He rephrases Luigi Russo’s view from “Letteratura narrativa della
nuova Italia” and “Tendenze europeizzanti della nuova letteratura italiana”
Ritratti i disegni storici. Bari: Laterza, 1946, pp. 199–205.
163. Ibid., p. 217.
164. Max Nordau, Degeneration, trans. George L. Mosse. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1993, pp. 296–337.
165. Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-
de-Siècle Vienna, trans. Rosemary Morris. New York: Continuum, 1993,
pp. 1–2.
166. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, p. 154.
 notes / 189

167. Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 2002, p. 151.
168. The following studies interpret decadence as a phase of decay in the cyclic
structure of history: Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an
Epithet. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979, p. 5.; Bernheimer,
Decadent Subjects, p. 5.; R. D. R Thornton, The Decadent Dilemma. London:
Edward Arnold, 1983, p. 1.
169. Thornton, Decadent Dilemma, p. 1.
170. David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism. Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1995), p. 7.
171. Ibid., pp. 7–10.
172. Havelock Ellis, Views and Reviews: A Selection of Uncollected Articles,
1884–1932. London: D. Harmsworth, 1932, pp. 51–2.
173. John Stuart Mill stresses the legitimacy of a society based on social utility.
He suggests that efficient labor on the part of the constituents and fair distri-
bution of compensation are indispensable to the operation of a just society.
See Utilitarianism. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001, p. 90.
174. Ellis, Views and Reviews, p. 51.
175. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. W. D. Halls. New York: Norton, 1990, pp. 39–43.
176. Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000, pp. 14–19.
177. The single exception is Shimada Masashiko’s novel Taihai Shimai [Decadent
Sisters] (2005) in Chapter 7.

1 Immature Decadents: The Waste of Useless Men in

Indulgences—Two Novellas by Oguri Fūyō and Iwano Hōmei
1. Okada Kōnosuke and Yamamoto Yūzō eds., Bakumatsu/Meiji no nihon
keizai [Economics of the Late Edo and Meiji Periods], Tokyo: Nihon Keizai
Shinbun, 1989, pp. 118—22.
2. According to Yamamura Kōzō, national economic statistics before the 1890s
are not available, but the first two decades of the Meiji period saw no signifi-
cant changes in Japanese economic activities as compared with the late Edo
period. Also, prior to 1885, the Meiji government, burdened by post-Resto-
ration debts from the Tokugawa shogunate regime, endeavored to overcome
the financial burdens it had inherited. The Economic Emergence of Modern
Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 42–6.
3. Ibid., p. 54.
4. Ibid., pp. 48–9.
5. Richard Ronald and Allison Alexy, “Continuity and Change in Japanese Homes
and Families,” in Home and Family in Japan: Continuity and Transformation,
eds. Richard Ronald and Allison Alexy. New York: Routledge, 2011,
pp. 3–4.
6. Ibid., p. 4.
7. Ibid.
8. Nagashima Yōichi, Objective Description of the Self. Aarhus: Aarhus University
Press, 1997, p. 35.
 190 / notes

9. Itō Sei, Nihon bundanshi vol. 12: Shizenshugi no saiseiki [The History of
Japanese Literary Circles vol. 12: The Heyday of Naturalism]. Tokyo:
Kōdansha, 1996, p. 208.
10. Itō Sei, Nihon bundanshi vol. 14: Hanshizenshugi no hitotachi [The History
of Japanese Literary Circles vol. 14: People of Anti-Naturalism]. Tokyo:
Kōdansha, 1997, pp. 66–7.
11. Kataoka Ryōichi, “Hōmei no Shizenshugi to Tandeki,” in Iwano Hōmei,
Tandeki [Indulgences]. Tokyo: Iwanami, 2009, p. 121.
12. Itō Sei, Nihon bundanshi vol. 14, pp. 68–9.
13. Ibid., p. 59.
14. Oguri Fūyō, “Tandeki” [Indulgences] in Fūyō Shōsetsushū. Tokyo: Saibunkan,
1911, p. 5.
15. Ibid., pp. 6–10.
16. Ibid., p. 60.
17. Ibid., p. 63.
18. The term paternalism is used by John Bennett and Iwao Ishino principally to
describe the pre-industrial economic mentality and organization based on a
metaphorical father–son relation and mutual obligations between, for exam-
ple, an owner of a resource or a skilled person and his apprentice or protégé.
Their concept of paternalism borrows the father figure’s obligation proposed
by Alvin Gouldner. As a supervisor of the son’s work and private life, he is “in
the words of the workers, ‘lenient’ when he live[s] up to ‘indulgent’ behavior”
(p. 225). For an in-depth discussion of paternalism in reference to Japan dur-
ing this period, see Bennett and Ishino’s Paternalism in the Japanese Economy.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963.
19. Ibid., p. 66.
20. Ibid., p. 83.
21. Ibid., p. 84.
22. Ibid., pp. 56–7.
23. Ibid., p. 15.
24. Frank A. Johnson, Dependency and Japanese Socialization: Psychoanalytic and
Anthropological Investigations into Amae. New York: New York University
Press, 1993, p. 15. Referring to J. P. Gurian’s “Dependency” (in A Dictionary
of the Social Sciences, eds. H. Gould and W.B. Kolb, New York: New York Free
Press, 1984), Johnson argues that “dependency” is innately interdependent. It
is an interactional process in which “separate entities reciprocally seek iden-
tity, support, security, and/or permission from one another.”
25. Oguri, p. 46.
26. Ibid., p. 95.
27. Ibid., pp. 17, 35, 48, 54.
28. Ibid., p. 14.
29. Ibid., p. 8. My translation.
30. Ibid., p. 3.
31. Ibid., p. 13.
32. Ibid., p. 70.
33. Itō Sei, Nihon bundanshi vol. 14, pp. 173–4. Hōmei’s dedication is included
in the first edition of Tandeki published by Ekifūsha, but it is not included in
other editions.
 notes / 191

34. Kataoka Ryōichi, “Morita Sōhei no ichi to sakufū,” [“The Location of

Morita Sōhei and His Style”], in Kataoka Ryōichi chosakushū vol. 5. Tokyo:
Chūōkōron, 1979, pp. 122–3.
35. Itō Sei, Nihon bundanshi vol. 13, p. 138.
36. Fūyō and Hōmei were not particularly close friends, but through their admi-
ration for Kunikida Doppo, they developed a friendship and a strong interest
in confessional I-novels, such as those by Tayama Katai. See Itō’s Nihon bun-
danshi vol. 12, pp. 223–5 and vol. 14, pp. 66–67.
37. Iwano Hōmei, Tandeki [Indulgences]. Tokyo: Iwanami, 2009, p. 103.
38. Ibid., p. 20.
39. Ibid., p. 79.
40. Ibid., pp. 94–5.
41. Ibid., pp. 100–1.
42. Ibid., p. 108.
43. Iwano, p. 65.
44. Ibid., p. 68. My translation.
45. Iwano, Tandeki, p. 69.
46. Mario Praz, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica [The
Flesh, the Death, and the Devil in the Romantic Literature]. Milan: Rizzoli,
2009, pp. 215–321. See the genealogy and categorical dispositions of “La belle
dame sans merci.”
47. Iwano, Tandeki, p. 108.
48. Ibid., p. 105.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid. My translation.
51. Iwano, Tandeki, p. 113.
52. Ibid., p. 11.
53. Ibid., pp. 118–119. My translation.
54. Itō Sei, Kindai nihonjin no hassō no shokeishiki [The Patterns of Modern
Japanese Mentalities]. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1993, pp. 30–9.
55. Ibid., pp. 30–1.
56. Ibid., p. 32.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid., p. 33.
60. Ibid., p. 34.
61. Ibid.
62. Kawahara Miyako, “Fukuzawa Yukichi no Jitsugaku shisō to Kyōikukan”
[Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Thoughts on Practical Learning and Education], p. 35,
accessed March 30, 2010, www.nuedu db.on.arena.ne.jp/pdf/003/03-r-003.pdf.
63. Fukuzawa Yukichi, Gakumon no susume [Encouragement of Learning].
Tokyo: Iwanami, 2005, pp. 147–8.
64. Kawahara, p. 46.
65. Maruyama, Fukuzawa Yukichi no tetsugaku, p. 58.
66. Ibid., p. 43.
67. Ibid., p. 47.
68. Ibid., pp. 48–56.
69. Ibid., pp. 60–1.
 192 / notes

70. Samuel Smiles, Self-Help. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 246.
71. Ibid., p. 246.
72. Ibid., p. 245.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid., pp. 246–9.
75. Oguri, p. 81.
76. Ibid., p. 91.
77. Iwano, Tandeki, p. 90.
78. Nagashima, Objective Description, p. 35.
79. Iwano, “Ichigenbyōsha no jissai shōmei” [Monistic Narration in Practice], in
Iwano Hōmei zenshū vol.10. Kyoto: Rinsen, 1996, pp. 582–3.
80. Oguri, “Tandeki,” p. 17.
81. Iwano, Tandeki [Indulgences], p. 111.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid., p. 70. My translation.
84. Ibid., p. 113.
85. Ibid., p. 118.
86. Senuma Shigeki, Meiji bungaku kenkyū. Tokyo: Hōsei University Press,
1974, p. 298.
87. Kobayashi Hideo, “Shishōsetsu ron” [On I-Novel]. Kobayashi Hideo zenshū
vol. 3. Tokyo: Shinchō, 2001, p. 381.
88. Bennett and Ishino, Paternalism, p. 227.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid., p. 228.
91. See representative traits of fin-de-siècle Decadents, especially those of
Huysmans’s Des Esseintes. David Weir, Decadence and the Making of
Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995, pp. 83–7.
92. It is outlined by Samuel Smiles, and also within the context of Meiji Japan,
by such figures as Ninomiya Sontoku (1787–1856). See Chapter 4, “Work
as Ethical Practice,” in Tetsuo Najita’s Ordinary Economies in Japan: A
Historical Perspective, 1750–1950. Berkeley: University of California Press,
2009, pp. 104–40.
93. Karaki Junzō, Muyōsha no keifu [A Genealogy of Useless Men]. Tokyo:
Chikuma, 1964, p. 265.
94. Takahashi Toshio, “Hōmei: ‘ichigen byōsharon’ e no shiza” [Hōmei:
Perspectives on Monistic Narration] in Tokuda Shūsei to Iwano Hōmei:
Shizenshugi no saikentō. Tokyo: Yūseidō, 1993, p. 200.
95. Kataoka, pp. 123–5. “Hōmei no Shizenshugi to Tandeki” [Hōmei’s
Naturalism and Indulgences]. In Iwano Hōmei, Tandeki [Indulgences]. Tokyo:
Iwanami, 2009. (Kataoka offers a brief commentary on Tandeki, in the end
of the Iwanami edition of the novella)
96. Jay Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals. Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1984, p. 184.
97. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share vol. 1. New York: Zone Books, 2007,
p. 25.
98. Ibid., p. 27.
99. Ibid., p. 25.
100. Hiraoka Toshio, Nichiro sengo bungaku no kenkyū [A Study of Literature
After the Russo- Japanese War]. Tokyo: Ūseidō, 1985, pp. 8–10.
 notes / 193

101. Hiraoka cites critic Kakuda Kōkōkakyaku’s “Sengo no bundan” [The

Postwar Literary Circle] (1905), which observes the current state of lit-
erature. Kakuda predicts the emergence of satiric novels and other work
that illustrates the dual sides of life with sorrow and pleasure. See Hiraoka
Toshio, Nichiro sengo bungaku no kenkyū [A Study of Literature After the
Russo-Japanese War]. Tokyo: Ūseidō, 1985, pp. 11–13.
102. Akagi lists the following as decadent writers: Nagata Kimihiko, Yoshii
Isamu, Kubota Mantarō, Gotō Sueo, and Chikamatsu Shūkō. Above all,
Chikamatsu is repeatedly referred to as the quintessential decadent writer.
See pp. 243–6.
103. Ibid., p. 238.
104. Yasunari Sadao, “’Yūtōbungaku’ bokumetsu fukanō ron” [The Impossibility
of Eradicating ‘Decadent Literature’]. Kindai bungaku hyōron taikei vol. 4.
Tokyo: Kadokawa, 1971, p. 271.
105. Ibid.
106. Ibid., p. 272.

2 The Decadent Consumption of the Self:

Naturalist Aestheticism in Morita Sōhei’s Sooty Smoke
1. Yoshimoto Takaaki, Gengo ni totte bi towa nanika [What is Beauty for
Language?]. Tokyo: Chokusō, 1965, pp. 203–9.
2. Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2002, p. 58.
3. Itō Sei, Nihon bundanshi vol. 13 : Taitōha no hitotachi [The History of
Japanese Literary Circles vol. 13: People of the School of Decadence]. Tokyo:
Kōdansha, 1996, p. 116.
4. Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s, ed.
Karl Beckson. New York: Vintage, 1966, p. 307.
5. Itō Sei, Nihon bundanshi vol. 13, p. 116.
6. Ueda Bin, “Italia no shinsakka” [New Writers of Italy] and “Genkon no Italia
bungaku” [Current Italian Literature], Teikokubungaku 4.5 and 4.6 (1989).
Reprinted in Teihon Ueda Bin zenshū vol. 3. Tokyo: Kyōiku shuppan, 1985,
pp. 481–3 and pp. 484–5.
7. Ibid., pp. 482–3.
8. Ibid., p. 484.
9. For Italy’s modernist consolidation of the national spirit, see especially
Chapter 5, “Italianism and Modernity,” in Emilio Gentile’s La Grande Italia:
The Myth of the Nation in the Twentieth Century. Trans. Suzanne Dingee and
Jennifer Pudney. Madison: University of Madison Press, 2009, pp. 82–93.
According to Gentile, the predominant enthusiasm was for “scientific dis-
coveries, technological development,” to collectively advance the nation’s
power and people’s consciousness of being national constituents.
10. Walter Binni, La poetica del decadentismo. Florence: Sansori, 1975, p. 23.
11. Walter Binni, “Interventi sulla relazione di Mario Praz,” in L’Arte di Gabriele
D’Annunzio: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studio Venezia-Gardone-
Riviera-Pescara, 7–13 ottobre 1963, ed. Emilio Mariano. Milan: Mondadori,
1968, p. 19.
 194 / notes

12. See Waki Isao’s “Kaisetsu: ‘Shi no shōri nitsuite’” [Exposition: On The
Triumph of Death], in his Japanese translation of D’Annunzio’s Trionfo della
morte, Shi no shōri: Bara shōsetsu III. Kyoto: Shōrai, 2010, p. 390.
13. Walter Binni, La poetica del decadentismo. Milan: Sansoni, 1996, p. 79.
14. Arima Tatsurō, The Failure of Freedom: A Portrait of Modern Intellectuals.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969, p. 73.
15. Abe Jirō, “Mizukara shirazaru shizenshugisha” [Naturalists Without Self-
Knowledge] (1910), in Nihon kindai bungaku hyōronsen: Meiji/Taishōhen.
Tokyo: Iwanami, 2003, p. 143.
16. As discussed in Chapter 3, for example, we find in Nagai Kafū’s Reishō [Sneers]
(1910) and Ueda Bin’s “Uzumaki” [The Vortex] (1910) the sensibilities of dil-
ettantes as latecomers to social and political turmoil in the early Meiji period.
In this regard, the decadents and dilettantes are indicative of a consciousness
of the historico-cultural decline of society.
17. Iwasa Sōshirō, Seikimatsu no shizenshugi: Meiji yonjūnendai bungaku kō [The
Naturalism of the Fin de Siècle: On Meiji 40s Literature]. Tokyo: Yūseidō, 1986,
p. 15.
18. After Ishikawa Gian’s translation of the novel, the other translations followed
by Ikuta Chōkō, Iwasaki Junkō, Nogami Soichi. Most recently, Waki Isao
published a translation of the novel, in 2010.
19. D’Annunzio is known for an excess of opulent sensuality in his language, and
it is for this reason that he is considered a representative writer of fin-de-siècle
Decadence. As Arthur Symons states, the style of Decadence underlies the
vivification of language, exploring ways to render nuanced sensibilities and
meaning concealed beneath the face value of mundane reality. By the inter-
vention of refinement and perversity enabled by language, Decadents strived
to redefine epistemological worldviews that had been overriden by bourgeois
values. Symons exemplifies the case in reference to Mallarmé, whose “contor-
tion of [the] French language” resembles the “depravation which was under-
gone by the Latin language in its decadence.” See Symons’s “The Decadent
Movement in Literature,” in Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890s, ed. Karl
Beckson. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1981, p. 124.
20. A prominent example is the partial translation of The Triumph of Death by
Ueda Bin (1905). It attempts to preserve D’Annunzio’s Parnassian aestheti-
cism in the Japanese language. See “Enjo monogatari” [The Story of a Sensual
Woman] and “Gakusei” [The Voice of Music], which highlight The Triumph
of Death, in Ueda Bin Shū [The Collected Works of Ueda Bin], pp. 115–24.
21. Itō Sei, Nihon bundanshi vol. 13, p. 116.
22. Tsutui Yasutaka, Danuntsuio ni muchū [Infatuated with D’Annunzio]. Tokyo:
Chūōkōron, 1989, p. 17.
23. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Trionfo della morte. Milan: Mondadori, 1995, p. 382.
24. Makimura Ken’ichirō, “Shōsetsu ‘Baien’: Morita Sōhei to Hiratsuka Raichō–
Tochigi Shiobara Onsen” [The Novel Sooty Smoke: Morita Sōhei to Hiratsuka
Raichō–Tochigi Shiobara Spa,” accessed December 14, 2012, www.asahi.
com/travel/traveler/TKY200611110128.html.
25. Itō Sei, Nihon bundanshi vol. 13, p. 128.
26. For a detailed account of the relationship between Morita and Hiratsuka and
their joint suicide attempt, see Itō Sei’s Nihon bundanshi vol. 12: Shizenshugi
 notes / 195

no saiseiki [The History of Japanese Literary Circles vol. 12: The Heyday of
Naturalism]. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1996, pp. 91–117.
27. Morita Sōhei, “Konosaku no koto” [On This Work, The Postscript to Baien],
Baien [Sooty Smoke]. Tokyo: Iwanami, 2006, p. 305.
28. Morita Sōhei, Baien. Tokyo: Iwanami, 2006, p. 29.
29. Ibid., p. 37.
30. Ibid., p. 87.
31. Ibid., pp. 276–7.
32. Ibid., p. 289.
33. Ibid., p. 301.
34. Suzuki Sadami, “Nihonshugi ni okeru kojinshugi” [Individualism in Japanese
Nationalism], Kojin no tankyū, ed. Hayato Kawai. Tokyo: NHK, 2003, p. 165.
35. Ibid., p. 169.
36. Janet A. Walker, The Japanese Novel of the Meiji Period and the Ideal of
Individualism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979, p. 4.
37. Walker refers to Prince Genji of the Tale of Genji and the priest Yoshida Kenkō
of Tsurezuregusa as quintessential examples of early individuals expressed in
literary texts. Ibid., p. 5.
38. Walker, The Japanese Novel, pp. 26–8.
39. Oka Yoshitake, “Generational Conflict After the Russo-Japanese War,” in
Conflict in Modern Japanese History: The Neglected Tradition, eds. Tetsuo
Najita and J. Victor Koschmann. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982, p. 199.
40. Ueno Chizuko, “Modern Patriachy and the Formation of the Japanese
Nation State,” in Multicultural Japan: Palaeolithic to Postmodern. Cambridge:
University of Cambridge Press, 1996, p. 215.
41. Ibid., p. 219.
42. Ibid., p. 215.
43. Jay Rubin, Injurious to Public Morals. Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1984, p. 59.
44. Walker, The Japanese Novel, p. 12.
45. Ibid., p. 82.
46. Kitamura Tōkoku, “Jinsei ni aiwataru towa nanno iizo” [What Does the
Challenge of Life Mean?], in Tōkoku zenshū vol. 2. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1950,
p. 121. My translation.
47. Kitamura, “Naibu seimei ron” [The Philosophy of Inner Life], in Tōkoku
zenshū vol. 2. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1950, pp. 242–3.
48. Oka, “Generational Conflict,” p. 119.
49. Cited by Tomi Suzuki in Narrating the Self, p. 38, from Takayama Chogyū,
“Bunmei hihyōka to shite no bungakusha” [The Man of Letters as Critics;
Jan. 1901], in Meiji bungaku zenshū vol. 40: Takayama Chogyū, Saitō Nonohito,
Anesaki Chōfū, Tobari Chikufū. Tokyo: Chikuma, 1970, p. 63.
50. Suzuki, “Nihonshugi,” pp. 178–9.
51. Takayama Chogyū, “Biteki seikatsu o ronzu” [Theorizing Aesthetic Life], in
Nihon kindai bungaku hyōronsen: Meiji/Taishōhen. Tokyo: Iwanami, 2003,
p. 79.
52. Anesaki Chōfū, “Chogyū ni kotauru no sho” [A Response to Chogyū], cited
by Senuma Shigeki, Meiji bungaku kenkyū. Tokyo: Hōsei University Press,
1974, p. 401.
 196 / notes

53. Kataoka Ryōichi, “Morita Sōhei no ichi to sakufū” [The Location of Morita
Sōhei and His Style], in Kataoka Ryōichi chosakushū vol. 5. Tokyo: Chūōkōron,
1979, p. 377.
54. Morita, Baien, p. 20.
55. Ibid., p. 43.
56. Ibid., p. 38.
57. Ibid., p. 8.
58. Ibid., p. 30.
59. Sugiura Minpei, “Dekadansu bungaku to ‘ie’ no mondai” [Decadent
Literature and Problems of Patriarchal Household], in Sakkaron [On Writers].
Tokyo: Kusakisha, 1952, p. 210.
60. Senuma Shigeki, “Nihonshugi ni okeru ‘ie’” [Conventional Households in
Naturalism], in Shōwa bungaku zenshū vol.33. Tokyo: Shōgakkan, 1989, p. 861.
61. Ibid., p. 862.
62. Kataoka, “Morita,” p. 379.
63. According to Iwasa Sōshirō, the 1910s is the period when modern Japanese
fiction began to incorporate images of the femme fatale as the result of the
reception of fin-de-siècle Decadent literature. Tayama Katai’s Futon (1907 =
Meiji 40 nen), Morita Sōhei’s Baien (1909 = Meiji 42 nen), and Mori Ōgai’s
Seinen (1910 = Meiji 43 nen) formed a genealogy of femmes fatales, for their
depictions of women who are either neurotic, corrupt, or both, and some of
whom meet their death in the novel’s pages. See Iwasa’s chapter “Meiji no
famu fataru tachi” [Femme Fatales of the Meiji Period] in Seikimatsu no shi-
zenshugi: Meiji yonjūnendai bungaku kō [Fin-de-Siècle Naturalism: On Meiji
40s Literature], pp. 82–104.
64. Morita, Baien, p. 77.
65. Ibid., p. 87.
66. Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from
Baudelaire to D’Annunzio. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989, p. 38.
67. Ibid., p. 153.
68. Ibid., p. 275.
69. Nicoletta Pireddu, Antropologi alla corte della bellezza: Decadenza ed economia
simbolica nell’Europa fin de siècle [Anthropologists at the Court of Beauty].
Verona: Edizioni Fiorini, 2002, pp. 8–10.
70. Glenn Willmott, Modernist Goods: Primitivism, the Market, and the Gift.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008, p. 14.
71. Morita, Baien, p. 88.
72. Sharon H. Nolte and Sally Ann Hastings, “The Meiji State’s Policy Toward
Women, 1890–1910,” in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945, ed. Gail
Lee Bernstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, p. 152.
73. Ibid., p. 158.
74. Horiba Kiyoko, Seitō no jidai: Hiratsuka Raichō to atarashii onnatachi [The
Epoch of the Bluestocking]. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1988, p. 19.
75. Ibid., p. 249.
76. Ibid., p. 191.
77. Ōmoto Izumi, “Morita Sōhei ‘Baien’: sono yokubō no yukue” [Morita Sōhei’s
Baien: The Trajectory of Its Desires], Kokubungaku: kaishaku to kanshō 73.4
(2008): pp. 29–30.
 notes / 197

78. Itō Sei, Nihon bundanshi vol. 12, pp. 100–1.

79. Morita, Baien, p. 250.
80. Ibid., p. 289.
81. Horiba, p. 180.
82. Saeki Junko, Iro to ai no hikaku bungakushi. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1998, pp. 324–6.
83. Itō Sei, Nihon bundanshi vol. 13, p. 116.
84. Morita, Baien, p. 163. My translation.
85. Ōmoto, “Morita Sōhei ‘Baien’,” p. 28.
86. Morita, Baien, p. 242. My translation.
87. Spackman, Decadent Genealogies, pp. vii–viii.
88. Morita, Baien, p. 259. My translation.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid., pp. 222–3. My translation.
91. It seems that Morita borrows D’Annunzian locution from the following
passage:
Io penso che morta ella raggiungerà la suprema espressione della sua bellezza.
[ . . . ] Ella diventerebbe materia di pensiero, una pura idealità. Io l’amarei
oltre la vita, senza gelosia, con un dolore pacato ed eguale (D’Annunzio, Il
trionfo della morte, pp. 168–9).
[I believe that in death her beauty will reach its supreme perfection. [ . . . ] I
should love her better than in life, free from jealous doubts, with a serene and
changeless sorrow. She would then become an object of thought—purely
ideal!] (D’Annunzio, The Triumph of Death. Trans. Georgina Harding.
London: Dedalus, 1990, p. 139).
92. Another example of Morita’s imitation of D’Annunzian locution can be
found in Yōkichi’s dramatic letter on page 174.
93. Morita, Baien, p. 85.
94. Ibid., p. 246.
95. See Morita’s postscript to Baien, p. 305.
96. Accustomed to Naturalist realism, readers around 1910 were puzzled as to
whether Sooty Smoke should be classified as a mere personal confession or as
art. For representative criticisms of the time, see Tashiro Hayao, “Geijutsu e
no shōnin: Baien dōjidaihyō o chūshin ni’ [The Recognition of Art: Focusing
on the Contemporary Criticism on Baien], in Kenkyūronshū: Research Journal
of Graduate Students of Letters. Sapporo: Hokkaidō University Press, n.d.,
p. 2.
97. Natsume Sōseki, cited by Itō, Nihon bundanshi vol. 13, p. 131.
98. Natsume Sōseki, Sorekara [And Then]. Tokyo: Shinchō, 2007, p. 199.
99. Kamei Hideo, Transformation of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji
Literature. Trans. Michael Bourdaghs et al. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese
Studies, University of Michigan, 2002, p. 138.
100. Kamei, pp. 135–158.
101. Ibid., p. 379.
102. Ibid., p. 301.
103. Ibid., p. 302. My translation.
104. Itō, Nihon bundanshi vol. 13, p. 130.
105. Gabriele D’Annunzio, The Triumph of Death. Trans. Georgina Harding.
London: Dedalus, 1990, p. 130.
 198 / notes

106. Morita, Baien, p. 223. The passage echoes Kitamura Tōkoku’s “Naibu
seimeiron” [The Philosophy of Inner Life], in which Buddhist pessimism
based on a philosophy of impermanence and Christian optimism based on a
soteriological worldview are considered equally the nature of human mind.
See the essay in Tōkoku zenshū vol. 3. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1950, p. 238.
107. Kataoka, “Morita,” p. 383.
108. Ibid., p. 380.
109. Morita, Baien, p. 132. My translation.
110. Ibid., p. 160.
111. Haniya Yutaka, Haniya Yutaka shisōronshū vol. 2. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2001,
p. 225.
112. Ibid., p. 226.
113. Morita, Baien, p. 290.
114. Ibid., p. 235. Tomoko’s epilepsy links her to Ippolita of The Triumph of
Death. Both cases can be seen as a fin-de-siècle sign of female hysteria.

3 Decadent Returnees: The Dialogic Labor of Sensibility

in Nagai Kafū’s Sneers and Ueda Bin’s The Vortex
1. Itō Sei, Nihon bundanshi vol. 15: Kindaigeki undō no hossoku [The History
of Japanese Literary Circles vol. 15: The Inauguration of the Modern
Movement of Drama]. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1997, pp. 181–2.
2. The essay “Kizokushugi to Heiminshugi” [Aristocratism and Populism]
was first published in the July and September 1911 issues of Kyōto kyōiku
[Kyoto Education], Ueda Bin, Teihon Ueda Bin zenshū vol. 5. Tokyo: Kyōku
Shuppan, 1985, pp. 57–69.
3. Ibid., pp. 61–2.
4. Ibid., p. 65.
5. Ibid., pp. 63–4.
6. Ibid., p. 64.
7. Ibid. p. 65.
8. Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979, p. 101.
9. Théophile Gautier, “Preface to ‘The Flowers of Evil,’” in The Flowers of
Evil, ed. Charles Baudelaire, trans. Keith Waldrop. Middletown: Wesleyan
University Press, 2006, pp. 17–18.
10. Richard Dellamora, “Productive Decadence: ‘The Queer Comradeship of
Outlawed Thought’: Vernon Lee, Max Nordau, and Oscar Wilde.” New
Literary History 35.4 (2004): p. 530.
11. Charles Baudelaire, “The Poem of Hashish,” On Wine and Hashish. London:
Hesperus, 2002, p. 75.
12. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1981, pp. 312–13.
13. Ibid., p. 315.
14. The Kichōsha [Returnees] stories include Fukagawa no uta [The Song of
Fukagawa] (1909), Botan no kyaku [The Peony Garden] (1909), Kanraku
[Pleasure] (1909), Donten [Cloudy Weather] (1909), Kitsune [The Fox]
 notes / 199

(1909), Kangokusho no ura [Behind the Prison] (1909), Sumidagawa [The

River Sumida] (1909), Shinkichōsha nikki [The New Diary of a Returnee]
(1909), and Reishō [Sneers] (1909–10).
15. Edward Seidensticker, Kafū the Scribbler. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1965, p. 34.
16. Stephen Snider, Fictions of Desire. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000,
p. 55, and Rachael Hutchinson, “Occidentalism and the Critique of Meiji:
The West in the Returnee Stories of Nagai Kafū,” Japan Forum 13.2 (2001):
p. 206.
17. Yoshida Seiichi, Nagai Kafū. Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Sentā, 1971, p. 70.
18. Isoda Kōichi, Nagai Kafū. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1980, p. 113.
19. Nagai Kafū’s five-year stay in the West has been discussed in detail by numer-
ous critics, including Isoda Kōichi, Yoshida Seiichi, and Edward Seidensticker.
Some of their biographically centered criticisms suggest that the writer’s rejec-
tion of Meiji modernity was caused by his extensive stays in the United States
and France. The social maturity of the West (primarily France and Britain),
grounded on established individualism, capitalism, and the co-existence of
traditions with the present, undoubtedly influenced Kafū’s life and writing.
Though my analysis owes much to their seminal research, I situate Reishō as
a conspicuous bridge between dichotomies such as the East (Japan) and the
West, pre-modernity and modernity, etc. In this regard, along with Isoda’s
commentary cited above, Rachael Hutchinson’s essay “Occidentalism and the
Critique of Meiji: The West in the Returnee Stories of Nagai Kafū” provided
me with a point of departure from previous studies on Kafū’s works.
20. Komori Yōichi, Yuragi no nihon bungaku [Japanese Literature in Fluctuation].
Tokyo: NHK Books, 1998, pp. 172–3.
21. Ibid., p. 175.
22. Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from
Baudelaire to D’Annunzio. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989, pp. 38–9.
23. Karaki Jun’zō regards Kafū as clearly decadent (decadan no to), the last literati
in the genealogy of bunjinbokkyaku—the Edo literati who retire from main-
stream social life for the artistic life. See Muyōsha no keifu, p. 74.
24. Critics such as Matsumoto Hajime attribute Kafū’s decadence to his failure to
vindicate the leftists who were convicted for their plot to assassinate the Meiji
Emperor. See Matsumoto Hajime, Kafū gokuraku. Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1998,
p. 39. The incident, recalled as Taigyaku Jiken [the High Treason Incident]
(1910–1), resulted in mass arrests and the execution of socialist-anarchist
thinkers, most notably Kōtoku Shūsui. Afterwards, Japan’s intellectual arena
became far more repressive for political dissidents. See Nagai’s essay “Hanabi”
[Fireworks], in Nihon kindai bungaku hyōronsen: Meiji/Taishō hen. Tokyo:
Iwanami, 2003, pp. 286–97.
25. Ibid., p. 292
26. Ibid., pp. 292–3.
27. Satō Haruo, Shōsetsu Nagai Kafū den [A Novelistic Biography of Nagai Kafū].
Tokyo: Iwanami, 2009, p. 264.
28. Robert M. Kaplan, “Being Bleuler: The Second Century of Schizophrenia,”
Australasian Psychiatry 16.5 (2008): p. 309.
29. Nagai Kafū, Reishō [Sneers]. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1950, p. 5.
 200 / notes

30. Ibid., p. 5.
31. Ibid., p. 6.
32. Ryū Kenki. Kichōsha Kafū [The Returnee Kafū]. Tokyo: Meiji Shoin, 1993,
p. 103.
33. Nagai, Reishō, p. 8.
34. Ibid., p. 11.
35. Ibid. My translation.
36. Ibid., p. 10.
37. Ibid., p. 47. Kōu refers to the essay “Fukagawa no uta” [The Song of Fukagawa]
(1908) as his own work. It is apparently derived from the actual essay by Kafū,
and thus Kōu can be considered the alter ego of the author.
38. Ibid., p. 59. D’Annunzio and Pascoli were the major exponents of Italian
Decadentism (il decadentismo italiano), an offshoot of the pan-European
fin-de-siècle Decadence. Its heyday spanned the years 1880 to 1910, though
more as a sporadic literary phenomenon than as a movement. Though the
aesthetics of Decadentism had much in common with those of Baudelaire,
Verlaine, and Gautier, the linguistic style diverged from that of its French
counterpart. Critics such as Marina Paladini Musitelli and Mario Moroni
view Italian Decadentism as playing the role of a modern oracle calling atten-
tion to “a variety of signs of an epochal crisis of values” in post-Risorgimento
Italy (p. 69). Advocating anti-naturalistic poetics, the movement’s exponents
wrestled with the domination of positivism and pragmatism. In this regard,
Italian Decadentism pursued a goal more socio-ideologically charted than the
other European cases of Decadence. Giovanni Pascoli is especially relevant
to our discussion in Chapter 3, above all for his frequent use of dialogism
in poetry. His poetic essay Il fanciullino [The Little Child] (1897) takes the
form of a dialogue between the child and the poet. It privileges intuition
and sense perception as viable poetic resources and in this way succeeds in
creating an imaginary intersubjective community. Whereas there is no evi-
dence that Kafū and Ueda had access to this work, all these writers and poets
share a temperament and style that are distant from the solipsism and strong
Romantic subjectivity still prevalent in fin-de-siècle Decadence.
39. Ibid., p. 45.
40. Ibid., pp. 46–7.
41. Ibid., p. 134.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., p. 137.
44. Ibid., p. 138. My translation.
45. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic, p. 308.
46. Nagai, Reishō, p. 54.
47. Ibid., p. 56.
48. Ibid. My translation.
49. Nagai, Reishō, pp. 124–5.
50. Ibid., p. 129.
51. Ibid., p. 59
52. Ibid., p. 200.
53. Ibid., p. 103.
54. Ibid., p. 204. My translation.
 notes / 201

55. Ibid.
56. Yamauchi Yoshio, the postscript to Uzumaki, by Ueda Bin Tokyo: Shiratama,
1950, pp. 225–7.
57. Kaichōon includes translations of poems by Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Verlaine,
D’Annunzio, Rossetti, and Browning. In the preface to the book, Ueda men-
tions that he employed “shichigo-chō” [a 7–5 syllable pattern], a traditional tanka
and haiku scheme, to render the elegance of the Parnassians. In contrast with this
renowned poetry collection, Uzumaki takes a form of modernized prose fiction.
58. See Naruse Masakatsu, “Taishōbungaku no mondaiten” [Problems in Taishō
Literature], in Taisho no Bungaku, ed. Nihon Bungaku Kenkyū Shiryō
Kankōkai. Tokyo: Yūseidō, 1988, p. 61.
59. In the opening line of Chapter 8 of “The Vortex,” Ueda refers to the sensuous
pleasure shared by a group of men and women depicted in Watteau’s paint-
ing, The Embarkation for Cythera. It shows the author’s interest in the playful
nature of Rococo culture, implying that the novella assimilates its worldview.
See Ueda Bin, “Uzumaki” [The Vortex], in Teihon Ueda Bin zenshū vol. 2.
Tokyo: Kyōiku Shuppan, 1985, pp. 513–4.
60. Ibid., p. 504.
61. Ibid., p. 514.
62. Ueda mentions the philosophy of Panta Rhei as a key concept in comprehend-
ing modernity. See “Dokugo to taiwa” [Monologues and Dialogues] (1915),
in Teihon Ueda Bin zenshū vol. 5. Tokyo: Kyōiku Shuppan, 1985, p. 259.
63. Ueda, “Uzumaki,” p. 517.
64. Ibid., p. 517.
65. Ibid., p. 518. For the original English passage, see “Conclusion” in Walter
Pater’s The Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 152.
66. For a full account of Ueda’s aestheticism as influenced by Pater, see Yano
Mineto’s essay, “Ueda Bin Sensei” [Teacher Ueda Bin], Ueda Bin shū. Tokyo:
Chikuma, 1966, pp. 388–90. For Pater’s passage, see “Conclusion” in The
Renaissance, p. 153.
67. Ueda, “Uzumaki,” pp. 519–20.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., p. 520.
70. Ibid., p. 519.
71. Ibid., p. 520.
72. Ibid.
73. Pater, p. 153. In Chapter 11 of “Uzumaki,” Ueda refers to this passage by Victor
Hugo, but he wrongly cites it as “the thoughts of a British thinker.” See p. 520.
74. Ibid., p. 524.
75. Ibid., pp. 535–6.
76. Ibid., p. 523.
77. Ibid., pp. 537–8.
78. Ibid., p. 539.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid., pp. 512–13. The third-person narrative notes the ghastly case of the
famous kabuki actor Tanosuke who cut off his limbs to fit the part he was
assigned to play. His death after the stage symbolizes the end of the Tokugawa
theatrical play, epitomizing the fate of contemporary art in general.
 202 / notes

81. Ibid., p. 545.

82. Ibid., p. 549.
83. Ibid., p. 558.
84. Ibid., p. 561.
85. Ibid., p. 570.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid., p. 584.
88. Ibid., p. 593.
89. Ibid., p. 595.
90. Ibid., p. 596.
91. Ibid., p. 595. My translation.
92. Ibid., p. 596.
93. Ibid., p. 597. My translation.
94. Ibid., p. 598.
95. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Phenomenology of Perception,” Basic Writings, ed.
Thomas Baldwin. New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 153.
96. Elaine Gerbert, “Space and Aesthetic Imagination in Some Taishō Writings,”
Japan’s Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democracy 1900–1930,
ed. Sharon A. Minichello. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998, p.
70. She gives an example of the nativist anthropology developed by Yanagita
Kunio and Orikuchi Shinobu.
97. Mihai I. Spariosu, The Wreath of Wild Olive. Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1997, p. 29.
98. Ueda, “Uzumaki,” p. 344.
99. According to Noda Utarō, Ueda was closely associated with the Group of
Pan inasmuch as he contributed to its literary magazine Subaru (Pleiades)
and attended its meetings. The group owes its interest in Symbolist and
Parnassian work largely to Ueda. See Noda’s Nihon tanbiha bungaku no
tanjō, p. 125 and p. 406.
100. Ibid., p. 344.
101. Dennis Washburn, The Dilemma of the Modern in Japanese Fiction. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 2.

4 Taishō Malaise as Decadence: Self-Reclusion and

Creative Labor in Satō Haruo’s A Pastoral Spleen and
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s A Fool’s Love
1. Gautier’s well-known preface to Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (1857) explains
this essence of Decadence: “The style of decadence [ . . . ] is nothing else than
art arrived at that extreme point of maturity produced by those civilizations
which are growing old with their oblique suns [!]—a style that is ingenious,
complicated, learned, full of shades of meaning and research, always pushing
further the limits of language, borrowing from all the technical vocabular-
ies, taking colors from all palettes, notes from all keyboards, forcing itself to
express in thought that which is most ineffable, and in form the vaguest and
most fleeting contours; listening, that it may translate them, to the subtle
confidences of the neuropath, to the avowals of aging and depraved passion,
 notes / 203

and to the singular hallucinations of the fixed idea verging on madness.”

In Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil. Trans. Keith Waldrop. Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 2006, pp. 17–18.
2. Jean Pierrot, The Decadent Imagination: 1880–1900. Trans. Derek Coltman.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 179.
3. Ibid., p. 166.
4. Charles Baudelaire, On Wine and Hashish. Trans. Andrew Brown. London:
Hesperus, 2002, pp. 15–25.
5. Seiji M. Lippit, Topographies of Japanese Modernism. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002, p. 206.
6. Kawamoto Saburō. Taishō gen’ei [Taishō Illusions]. Tokyo: Shinchō, 1997,
p. 308.
7. In this chapter, the title of the novella is referred to as “A Pastoral Spleen: Or
the Sick Rose,” in accord with the original title in Japanese. To quote passages
from the novella, I rely on the following text: The Sick Rose: A Pastoral Elegy.
Trans. Francis B. Tenny. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993.
8. A faithful translation of the original title Chijin no ai is “A Fool’s Love.” In my
analysis in this chapter, I refer to Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Naomi. Trans. Anthony
H. Chambers. New York: Vintage, 2001.
9. Hirotsu Kazuo, “‘Den’en no yūutsu’ no sakusha” [The Author of “A Pastoral
Elegy”], in Hizotsu Kazuo zenshū vol. 8. Tokyo: Chūōkōron, 1974, p. 267.
In praise of A Pastoral Elegy, Hizotsu notes that Satō’s unconscious overrides
his consciousness, and that this imbalance constitutes the substance of the
novella (p. 264). In contrast, Tanizaki appears too rational, his imagination
overcontrolled in his writing (pp. 268–9). Despite the difference, Hirotsu
privileges the writers’ thematic focus on modern malaise.
10. Satō published the first half of Den’en no yūutsu under the title Yameru bara
[A Sick Rose] in the literary magazine Kuroshio in 1918. After the magazine
rejected the second half of the novella, he destroyed the manuscript. Later, he
rewrote the second half, and the complete version of the entire novella was
published under the title Kaisaku Den’en no yūutsu in 1920 in Chūgai. For a
detailed history of this publication, see Fujita Shūichi, Den’en no yūutsuron:
Taishōki no kansei [A Pastoral Elegy: Sensibilities of the Taishō Period]. Tokyo:
Yōyōsha, 1988, pp. 20–1. My current study is based on the final version of the
entire novella.
11. Shimada Kinji, “‘Den’en no yūutsu’ kō” [On the Pastoral Elegy], in
Nihonbungaku niokeru kindai [Modernity in Japanese Literature]. Tokyo:
University of Tokyo Press, p. 258.
12. Yasuda Yōjūrō, Satō Haruo. Tokyo: Nihon Tosho Sentā, 1993, p. 68.
13. Ibid., p. 99.
14. Satō Haruo, Den’en no yūutsu [A Pastoral Spleen]. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2000,
p. 141.
15. Kawamura Masatoshi, “Den’en no yūutsu,” Kokubungaku: kaishaku to kanshō
67.3 (2002): p. 99.
16. Shimada, “‘Den’en no yūutsu’ kō”, p. 217.
17. Hirotsu Kazuo’s essay “Shinjin Satō Haruo-shi,” (A New Writer, Mr. Satō
Haruo),” published in the magazine Yūben [Eloquence], November 1918, is rep-
resentative of the criticism that Den’en no yūutsu received upon publication.
 204 / notes

18. Satō Haruo, The Sick Rose, p. 16.

19. Ibid., pp. 16–17.
20. Satō, Den’en no yūutsu, pp. 67–8.
21. Fujita, Den’en no yūutsuron: Taishōki no kansei, p. 114.
22. Satō, The Sick Rose, , p. 8.
23. Ibid., p. 16.
24. With the examples of Kunikida Doppo’s Musashino [The Field of Musashino]
and Wasureenu hitobito [Unforgettable People] (1898), Karatani Kōjin states
that the scenery in literary discourse since then has accommodated an epis-
temological position (ninshikitekina fuchi) of space that was not present in
realism (shajitsu shugi). See Karatani’s Nihon kindai bungaku no kigen [The
Origin of Modern Japanese Literature]. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1988, pp. 24–5.
25. Angela Yiu, “Beautiful Town: The Discovery of the Suburbs and the Vision
of the Garden City in Late Meiji and Taishō Literature,” Japan Forum 18.3
(2006): pp. 320–2.
26. Satō, Den’en no yūutsu, p. 90.
27. Satō, The Sick Rose, p. 17.
28. Satō, Den’en no yūutsu , p. 32.
29. Ibid., p. 33..
30. Hayashi Hirochika, “Den’en no yūutsu,” in Miyoshi Yukio ed. Nihon no kin-
dai shōsetsu. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1986, p. 207.
31. According to Christopher Hill, the surge in discussion of neurasthenia in
Japan took its place in the late Meiji period. It stems from the rapid changes
in social life after 1868. Those impacts on individuals who faced transforma-
tions of social institution, along with Japan’s relationship to the European
model of modernization, resulted in “an endemic ‘ideology fatigue’” (p. 247).
After the Russo-Japanese War, reflecting this collective psychological reaction
by intellectuals, novels featuring the motif of neurotic individuals prolifer-
ated in such works as Natsume Sōseki’s Wagahai wa neko de aru [I am a Cat]
(1905), Tayama Katai’s Futon [The Quilt] (1907), and Shimazaki Tōson’s
Haru [Spring] (1908) (p. 243). See Hill’s “Exhausted by Their Battles with the
World: Neurasthenia and Civilization Critique in Early Twentieth-Century
Japan” in Nina Cornyetz and J. Keith Vincent eds. Perversion and Modern
Japan. New York: Routledge, 2010, pp. 242—58. Published a decade after
the post-Russo-Japanese War period, Satō’s A Pastoral Elegy clearly inherits
the neurotic tendency prevalent in the late Meiji works.
32. Satō, The Sick Rose, p. 60.
33. Unagami Masaomi, “Satō Haruo no bijutsukan” [The Art Museum of Satō
Haruo], Rōman [The Romantic] 2.2 (1973): p. 46.
34. Satō, Den’en no yūutsu, pp. 101–2.
35. Ibid., pp. 110–112.
36. Kawamoto, Taishō gen’ei, pp. 286–7.
37. Ibid., p. 282.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., p. 283.
40. Satō, Den’en no yūutsu, p. 64.
41. Ibid., pp. 120–3.
42. Satō, The Sick Rose, p. 76.
 notes / 205

43. Fujita, Den’en no yūutsuron: Taishōki no kansei, p. 111.

44. Satō, Den’en no yūutsu , p. 127.
45. Mephistopheles’s words are Francis B. Tenny’s translation based on the
Japanese translation used by Satō. Tenny notes that a direct English transla-
tion from the German would differ slightly. See The Sick Rose, p. 84.
46. Satō, Den’en no yūutsu, p. 128.
47. Ibid., p. 89.
48. Ibid., p. 15.
49. Ibid., p. 128.
50. Ibid., pp. 127–8.
51. Kawamura, “Den’en no yūutsu,” p. 99. Kawamura states that A Pastoral Spleen
is in essence a collage of the protagonist’s Romantic and Decadent solipsism
cast in terms of a diseased rose.
52. Ibid., p. 90.
53. Ibid., p. 91. The translator Francis B. Tenny notes that the poem is a quota-
tion from Rose Leaves, by the Tang poet Chu Guang-yi (AD 700–760). The
poem is an English rendition by the translator.
54. Ibid., p. 93.
55. Shimada Kinji points to the influence of D’Annunzio on A Pastoral Spleen,
though without specifying any of the Italian writer’s works, p. 253.
56. Satō, The Sick Rose, p. 97.
57. Dan Kazuo, “Kaisetsu” [Commentary], in Den’en no yūutsu. Tokyo: Shinchō,
2000, p. 177.
58. Satō, “Dekadan ni taisuru awatadashii ichikōsatsu” [A Brief Reflection on
Decadence], in Teihon Satō Haruo zenshu vol. 19. Tokyo: Rinsen, 1988,
p. 144.
59. Odaka Shūya, Seinenki: Tanizaki Jun’ ichirō ron [The Maturity: On Tanizaki
Jun’ichirō]. Tokyo: Sakuhinsya, 2007, p. 259. The incident originates in
the triangle relationship among Tanizaki, his wife Chiyo, and Satō Haruo.
Because Tanizaki felt that there was a mismatch between his personality and
that of introverted Chiyo, he planned to divorce her. In addition, he also
promised to marry her off to his best friend, Satō, who was in love with her.
However, Tanizaki revoked the promise, and as a result he and Satō broke off
their friendship in 1921. In 1930, though, after the friends had reconciled,
Satō and Chiyo married. A detailed though fictionalized account of this story
is given in Satō’s novel Kono mittsuno mono [These Three Things] (1926).
60. Ibid., pp. 228–9.
61. Ibid., p. 230.
62. See Odaka Shūya’s Sōnenki: Tanizaki Jun’ ichirō ron [The Maturity: On
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō]. Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2007, pp. 236–45, and Hosoe
Hikaru’s Tanizaki Jun’ ichirō: Shinsō no retorikku [Tanizaki Jun’ichirō: The
Rhetoric of Abysmal Psyche]. Osaka: Izumi, 2004, pp. 595–605. Their
biographically centered analysis considers Tanizaki’s complex relation with
his wife Chiyo, by drawing on the Jungian notion of anima. To this extent,
Hosoe, for example, reads Jōji and his fetishizing of Naomi’s body as a projec-
tion of the author himself. This interpretation is certainly helpful in com-
prehending Tanizaki’s work given that his pursuit of artistic Decadence is
intertwined with his real-life experience, which is also the case for Oscar
 206 / notes

Wilde. However, our analysis in this chapter concentrates on the semantic

dimensions of economic practices as shown in the discussion itself.
63. See Chapters 1 and 3 on the shift in Nagai Kafū’s artistic style.
64. Odaka, Sōnenki, p. 245.
65. Saeki Shōichi, Monogatari Geijutsu ron [On the Art of Storytelling]. Tokyo:
Kōdansha, 1979, pp. 169–70.
66. Ibid., p. 113.
67. Ibid., p. 135.
68. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the
State Form. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, pp. 1–2 of
“Preface.”
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., pp. 7–11.
71. Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Chijin no ai [A Fool’s Love]. Tokyo: Chūōkōron, 2007,
pp. 9–10.
72. Ibid., p. 11.
73. Ibid., p. 13.
74. Ibid., p. 12.
75. Ibid., p. 27.
76. Ibid., p. 30.
77. Ibid., pp. 33–4.
78. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1950, pp. 9–10.
79. Ibid., p. 9.
80. Ibid., p. 13.
81. Tanizaki, Chijin no ai, p. 27.
82. Ibid., p. 30.
83. Ibid., p. 8.
84. Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Naomi, Trans. Anthony H. Chambers. New York:
Vintage, 2001, p. 68.
85. Tanizaki, Chijin no ai, p. 142.
86. Here, we can recall the idea that Jōji is a “yielder,” which is pointed out by
Komori Yōichi and Margherita Long, whose readings of A Fool’s Love base
largely on the protagonist’s humiliated male psyche and geopolitical values.
See Komori, “Tanizaki raisan—tōsō suru disukūru [In Praise of Tanizaki—
embattled discourses] in Kokubungaku 38.4 (December 1993), p. 12, and
Long, This Perversion Called Love. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009,
pp. 48–9. Our reading in this chapter agrees with the view and adds a socio-
economic perspective to it. Jōji yields also to the limit of his economic condi-
tions and social standing as the corporate worker.
87. Nakamura Mitsuo, Tanizaki Jun’ ichirō ron [On Tanizaki Jun’ichirō]. Tokyo:
Nihon Tosho Sentā, 1984, p. 155.
88. Tanizaki, Chijin no ai, p. 102.
89. Ibid.
90. Saeki, Monogatari, pp. 178–9.
91. Ibid., pp. 179–80.
 notes / 207

92. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994, pp. 3–6.
93. Referring to Hegel’s Jenenser Realphilosophie, Hardt and Negri point out that
the capitalist accumulation of resources leads to the abstraction of labor and
differentiates “the enjoyment of labor” from “the enjoyment of its fruits,”
thereby resulting in “the most general alienation” (p. 58).
94. Saeki, Monogatari, pp. 185–6.
95. Tanizaki, Chijin no ai, p. 29.
96. Ibid., p. 32.
97. Ibid.
98. Ibid., p. 40.
99. Ibid., p. 56.
100. Ibid., pp. 35, 61.
101. Ken K. Itō, Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1991, p. 81.
102. Tanizaki, Chijin no ai, pp. 51–2.
103. Ibid., pp. 68–72.
104. Ibid., p. 73.
105. Ibid., p. 75.
106. Tanizaki, Naomi, pp. 71–2.
107. Ibid., p. 74.
108. Tanizaki, Chijin no ai, p. 115.
109. Ibid., p. 142.
110. See my Chapter 6.
111. Ibid., pp. 182–3.
112. Tanizaki, Naomi, p. 161.
113. Ibid., p. 207.
114. Tanizaki, Chijin no ai, pp. 345–6.
115. Nakamura, Tanizaki, p. 161.
116. Komori Yōichi, Seikimatsu no yogensha: Natsume Sōseki [The Prophet of the
Fin de Siècle]. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1999, p. 102. According to Komori’s com-
ments on Sōseki, the Decadents’ realization of desire and pleasure presumes
an intricate process of negating energy consumption when not a spontane-
ous act by the subject is dispensed for his or her personal interest or pleasure.
In this semiotic reading, the late Meiji period on, as represented by Sōseki,
Decadent literature represents a critical response to the capitalist modernity
of Japan. Such an interpretation proposes a new assessment of the works
of Taishō Decadence. For example, Kōno Taeko unequivocally considers
Tanizaki to be an optimistic hedonist who acts on the principle of “utterly
positive desire” (mattaki kōtei no yokubō). This view limits the issue to per-
sonal desire and appears to dismiss the socio-economic context at work in
Naomi. See her Tanizaki bungaku to kōtei no yokubō [Tanizaki’s Literature
and the Desire of Affirmation]. Tokyo: Chūōkōron, 1980, p. 61.
117. Komori Yōichi, Seikimatsu no yogensha, pp. 103–4.
118. Ibid., p. 104.
119. Ibid.
 208 / notes

5 Decadence Begins with Physical Labor: The Postwar

Use of the Body in Sakaguchi Ango’s The Idiot and
Tamura Taijirō’s Gateway to the Flesh
1. Sakaguchi Ango, “Darakuron” [On Decadence]. Sakaguchi Ango zenshū vol.
4. Tokyo: Chikuma, 1999, p. 157.
2. Matsumoto Tsunehiko, “‘Hakuchi’ ron no maeni” [Before the Discussion
on The Idiot], Kokubungaku to kaishaku [Japanese National Literature and
Interpretation] 71.11 (2006): pp. 103–5. Matsumoto lists notable examples,
such as novellas and essays by Sakaguchi (“Izuko e” [To Where?], “Ma no
taikutsu” [Diabolic Boredom], “Dekadan bungakuron” [On Decadent
Literature], “Nikutai jitai ga shikō suru” [The Flesh as the Thinking Subject],
“Watashi wa umi wo dakishimeteitai” [I Want to Keep Holding the Sea]
that express Ango’s view that the body is a subjective entity independent of
rationality.
3. Ibid., p. 107.
4. Sakaguchi Ango, Sakaguchi Ango zenshū vol. 4. Tokyo: Chikuma, 1998, p. 53.
(From here on abbreviated as SAZ 4.)
5. Sakaguchi Ango, “Discourse on Decadence.” Trans. James Dorsey, Literary
Mischief: Sakaguchi Ango, Culture, and the War. Lanham: Lexington, 2010,
pp. 176–7. The original is in SAZ 4, pp. 53–4.
6. Ian Smith, “Sakaguchi Ango and the Morality of Decadence,” accessed April
5, 2006, http://mcel.pacificu.edu/aspac/papers/scholars/smith/.
7. Max Nordau, Degeneration. Trans. George L. Mosse. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1993, p. 301. Nordau cites Paul Bourget’s view that strong
individualism is injurious to the organic structure of society.
8. Sakaguchi Ango, “Dekadan bungakuron” [On Decadent Literature]. SAZ 4,
p. 213.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., p. 214.
12. J. Victor Koschmann, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 57.
13. Tamura Taijirō, “Nikutai ga ningen de aru” [The Flesh Is the Human Being],
in Nihon kindai bungaku hyōronsen Shōwahen. Tokyo: Iwanami, 2004, p.
367.
14. Ibid., p. 368.
15. Ibid. Translation is Koschmann’s, p. 58.
16. Ibid., pp. 370–1.
17. With an explicit reference to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1869) in the novel’s title,
however, Sakaguchi’s female character offers a subversive version of human
innocence. Unlike Prince Myshkin, who is characterized by altruism, self-
sacrifice, and asexuality, Ango’s female character, “the Idiot,” provides the
novella with a conscious subversion of the widely known figure.
18. Sakaguchi, “Darakuron,” SAZ 4, p. 53.
19. For a discussion of Ango’s relationship with Buddhism, see Karatani Kōjin’s
“The Irrational Will to Reason: The Praxis of Sakaguchi Ango.” Trans. James
Dorsey, in James Dorsey and Doug Slaymaker, eds., Literary Mischief: Sakaguchi
Ango, Culture, and the War. Plymouth: Lexington, 2010, pp. 23–33.
 notes / 209

20. Elizabeth English, Vajrayoginī: Her Visualizations, Rituals, and Forms. Boston:
Wisdom, 2002, p. 40.
21. Ibid., p. 41.
22. Ibid.
23. Mircea Eliade, Symbolism, The Sacred, and The Arts, ed. Diane Apostolos-
Cappadona. New York: Crossroad, 1985, p. 83.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and
Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 82.
27. Ibid., p. 84.
28. Ibid., p. 1.
29. Akasaka Norio, Ijinron josetsu [An Introduction to Aliens]. Tokyo: Sunakoya,
1985, p. 114.
30. Renouncing his divinity, Emperor Hirohito made a speech known as the
Ningen sengen that was broadcast on national radio, on January 1, 1946.
31. Sakaguchi, “A Short Essay on the Emperor,” SAZ 4, p. 86.
32. In particular, Emperor Hirohito (1901–89), who reigned during the period of
1926 to 1989.
33. Sakaguchi, Tennō shōron [A Short Essay on the Emperor], SAZ 4, p.86.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., p. 87.
36. Hierotheos Kykkōtēs, English–Greek and Greek–English Dictionary. London:
Humphries, 1942, p. 223.
37. Ōshima Hitoshi, “Kobayashi Hideo, Apologist for the ‘Savage Mind,’”
Comparative Literature Studies 41.4 (2004): pp. 509–10.
38. Sakaguchi, “Yokubō ni tsuite” [On Desire], SAZ 4, pp. 141–2.
39. Ibid., pp. 140–1.
40. Sakaguchi Ango, “The Idiot.” Trans. George Saitō, in Ivan Morris ed., Modern
Japanese Stories: An Anthology. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1962, p. 398.
41. Sakaguchi, “Darakuron,” SAZ 4, p. 55.
42. Yōrō Takeshi. Shintai no bungakushi [A Literary History of the Body]. Tokyo:
Nihon Tosho Sentā, 1992, p. 53.
43. Ibid., p. 91.
44. Sakaguchi, “Hakuchi,” SAZ 4, p. 65
45. Sakaguchi, “The Idiot,” p. 401. The original is in SAZ 4, p.74
46. Sakaguchi, “Hakuchi,” SAZ 4, p. 72.
47. Shukumi Lin, “Moraru to yobu atarashii gainen no sōzō: ‘Hakuchi’ to Ango
no sengo” [Creation of the New Notion Named the Moral], in Sakaguchi
Ango Kenkyūkai ed., Ekkyōsuru Ango [Ango Who Deterritorializes]. Tokyo:
Yumani, 2002, p. 101.
48. In the novella, Sakaguchi employs the terms “idiocy” and “madness” almost
interchangeably (e.g., see p. 68). However, he usually describes the woman as
“the Idiot,” whereas her husband is called “the Madman.”
49. See Chapter 8, “The New Division,” for a discussion of the gradual confine-
ment of madmen in the eighteenth century. Michel Foucault, Madness and
Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard.
New York: Vintage, 1965, pp. 221–40.
50. Sakaguchi, “Hakuchi,” SAZ 4, pp. 67–8.
 210 / notes

51. Ibid., p. 64.

52. Ibid., p. 73.
53. Cixous, Hélène, “The Newly Born Woman,” The Hélène Cixous Reader, ed.
Susan Sellers. New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 39.
54. Shōji Hajime, Sakaguchi Ango. Tokyo: Chūsekisha, 2004, p. 207.
55. Sakaguchi, “Hakuchi,” SAZ , p. 76.
56. Ibid., p. 77.
57. Ibid., p. 66.
58. Ibid., p. 70.
59. Ibid., p. 58.
60. Ibid., p. 75.
61. Sakaguchi, “The Idiot,” p. 407. The original is in SAZ 4, p. 79.
62. Sakaguchi, “Hakuchi,” SAZ 4, p. 79.
63. Ibid., p. 80.
64. Ibid., p. 73.
65. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison. Trans. Alan
Sheridan, New York: Vintage, 1995, p. 144.
66. Sakaguchi, “The Idiot,” p. 409. The original is in SAZ 4, p. 82.
67. Sakaguchi, “Hakuchi,” SAZ 4, p. 84.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. Sakaguchi, “The Idiot,” p. 415. The original is in SAZ 4, p. 72.
72. Ibid.
73. Takeda Taijun, “Metsubō nitsuite” [On Annihilation], in Kindai bungaku
hyōronsen: shōwahen [The Collected Works of Modern Japanese Literary
Criticism: Shōwa Edition]. Tokyo: Iwanami, 2004, pp. 391–2.
74. Ibid., pp. 395–6.
75. Ibid., p. 398.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid., pp. 398–9.
78. Onishi Yasumitsu, Tamura Yasujirō no sensō bungaku [Tamura Yasujirō’s
Literature of War]. Tokyo: Kasama, 2008, p. 162.
79. Tamura Taijirō, “Nikutai ga ningen de aru” [The Flesh Is the Human Being],
pp. 366–7.
80. Onishi, p. 162.
81. Tamura Taijirō, Nikutai no mon [Gateway to the Flesh]. Tokyo: Kadokawa,
1988, p. 9.
82. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New
York: Norton, 1999, p. 139.
83. Tamura, Nikutai no mon, p. 8.
84. Ibid., p. 9.
85. Ibid., p. 14.
86. Ibid., p. 10.
87. Ibid., pp. 12–13.
88. Ibid., p. 8.
89. Ibid., p. 10.
90. Ibid., p. 19.
 notes / 211

91. Ibid., pp. 22–3.

92. Ibid., p. 23.
93. Sakaguchi, “Darakuron,” SAZ 4, pp. 52–3.
94. Ibid., p. 36.
95. Ibid., p. 27.
96. Ibid., p. 18.
97. Ibid., p. 27.
98. Ibid., p. 37.
99. Ibid., p. 40.
100. Ibid., p. 42.
101. Ibid., p. 43.
102. Ibid., p. 41.
103. Ibid., p. 9.
104. Ibid., p. 43.
105. These factors are discussed in depth in Chapter 6, particularly in reference
to Bataille and Lyotard.

6 Decadence as Generosity: Squander and Oblivion in

Mishima Yukio’s Spring Snow
1. Mishima’s tetralogy Hojō no umi [The Sea of Fertility] consists of Haru no
yuki [Spring Snow] (1965), Honba [Runaway Horses] (1967), Akatsuki no
tera [The Temple of Dawn] (1970), and Tennin gosui [The Decay of the
Angel] (1970). The four novels were first serialized in the magazine Shinchō
in 1965 to 1970, and subsequently published in book form.
2. Mishima Yukio, “Hōjō no umi nitsuite” [On The Sea of Fertility], in Mishima
Yukio zenshū vol. 35. Tokyo: Shinchō, 2003, p. 411. The essay was originally
published in the evening edition of Mainichi shinbun, February 26, 1969.
3. Ibid.
4. Nibuya Takashi, “Mishima to riarizumu” [Mishima and Realism], Eureka
11 (2000): p. 102.
5. Ibid., p. 105.
6. The chapters most relevant to my analysis are “The Origins of Capitalism
and the Reformation” and “The Bourgeois World,” in Part 4, Georges
Bataille, The Accursed Share vol. 1. New York: Zone Books, pp. 115–42.
7. Marcel Mauss, The Gift. Trans. W.D. Halls. New York: Norton, 1990,
pp. 33–46.
8. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess. Ed. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, p. 124.
9. Nicoletta Pireddu, Antropologi alla corte della bellezza: Decadenza ed eco-
nomia simbolica nell’Europa fin de siècle [Anthropologists at the Court of
Beauty: Decadence and Symbolic Economy in fin-de-siècle Europe]. Verona:
Edizioni Fiorini, 2002, p. 11.
10. Max Nordau, Degeneration. Trans. George L. Mosse. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1993, p. 301. He cites Paul Bourget, Essais de Psychologie
contemporaine. Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1883, p. 24.
11. Ibid., p. 301.
 212 / notes

12. Ibid., pp. 298–337.

13. Ibid., p. 313.
14. Ibid., p. 322.
15. Ibid., pp. 323–4.
16. Ibid., p. 325.
17. See Georges Bataille’s “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess. Ed.
Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 116–29, and
Jean-François Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, especially Chapter 2, “Tensor,”
pp. 43–94.
18. Bataille, Visions of Excess, p. 118.
19. Mishima, Yukio, “‘Erochishizumu’—Jyoruju Bataiyu cho, Muro Junsuke
yaku” [Eroticism—by Georges Bataille, Trans. Muro Junsuke], in Mishima
Yukio zenshū vol. 31. Tokyo: Shinchō, 2006, pp. 411–15. This book review was
published in 1955, shortly after Muro’s translation of Bataille’s Eroticism was
published. In Mishima’s reading, Bataille’s eroticism begins with the premise
that “life” (sei) is essentially discontinuity (hirenzokusei) of individuals. In
this presumption, eroticism functions as a sort of rupture that deconstructs
the social structure governing the order of discontinuous individuals. In so
stating, Mishima views that Bataille’s eroticism is potentially a breakthrough
in the impasse of intellectualism (shuchi shugi), as it sheds light on the con-
tinuity (renzokusei) of death and individual lives obscured by intellectualism
(pp. 412–13).
20. Harry D. Harootunian, Japan in Crisis: Essays on Taishō Democracy. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1974, p. 10.
21. Nakamura Mitsuo and Mishima Yukio. Taidan: Ningen to Bungaku [Dialogue:
Human Beings and Literature]. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2003, p. 145.
22. Mishima Yukio, “Haru no yuki nitusite” [On Spring Snow], Mishima Yukio
zenshū vol. 35. Tokyo: Shinchō, 2003, p. 515.
23. Mishima Yukio, Haru no yuki [Spring Snow], in Mishima Yukio zenshū vol.
13. Tokyo: Shinchō, 2006, pp. 12–13.
24. Mishima was an avid reader of Oscar Wilde. See “Osukaa Wairudo ron” [On
Oscar Wilde], in Mishima Yukio zenshū vol. 27. Tokyo: Shinchō, 2003, pp.
290–1.
25. Mishima, Haru no yuki, p. 7.
26. Mishima Yukio, Spring Snow. Trans. Michael Gallagher. New York: Vintage,
1990, p. 15.
27. Mishima, Haru no yuki, pp. 171–2.
28. Ibid., p. 149.
29. Ibid., p. 22.
30. Bataille, Visions of Excess, p. 117.
31. Ibid., p. 123.
32. Ibid., pp. 128–9.
33. Mishima, Spring Snow, p. 373.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., p. 306.
36. Mauss, The Gift. For a detailed discussion of potlatch, see Chapter 2, pp.
19–46. According to this seminal anthropological study, the essence of
 notes / 213

potlatch consists of three obligations: “to give, to receive, [and] to recipro-

cate” (p. 39). In ancient societies, including the Kwakiutl, the Haïda, and the
Tsimshian, the practice of potlatch signifies a basic act of “recognition” in
“military, judicial, economic, and religious” spheres designed to elicit a sense
of gratitude among constituents (p. 40). Destruction of one’s wealth in public
is inextricably attached to the notion of “honour” (p. 37). In Mauss’s view, as a
form of economy, the gift exchange of potlatch is an interstitial phenomenon
between “total services” that take place at the level of community, such as clan
to clan or family to family, and a “purely individual contract” of the market
economy based on selling and the circulation of money (p. 46).
37. Bataille, The Accursed, p. 67.
38. Ibid., p. 68.
39. Ibid., p. 69.
40. Mishima, Haru no yuki, p. 218.
41. Ibid., p. 187.
42. Lyotard, Libidinal, p. 201.
43. Mishima, Spring Snow, p. 246.
44. Nicoletta Pireddu, “‘Il divino pregio del dono’: Andrea Sperelli’s ‘Economy of
Pleasures,’” Annali d’Italianistica 15 (1997): p. 178. In the article, Pireddu ana-
lyzes the representation of unproductive expenditure in Il Piacere by Gabriele
D’Annunzio, of whom Mishima was an avid reader and a great admirer.
45. For this interpretation, I disagree with Michiko Wilson’s interpretation of
Mishima as a misogynistic writer. According to her, the writer’s female char-
acters are “doomed to outlive” the male characters, thereby underscoring
the aestheticized premature deaths of the male victims (p. 172). Although
Wilson states that Mishima reduces his heroines to the “unthinkable” (p.
176), Satoko in Spring Snow plays an indispensable role in Kiyoaki’s psycho-
logical development through her renouncement of personal history, body,
emotion, and social privileges. See Wilson’s “Three Portraits of Women in
Mishima’s Novels,” Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 14.2
(1979): pp. 157–81.
46. See Takahashi Eiri’s “’Hōjō no umi’ o yomu to iu monogatari” [The Tale
of Reading The Sea of Fertility], Eureka 11 (2000): pp. 134–45, and David
Pollock’s “Arayuru mono e no hihyō” [Critique of Everything], Eureka 11
(2000): pp. 146–63. Both critics consider Kiyoaki to be a man of action.
For example, Pollock describes the protagonist as comparable to “a shite”
of Noh drama, juxtaposing him with the passive observer, Honda (p. 152).
Nonetheless, Kiyoaki presents himself with a considerable sense of hopeless-
ness in the face of the insurmountable authority of patriarchy.
47. Mishima, Spring Snow, p. 365.
48. For example, Mishima often expresses the protagonist’s fascination with
dying young in Confessions of a Mask. Refer to the episode in which the pro-
tagonist regrets that his poor physique had prevented him from entering the
army. Confessions of a Mask. Trans. Meredith Weatherby. New York: New
Directions, 1958, p. 139.
49. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2008, pp. 41–2.
50. Ibid., pp. 45–6.
 214 / notes

51. Ibid., p. 48.

52. Mishima, Spring Snow, p. 373.
53. Mishima, “Hōjō no umi ni tsuite” [A Note on The Sea of Fertility], p. 411. To
frame the entire tetralogy, Mishima expounds the narrative development in
regard to the philosophy of Yogācāra (yuishiki, consciousness-only) developed
by Mahāyāna Buddhism.
54. Lyotard, Libidinal, p. 61.
55. Ibid., p. 145.
56. Ibid. Italics are Lyotard’s.
57. Mishima, Spring Snow, p. 451.
58. Roger Caillois. Man, Play and Games. Trans Meyer Barash. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000, pp. 14–19.
59. According to Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, Mishima understood the concept of
decadence quite broadly and he explicitly showed his infatuation with it. As
Shibusawa points out, in his postscript written as editor to the literary jour-
nal, Hihyō [Criticism] (1968), Mishima attests to his discursive understand-
ing of the term. As Shibusawa points out, in this short paragraph, Mishima
employs the term “decadence” six times, a repetition that can be understood
as reflecting his unsettled and complicated conceptualization of the term.
See Shibusawa’s Mishima Yukio Oboegaki [The Memoirs of Mishima Yukio].
Tokyo: Chūōkōron, 2002, pp. 58–9.
60. Shibusawa, Chi to bara korekushon vol.1 [A Collection of Blood and Roses
Magazine vol. 1]. Tokyo: Kawade, 2005, p. 38.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., p. 22.
63. Ibid., p. 15.
64. Shibusawa, Mishima Yukio Oboegaki [The Memoirs of Mishima Yukio].
Tokyo: Chūkō, 2002, pp. 60–61.
65. Ibid., p. 59.
66. Ibid.
67. Sadoya Shigenobu, Mishima ni okeru seiyō [The West in Mishima’s Work].
Tokyo: Tokyō Shoseki, 1981, p. 148.
68. Mishima Yukio, “Erochishizumu” (book review of Bataille’s Eroticism), in
Mishima Yukio hyōron zenshū vol. 1. Tokyo: Shinchō, 1989, p. 506.
69. Sadoya, p. 145
70. Pireddu, “’Il divino pregio del dono’: Andrea Sperelli’s Economy of Pleasures,”
p. 182.
71. Ibid.
72. Although Mishima’s novella “Misaki nite no monogatari” [A Story at the
Cape] (1947) was influenced by D’Annunzio’s The Triumph of Death, there
is no evidence that the Japanese writer actually read the entire trilogy,
The Romance of Roses, which also includes The Child of Pleasure and The
Innocent.
73. Edward S. Brinkley, “Homosexuality as (Anti)Illness: Oscar Wilde’s The
Picture of Dorian Gray and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere,” Studies in
Twentieth Century Literature 22.1 (1998): p. 79.
 notes / 215

74. Gabriele D’Annunzio, Il Piacere [The Child of Pleasure]. Milan: Mondadori,

1995, pp. 34–7.
75. David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism. Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1995, p. 124.
76. See Charles Bernheimer’s accessible interpretation of Cesare Lombroso’s
misogynistic study in La donna delinquente: la prostituta e la donna normale
(1893), in Decadent Subjects, pp. 146–9. Bernheimer’s interpretation is based
on the French translation of Lombroso’s work, La femme criminelle et la pros-
tituée. Trans. Louise Meille. Paris: Alcan, 1896.
77. Ibid., p. 147.
78. Spackman states that “Something speaks through the subject, but in the pre-
Freudian texts that are the most ambitious proponents of this discourse, it
is not language, not yet the unconscious. Behind the disturbed syntax, the
disturbing contents of decadent texts, there hides a diseased, degenerate body.
Post-Freudian symptomatic readings rely on an analysis of psychic mecha-
nisms to interpret texts, and nineteenth-century medicolegal anthropological
studies (as their authors call them) ground their interpretive code on a descrip-
tion of somatic reaction, not the unconscious. These pre-Freudian texts are as
blissfully unaware of that dark continent as they are of discipline to boundar-
ies” (p. 1).
79. Tsutui Yasutaka, Danuntsuio ni muchū [Infatuated with D’Annunzio]. Tokyo:
Chūōkōron, 1989, pp. 11–46.
80. Ibid., p. 135.
81. Mishima, Haru no yuki, p. 166.
82. Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from
Baudelaire to D’Annunzio. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989, p. 42.
83. Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2002, p. 150. He cites Cesare Lombroso and Ferrero, La femme crim-
inelle, p. 409.
84. Gabriele D’Annunzio, The Child of Pleasure. Trans. Georgina Harding and
Arthur Symons, London: William Heinemann, 1898, p. 53.
85. Mishima, Spring Snow, p. 88.
86. Mishima, “Erochishizumu,” p. 506. My translation.
87. Shibusawa, Mishima Yukio Oboegaki, p. 57.
88. Mishima Yukio, “Amerikateki Dekadansu: Tōi koe, tōi heya” [American
Decadence: Other Voices, Other Rooms], in Mishima Yukio zenshū vol. 28.
Tokyo: Shinchō, 2003, p. 469. The essay was published in May 7, 1955, as a
book review of Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms in Toshoshinbun.

7 Capitalist Generosity: Decadence as Giving and

Receiving in Shimada Masahiko’s Decadent Sisters
1. Here, the distinction between the bare life and the communal human life
can assimilate Giorgio Agamben’s dualism located in the Greek terms zoē and
bios. The former refers to “the simple fact of living common to all living beings
 216 / notes

(animals, men, or gods)” and the latter “the form or way of living proper to an
individual or a group.” Homo Sacer. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1998, p. 1.
2. Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
3. For the postwar leftist literary debates on the construction of subjectiv-
ity through realism, see J. Victor Koschmann’s Chapter 2: “Literature and
Bourgeois Subject” in Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 41–57. His discussion of the Kindai
bungaku group offers a detailed analysis of the problem of subjectivity, the
responsibilities of writers, and their adherence to a Marxist–Leninist episte-
mology and the aesthetics commensurate with it.
4. To my knowledge, Shimada does not claim any concrete interconnectedness
between Taihai shimai and Sakaguchi Ango’s “Darakuron.” However, the
author appears to be highly conscious of Ango’s postwar critique against
the totalitarian regime of wartime, particularly in the final six paragraphs
of “On Decadence,” which concern the postwar recovery of humanity via
a moral downfall. See “Darakuron” [On Decadence] in Sakaguchi Ango
zenshū vol. 4. Tokyo: Chikuma, 1999, pp. 58–60. Also, Shimada’s depiction
of comfort facilities appears to be indebted to John W. Dower’s Chapter 4
in Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: Norton,
1999, pp. 123–39.
5. Sakaguchi, “Dekadanron,” p. 58.
6. Kobayashi Takayoshi, Shimada Masahiko: Koimonogatari no tanjō. Tokyo:
Bensei, 2010, p. 227.
7. According to Hayakawa Noriyo’s essay, “Senryōgun no ian to baishunsei
no saihen” [Comforting the Occupation Army and the Reorganization of
Prostitution], soldiers, from the highest to the lowest-ranked, expected to
receive sexual services in Japan after that country’s defeat in August 1945. At
the time, the Japanese Cabinet feared the uncertainty of the national polity,
and out of necessity it issued an official notification, “Gaikokugun chūtonchi
ni kakaru ianshisetsu nitsuite” [On Comfort Facilities in Foreign Militaries’
Stations], on August 18. For details, see Hayakawa’s essay in Senryō to sei:
seisaku, jittai, hyōshō [Occupation and Sex: Policies, Realities, Symbols], ed.
Kanō Mikiyo et al. Tokyo: Inpakuto, 2007, pp. 45–78.
8. Duus Masayo, Haisha no okurimoto: kokusaku ianfu o meguru senryōka hishi
[The Gift of the Defeated: A Secret History Surrounding National Comfort
Women]. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1979, p. 4.
9. Ibid., p. 23.
10. Shimada Masahiko, Taihai shimai [Decadent Sisters]. Tokyo: Bunshun, 2008,
p. 54.
11. Ibid., pp. 140–1.
12. Ibid., pp. 149–50.
13. Ibid., p. 139.
14. Ibid., p. 113.
15. Ibid., p. 127. My translation.
16. Ibid., p. 128.
17. Ibid., p. 133.
 notes / 217

18. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant.
London: Sage, 1993, p. 5.
19. Ibid., p. 133.
20. Ibid., p. 191.
21. Ibid., p. 197.
22. Ibid., p. 198.
23. Ibid., p. 137.
24. Ibid.
25. Shimada, Taihai shimai, p. 192.
26. Ibid., 71.
27. Ibid. My translation.
28. Ibid., p. 177.
29. Ibid., 181. My translation.
30. Ibid., p. 71.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., p. 338.
33. Ibid., pp. 117–18.
34. Ibid., pp. 212–13.
35. Ibid., pp. 334–5.
36. Ibid., p. 54.
37. Ibid., pp. 51–2.
38. Ibid., p. 60.
39. Ibid., p. 83.
40. Ibid., pp. 250–5.
41. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State
Form. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, p. 7.
42. Ibid., p. 8. Italics added by Negri and Hardt.
43. Ibid., p. 9. Negri and Hardt suggest the following references as indices to an
analysis of female affective labor: Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex and Power:
Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism. Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 1985, pp. 234–40; Hilary Rose, “Hand, Brain, and Heart: A Feminist
Epistemology for the Natural Sciences,” Women and Religion 9.1 (1983):
3–90; and Micaela Di Leonardo, “The Female World of Cards and Holidays:
Women, Families, and the Work of Kinship,” Signs 12.3 (1987): 440–53.
44. Ibid., p. 239.
45. Ibid., p. 194.
46. Ibid., pp. 206–18.
47. Ibid., pp. 258–60.
48. Shimada Masahiko, “Transcritique and Poietique of Novels,” Kokubungaku
44.9 (1999): p. 22.
49. Ibid.
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 I n de x
Note: Foreign language titles of literary works follow their English translations in
square brackets.
Abe Jirō, 60
Aestheticism
defined, 8–9, 10
growth of Decadence and, 11, 21
Naturalism and, 20, 57–8, 60–1,
62, 66; see also Sooty Smoke
[Baien] (Morita)
Against Nature [A rebours]
(Huysmans), 29, 107, 114,
161, 179
Agamben, Giorgio, 215n1
Aguri [Aoi hana] (Tanizaki), 105
Akagi Kōhei, 7, 8, 11, 55
Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 21, 104, 109
alea, 33, 123, 156, 164
American Stories [America Monogatari]
(Kafū), 9
And Then [Sorekara] (Sōseki), 72, 124
Anesaki Chōfū, 66
Ara Masato, 130
“Aristocratism and Populism”
[“Kizokushugi to Heiminshugi”]
(Ueda), 80–1, 88
Ariwara no Narihira, 2–3, 85
artificial paradise [paradis artificiels]
Baudelaire on, 17, 18, 31, 41–2,
103–4
defined, 34, 103–5, 123–5
see also Fool’s Love, A [Chijin no ai]
(Tanizaki); Pastoral Spleen, A
[Den’en no yūutsu] (Satō)
“Art in the Age of Disillusionment”
[“Genmetsujidai no geijutsu”]
(Hawegawa), 20
Awakening from Love [Koizame]
(Oguri), 39
Baju, Anatole, 30
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 79, 82, 88, 93
Barrès, Maurice, 52, 87, 98
Bataille, Georges
Blood and Roses, 26–7
Spring Snow (Mishima) and, 147,
148, 150, 152, 153, 157–60, 163
unproductive expenditure and,
15–16, 29, 54
Baudelaire, Charles
on artificial paradise [paradis
artificiels], 17, 18, 31, 41–2,
103–4
Flowers of Evil, 202–3n1
influence of, 9, 15, 26, 53, 60, 75,
81, 88
“The Painter of Modern Life” [“Le
peintre de la vie moderne”], 161
Baudrillard, Jean, 119
Bennett, John, 53
Bentham, Jeremy, 25, 138
Bernheimer, Charles, 30, 57
Bhabha, Homi K., 2, 11
Biedermeier, 21
Bildungsroman, 92, 95, 96, 150, 160,
168, 179
Binni, Walter, 28, 60
Birth of Japan’s Aesthetic School, The
[Nihon Tanbiha bungaku no
tanjō] (Noda), 20
Bleuler, Eugen, 85
 234 / index
Blood and Roses [Chi to bara] (literary
group), 26–7, 157–8
Bourget, Paul, 31, 32, 34, 147, 178
“Brief Reflection on Decadence, A”
(Satō), 112
Brinkley, Edward S., 160
Browning, Robert, 97
Buddhism
The Idiot (Sakaguchi) and, 132
mappō, 182n13
“On Annihilation” (Takeda)
and, 139
Spring Snow (Mishima) and,
145, 146
Caillois, Roger, 33
Calinescu, Matei, 30
Carducci, Giosuè, 28
Cat’s Bridge, The (Sudermann), 70
Cavour, Camillo, 59
Channel Buoys [Miotsukushi]
(Ueda), 91
Charterhouse of Parma,
The (Stendhal), 98
Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 73
Chikamatsu Shūkō, 7, 55
Child of Pleasure, The (D’Annunzio),
154, 160, 161, 163
Chu Guang-yi, 112
Chūōkōron (magazine), 39
Cixous, Hélène, 136
Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves
[Manyōshū], 3
“Comforting the Occupation Army
and the Reorganization of
Prostitution” [“Senryōgun no
ian to baishunsei no saihen”]
(Hayakawa), 216n7
Comte, Auguste, 19
Confessions of a Mask (Mishima), 164
Confessions of an Opium Eater (de
Quincey), 72
Confucianism
English empiricism and, 19
Fukuzawa Yukichi’s shift from, 48
The Idiot (Sakaguchi) and, 135
ie system and, 64–5
individualism and, 65
Sooty Smoke (Morita) and, 73
suicide themes and, 73
Crime and Punishment
(Dostoevsky), 70
Critique [Hihyō] (Mishima), 158
Croce, Benedetto, 28
Cursed Play, The [Norowareta gikyoku]
(Tanizaki), 113
Dan Kazuo, 112
D’Annunzio, Gabriele
Blood and Roses and, 26
The Child of Pleasure, 154, 160,
161, 163
influence on Mishima, 147,
159, 160
Kōu in Kafū’s Sneers, 87, 90, 96
The Novels of the Roses, 61, 68,
112, 161
Romanticism and, 28
The Triumph of Death, 33, 58–60,
61–2, 63, 67, 68, 73–4, 76
Dante Alighieri, 74
daraku (downfall), 1, 25, 188n148
see also Decadence
Dazai Osamu, 25, 157
Decadence
Aestheticism and, 8–9
as creative labor, 13–18
definitions, 1–3, 30, 31–2
fin-de-siècle, 9–13, 30, 35–6,
157–60
kichōsha stories as, 34, 79–83; see
also Sneers [Reishō] (Nagai);
Vortex, The [Uzumaki] (Ueda)
Naturalism and, 7–8, 39, 41,
42, 50–5; see also Indulgences
[Tandeki] (Iwano); Indulgences
[Tandeki] (Oguri); Sooty Smoke
[Baien] (Morita)
as refuge, in early Meiji period, 38
taihai (degeneration) and, 1, 25,
131, 165–6, 168
Taishō period and, 46, 103–5, 147,
148–9; see also Fool’s Love, A
[Chijin no ai] (Tanizaki); Pastoral
Spleen, A [Den’en no yūutsu]
(Satō)
 index / 235
uselessness, as ideology, 18–27; see
also labor; uselessness
uselessness and, historical
perspective, 18–27, 177–80
uselessness as motif and, 3–7
World War II and, 130, 134,
137–8, 139
see also individual names of authors;
individual titles of works
Décadent, Le (magazine) (Baju), 30
Decadent Genealogies (Spackman), 161
Decadent Sisters [Taihai shimai]
(Shimada)
labor and capitalism, 35,
165–6, 179
plot and characters of, 166–75
Decay of the Angel, The [Tennin gosui]
(Mishima), 153
Declaration of the Human Being
[Ningen sengen], 133
“Defining Decadence in Nineteenth-
century French and British
Criticism” (North), 187n140
Deleuze, Gilles, 129, 133
Dellamora, Richard, 14
“Demise of the Logic of the Meiji
Restoration, The” [“Bunmeikaika
no ronri no shūen nitsuite”]
(Yasuda), 23
de Quincey, Thomas, 72
Derrida, Jacques, 154, 155
Descartes, René, 24
dilettantism
defined, 83
Iwano and, 44
Nagai and, 6, 9–10, 34, 57, 90
Ueda and, 34, 57, 91–100
Ueda on kyōraku shugi, 80
“Discourse in the Novel”
(Bakhtin), 82
“Discourse on Decadence”
[“Darakuron”] (Sakaguchi), 25,
127–30, 165, 171, 178
“Discourse on Decadent Literature”
[“Dekadan bungakuron”]
(Sakaguchi), 130
Divine Comedy (Dante), 74
Dōgen, 3
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 59, 70, 75, 133,
208n17
Dower, John, 140
Duus Masayo, 167
economic issues, see labor; uselessness
Edo culture, Meiji period contrasted
with, 80, 83–4, 85–7, 88, 90,
92, 100
Eight Laughing Men [Hasshōjin]
(Ryūtei), 86, 90
Eliade, Mircea, 133
Ellis, Havelock, 31
Embarkation for Cythera, The
(Watteau), 92, 99
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 65
Emperor
as patriarch, 64–5
shinmin (subjects ruled by
Emperor), 129
worship of, 171
see also individual names of emperors
Encouragement of Learning [Gakumon
no susume] (Fukuzawa), 18, 47, 49
Engels, Friedrich, 15, 16
“Eradication of Decadent Literature,
The” [“Yūtōbungaku no
bokumetsu”] (Akagi), 7
Eroticism (Bataille), 148
Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine
(Ellis), 31
Ethics of the Man of the Polis
[Porisutekei ningen no rinrigaku]
(Watsuji), 24
Ethics [Rinrigaku] (Watsuji), 24
European Decadence
individualism and, 24, 31
Italian-Japanese parallels, 27–32; see
also D’Annunzio, Gabriele
Japanese Decadence contrasted
with, 6, 7–9, 11, 12, 14–15, 17,
20–1, 26–32, 33, 79, 177–80
Sneers (Nagai) and, 80, 82, 84
Sooty Smoke (Morita) and, 58–9, 61,
70–1, 73, 74
Spring Snow (Mishima) and, 146,
147, 149, 152, 153–4, 157–60
Taishō period and, 105, 177
 236 / index
European Decadence—Continued
Triumph of Death (D’Annunzio)
and, 61
The Vortex (Ueda) and, 80, 82, 91
Expansion of Great Japan, The
[Dainihon bōcherōn]
(Tokutomi), 19
expenditure
unproductive, 15–16, 29, 54
wealth versus, 150–1, 152–3
see also labor
Family Registry System, 37
Faust (Goethe), 106, 110
feminist theory
The Idiot (Sakaguchi) and, 136–7
“New Woman,” 70
“femme fatale” characters
Indulgences (Iwano), 44–5
Sooty Smoke (Morita), 63, 68–9,
70, 75
Spring Snow (Mishima), 160–2
fête galante, 92–3
Field of Musashino, The [Musashino]
(Kunikida), 107
fin-de-siècle Decadence, defined,
9–13, 30, 35–6, 157–60
see also Spring Snow [Haru no yuki]
(Mishima)
“Fireworks” [“Hanabi”] (Nagai), 7, 85
Flaubert, Gustave, 59
“Flesh Is the Human Being, The”
[“Nikutai ga ningen de aru”]
(Tamura), 131
Flowers of Evil (Baudelaire), 202–3n1
Fool’s Love, A [Chijin no ai] (Tanizaki)
artificial paradise and, 34, 103–5,
123–5
A Pastoral Spleen (Satō) compared
to, 113–23
plot and characters of, 113–23
Forbidden Colors (Mishima), 164
Forerunner, The [Senkusha], 45
Foucault, Michel, 136, 138
French Stories [Fransu Monogatari]
(Kafū), 9, 20–1
Freud, Sigmund, 158, 161
Fujiwara family, 128
Fujiwara no Kusuko, 181–2n7
Fukuzawa Yukichi, 6, 18–19, 47–8
Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 59
Gate, The [Mon] (Sōseki), 124
Gateway to the Flesh [Nikutai no mon]
(Tamura)
body and sexuality, 34–5, 130–1
The Idiot (Sakaguchi) compared to,
132–40
plot and characters of, 140–4
Gautier, Théophile, 20, 81, 202–3n1
Gay Science, The (Nietzsche), 161
Gemeinschaft, 49
Genealogy of Useless Men, The
[Muōysha no keifu] (Junzō), 2, 13
generosity, through malaise, 160–4
German Romanticism, 22, 111
gesaku (trivial work)
defined, 5
Nagai and, 7, 9, 10, 84, 85, 86, 90
Gesellschaft, 49, 147–8
Gibbon, Edward, 163
Gift, The [Essai sur le don]
(Mauss), 147
gift giving, 68–9
Gift of Death (Derrida), 154
Gilman, Richard, 30, 81
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 105,
106, 110–11, 112
Golden Death, The [Konjiki no shi]
(Tanizaki), 114
Goncourt brothers, 59, 87, 90
Gotō Sueo, 7, 55
Guattari, Félix, 129
Haniya Yukata, 26, 75
Hardt, Michael (Negri, Antonio),
15–17, 115, 116, 119, 173
Hasegawa Tenkei, 20
Hashikawa Bunzō, 23
Hata Toyokichi, 22
Hayakawa Noriyo, 216n7
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 24
Heian period, Fujiwara
Family and, 128
Heidegger, Martin, 24
Heijō, Emperor, 2
 index / 237
Heliogabalus (Roman Emperor), 163
Heraclitus, 92–3
Heretics [Jashūmon] (Kitahara), 20
hermaphroditism, 162–3
heteroglossia, 79, 82, 88, 93, 99
Hiraoka Toshio, 193n101
Hiratsuka Haruko (Raichō), 58, 62,
69, 70, 72
Hirohito, Emperor, 133–4
Hirotsu Kazuo, 105, 110
History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire (Gibbon), 163
Hosoe Eikoh, 26
Hugo, Victor, 87, 94
Huizinga, Johan, 117
Hunter’s Sketches, The (Turgenev), 108
Husserl, Edmund, 24
Hutchinson, Rachael, 84
Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 26, 29, 53, 59,
105, 107
hyōmen byōsha (flat narrative), 82
Ibsen, Henrik, 59, 66
ichigen byōsha (monistic narration),
50–1
Idiot, The (Dostoevsky), 208n17
Idiot, The [Hakuchi] (Sakaguchi)
body and sexuality, 34, 127–30
Gateway to the Flesh (Tamura)
compared to, 140–4
plot and characters of, 132–40
ie system, 37–8, 40, 41, 43–4, 48–53,
64–5, 66–7, 76, 116
Ikuta Chōkō, 59, 63
Inagaki Taruho, 26
individualism
Mishima on, 147–8
Morita on, 59, 66–77
Nagai and Ueda on, 80, 81, 83, 84,
85, 86, 89, 90, 91, 93–4, 96–9
Tamura on, 143
Indulgences [Tandeki] (Iwano)
Indulgences [Tandeki] (Oguri) and,
39–42
plot and characters of, 42–6
unproductivity and waste as themes
in, 33, 37–9, 46–55
Indulgences [Tandeki] (Oguri)
Indulgences [Tandeki] (Iwano)
compared to, 42–6
plot and characters of, 39–42
unproductivity and waste as themes
in, 33, 37–9, 46–55
inja (hidden men), 5
I-novel
Indulgences (Oguri) and Indulgences
(Iwano), 38, 41, 47, 52, 53–5
shinkyō shōsetsu (state-of-mind
novel) and shishōsetsu, 183n34
Sooty Smoke (Morita) and, 57–8, 60,
62–3, 66, 67, 72, 73, 76
Ippenshōnin, 3
Iser, Wolfgang, 99
Ise Stories, The [Ise Monogatari]
(anonymous), 2–3
Ishikawa Gian, 61
Ishikawa Takuboku, 20
Ishino Iwao, 53
Italian Decadentism, Japanese
parallels with, 27–32
see also European Decadence
Itō Sei, 46
Iwanō Hōmei, 7, 33, 38, 42–50, 52
Japanese Recreation and Amusement
Association (RAA), 167–8
Jijyoron (Nakamura), 49
Johnson, Frank A., 190n24
Josei (magazine), 113
jyōfu mono (story of the mistress), 113
kabuki, 96
Kafū the Scribbler (Seidensticker), 83
Kajii Motojirō, 109
Kamei Hideo, 73
Kamishima Jirō, 2
Kamono Chōmei, 5, 107
Kant, Immanuel, 24
Karaki Junzō, 2–5, 12, 13, 53, 85
Karatani Kōjin, 174
Kasai Zenzō, 7
Katagami Tengen, 7, 20
Kataoka Ryōichi, 68
Kawabata Yasunari, 55
Kawaji Utako, 106
Kawamoto Saburō, 21, 104, 109
 238 / index
Kawamura Masatoshi, 106
Kenyūsha, 38
kichōsha stories (returnees from the
West), 34, 79–83
see also Sneers [Reishō] (Nagai);
Vortex, The [Uzumaki] (Ueda)
Kinoshita Mokutarō, 20
Kitahara Hakushū, 20
Kitamura Tōkoku, 65
Kobayashi Hideo, 11, 52, 134
Kobayashi Takayoshi, 167
Kokumin Shinbun (newspaper), 91
Komori Yōichi, 84, 124
Koschmann, J. Victor, 130
Kōtoku Shūshui, 6–7
Kristeva, Julia, 84–5
Kubota Mantarō, 7, 8
Kunikida Doppo, 38, 107–8
kyōraku shugi, 80
labor
expenditure versus wealth, 150–1,
152–3
function of “labor” in Decadent
literature, 32
ideology of uselessness and, 13–18;
see also uselessness
Marxism on, 14, 16
Morita on, 57; see also Sooty Smoke
[Baien] (Morita)
Shimada on, 167, 169, 173; see also
Decadent Sisters [Taihai shimai]
(Shimada)
Tanizaki on, 115–19; see also Fool’s
Love, A [Chijin no ai] (Tanizaki)
unproductive expenditure and,
15–16, 29, 54
Labor of Dionysus (Hardt, Negri),
16–17, 115
Leonardo da Vinci, 96
Lévinas, Emmanuel, 155
Links of All Sciences [Hyakugaku
renkan] (Nishi), 19
“Literature Without Solutions”
[“Mukaiketsu no bungaku”]
(Katagami), 20
“Little Child, The” (“Il fanciullino)
(Pascoli), 200n38
Lombroso, Cesare, 28, 60, 110, 161
Love Suicides at Amijima, The
(Chikamatsu), 73
Love Suicides at Sonezaki, The
(Chikamatsu), 73
Lyotard, Jean-François, 15, 16, 148,
156, 157, 165
Madness and Civilization
(Foucault), 136
malaise, generosity through, 160–4
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 159
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 9, 81
Manifesto of the Communist Party,
17, 115
“Man of Letters as a Critic of
Civilization, The” [“Bunmei
hihyōka to shite no bungakusha”]
(Takayama), 66
Manon Lescaut (Prévost), 134
Mantegazza, Paolo, 159
mappō (law of end of world), 182n13
Marquis de Sade, 22, 26, 157
Maruki Sado, 22
Maruyama Masao, 18, 48, 129
Marx, Karl, 15, 16, 173
Marxism
on Aestheticism, 8–9, 10
on labor, 14, 16
Naturalism and, 21
Yasuda on Japanese literature and,
23–4
Matsuo Bashō, 5, 107
Maupassant, Guy de, 6, 9, 52
Mauss, Marcel, 32, 147, 150,
157, 159
Meiji period
art themes of, 96–7, 100
bundan (literary circles), 57–8
Decadent literature and Italian-
Japanese parallels, 32
Decadent literature development
and, 14, 18–20, 23–4, 28
female stereotypes in literature
during, 70
fukoku kyōhei (rich nation, strong
army), 33, 47
individualism and, 64–6
 index / 239
individualism and, Nagai and Ueda
on, 80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 89, 90,
91, 93–4, 96–9
Meiji Civil Code, 37, 50, 65
Nagai and Ueda on Edo culture
contrasted with, 80, 83–4, 85–7,
88, 90, 92, 100
Pax Tokugawa transition to, 37
Restoration, 86
Taishō transition and, 147, 148–9
mental disorders
division between sanity and
insanity, 136; see also Idiot, The
[Hakuchi] (Sakaguchi)
neurasthenia, 108
schizophrenia, 68, 85–6, 110
Merezhkovskii, Dmitri Sergeevich, 45
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 99
Mill, John Stuart, 19, 29, 31, 146
Mishima Yukio, 26
influence of fin-de-siècle Decadence
and Bataille on, 157–60
The Sea of Fertility, 35, 145–6, 160
Spring Snow, generosity through
malaise, 160–4
Spring Snow, plot and characters,
146–57
Mita Literature [Mita bungaku]
(magazine), 85
Miyamoto Yuriko, 9–10, 11
Mori Ōgai, 20
Morita Sōhei, 33, 57–77
Moto Izumi, 69
Muyōsha no keifu (Karaki), 2
muyōsha (useless man), 85
My Fair Lady, 120
“Mystical Semi-Animalism”
[“Shinpiteki hanjūshugi”]
(Iwano), 42
Nagai Kafū, 6–7, 9–10, 11, 20, 30,
34, 114
“Fireworks,” 85
Sneers, plotlines and characters,
83–91
Sneers as kichōsha story, 34, 79–83
Sneers compared to Vortex (Ueda),
91–101
Nagata Kimihiko, 7
naibu seimeiron (philosophy of the
inner life), 65
Nakamura Masanao, 49
Nakamura Mitsuo, 118, 123
NALP (the Japan Proletarian Writers’
Alliance), 23
Narushima Ryūhoku, 6
Native American culture, potlatch
and, 147, 151
Natsume Sōseki, 59, 61, 70, 72–3,
77, 124
Naturalism
defined, 7–8
Iwanō and, 7, 33, 38, 42–50, 52
Morita’s use of Symbolism and,
57–8, 61, 72–4; see also Sooty
Smoke [Baien] (Morita)
Naturalist School ideology, 19–21
Negri, Antonio (Hardt, Michael),
15–17, 115, 116, 119, 173
neurasthenia, 108
New Collection of Poems Ancient and
Modern [Shinkokin wakashū], 156
“Newly Born Woman, The”
(Cixous), 136
“New Woman,” 70
Nibuya Takashi, 146
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Bleuler influenced by, 85
Eliade’s views on, 133
European Decadence and,
12–13, 28
rhetoric of disease and, 161
Übermensch (superman) theme of,
58–60, 63, 66, 74, 76, 94
Ueda influenced by, 81, 94
Nii Itaru, 22
nikutai bungaku (carnal literature),
130–1, 167
Nishi Amane, 19
Nishiyama Sōin, 4
Noda Utarō, 20
Nordau, Max, 28, 148
North, Julian, 187n140
Novels of the Roses, The [I Romanzi
della Rosa] (D’Annunzio), 61, 68,
112, 161
 240 / index
Oda Sakunosuke, 25, 157
Oguri Fūyō, 33, 38–42, 46, 51–2
“On Annihilation” [“Metsubō ni
tsuite”] (Takeda), 139
On Decadence [Darakuron]
(Sakaguchi), 34, 127–44, 178
“On Decadent Literature” [“Dekadan
bungakuron”] (Ango), 25
“On Desire” [“Yokubō ni tsuite”]
(Ango), 134
“On the Demise of the Logic
of the Meiji Restoration”
[“Bunmeikaika no ronri no shūen
ni tsuite”] (Yasuda), 23
On the Genealogy of Morals
(Nietzsche), 66
“On the Impossibility of Eradicating
Decadent Literature”
[“Yūtōbungaku bokumetsu
fukanōron”] (Yasunari Sadao), 8
Ōoka Makoto, 21
Orikuchi Shinobu, 5
Ōsaka Asahi Shinbun (newspaper), 113
Ozaki Kōyō, 38
“Painter of Modern Life, The” [“Le
Peintre de la vie moderne”]
(Baudelaire), 161
Pan no kai (Group of Pan), 20, 61, 100
panopticism, 137
Panta Rhei (Heraclitus), 92–3, 98, 155
Part Maudite, La (Bataille), 147
Pascoli, Giovanni, 28, 60, 87, 90,
200n38
Pastoral Spleen, A [Den’en no yūutsu]
(Satō)
artificial paradise and, 34,
103–5, 123–5
A Fool’s Love (Tanizaki) compared
to, 113–23
plot and characters of, 105–13, 178
Pater, Walter, 93
paternalism, 40
patriarchy
Decadent Sisters (Masahiko), 172
The Idiot (Sakaguchi) and, 136–7
ie system, 37–8, 40, 41, 43–4,
48–53, 64–5, 66–7, 76, 116
saikun mono genre, 113
Spring Snow (Mishima) on, 151–3
The Vortex (Ueda) and, 89
“Phenomenology of Perception, The”
(Merleau-Ponty), 99
Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde),
149, 154
Pierrot, Jean, 17, 31, 103
Pireddu, Nicoletta, 147, 153
Poe, Edgar Allan, 26, 60, 105, 109, 111
Poetry and Decadence [Shi to
dekadansu] (Karaki), 12
potlatch, 147, 151
Praz, Mario, 28
Prévost, Abbé, 134
prostitution
as capitalism, 165–6; see also
Decadent Sisters [Taihai shimai]
(Shimada)
World War II “comfort” facilities,
165–6, 167–8, 169–70, 172
Quilt, The [Futon] (Tayama), 38, 39,
42, 50, 51
Red and the Black, The (Stendhal), 97
“reiki,” 181n5
Renaissance, The (Pater), 93
Rodenbach, Georges, 87
Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, The
(Merezhkovskii), 45
Romantic Agony (Praz), 70
Romanticism
Oguri on, 50; see also Indulgences
[Tandeki] (Oguri)
in A Pastoral Spleen (Satō), 106–7,
109, 111–13, 124
Ueda and, 81
Rubin, Jay, 54
Runaway Horses [Honba]
(Mishima), 145
Russo-Japanese War
individualism and, 64
infrastructure and industry, 37
Meiji period timeframe and, 14; see
also Meiji period
Ryūtei Rijō, 86, 90
Saeki Junko, 70
Saeki Shōichi, 118
 index / 241
Saga, Emperor, 181–82n7
Saigyō Hōshi, 3
saikun mono (story of the wife), 113
Saionji Kinmochi, 65
Saitō Dōsan, 67
Sakaguchi Ango, 26
Decadent Sisters (Shimada)
compared to works of, 157,
165–7, 171
“Discourse on Decadence,” 25,
127–30, 132, 134, 135, 137, 139,
140, 142, 144, 165, 171, 178
“Discourse on Decadent Literature,”
130
The Idiot, body and sexuality, 34,
127–30
The Idiot, plot and characters,
132–40
The Idiot compared to Gateway to
the Flesh (Tamura), 140–4
Salome (Wilde), 29, 72, 179
Satō Haruo, 21, 85
A Pastoral Spleen, and artificial
paradise, 34, 103–5, 123–5
A Pastoral Spleen, plot and
characters, 105–13, 178
A Pastoral Spleen compared to A
Fool’s Love (Tanizaki),
113–23
“Saufen und Huren” (drinking and
whoring), 55
see also Indulgences [Tandeki]
(Iwano); Indulgences [Tandeki]
(Oguri)
schizophrenia, 68, 85–6, 110
Schnitzler, Arthur, 7
School of Decadence [Buraiha]
(Sakaguchi, Dazai, Oda), 157
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 28, 60
Sea of Fertility, The [Hōjō no umi]
(Mishima), 35, 145–6, 164
Seidensticker, Edward, 83
self, see individualism
Self Help [Jijyoron] (Nakamura,
translation), 49
Self Help (Smiles), 49
“Sequel to ‘Discourse on Decadence,’
The” [“Zoku darakuran”]
(Ango), 25
sexuality
hermaphroditism, 162–3
The Idiot (Sakaguchi), 34, 127–30;
see also Idiot, The [Hakuchi]
(Sakaguchi)
Mishima on, 151–3, 159; see also
Spring Snow [Haru no yuki]
(Mishima)
post-World War II body and
sexuality and, 127–30, 134,
137–8, 139
prostitution and World War II
“comfort” facilities, 165–6,
167–8, 169–70, 172
prostitution as capitalism, 165–6;
see also Decadent Sisters [Taihai
shimai] (Shimada)
Tamura on, 34–5, 130–1; see also
Gateway to the Flesh [Nikutai no
mon] (Tamura)
see also feminist theory; “femme
fatale” characters; prostitution
Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, 26–7,
157–8
Shimada Masahiko
Decadent Sisters, labor and capitalist
themes, 35, 165–6, 179
Decadent Sisters, plot and characters,
166–75
Shimamura Hōgetsu, 20, 61
shinkyō shōsetsu (state-of-mind novel),
183n34
Shinshōsetsu (magazine), 42
shishōsetsu (I-novel), 183n34
see also I-novel
Shōji Hajime, 136
“Short Essay on the Emperor, A”
[“Tennō shōron”] (Ango), 133
Shōwa period, Decadence and
uselessness during, 22–7
Silverberg, Miriam, 22
simulacra, 118–19
Sino-Japanese War, 37
Smiles, Samuel, 49–50, 146
Sneers [Reishō] (Nagai)
as kichōsha story, 34, 79–83
plotlines and characters of, 83–91
The Vortex (Ueda) compared to,
91–100
 242 / index
Snow Country [Yukiguni] (Kawabata),
55
Snyder, Stephen, 84
Sōgi, 4
Sooty Smoke [Baien] (Morita)
individualism and, 59, 66–77
Naturalism and Aestheticism, 33–4,
57–61
plot and characters of, 62–6
Triumph of Death (D’Annunzio)
compared to, 33, 58–60, 61–2,
63, 67, 68, 73–4, 76
Sōseki, Natsume, 70, 72–3, 77
Sounds of Tides [Kaichōon] (Ueda), 91
Spackman, Barbara, 68, 71, 161, 162
Spariosu, Mihai I., 99
Spinoza, Baruch, 85
Spring Snow [Haru no yuki] (Mishima)
generosity through malaise, 160–4
plot and characters, 146–57
“Statue and the Bust, The”
(Browning), 97
Stendhal, Marie-Henri Beyle, 97
Studies on Hysteria (Freud), 161
Subaru (The Pleiades) (magazine),
20, 61
Sugawara no Tukasue no Musume, 146
suicide
Decadent Sisters (Shimada), 170–2
in I-novels, 73; see also Sooty Smoke
[Baien] (Morita)
Mishima and, 146
Sun and Steel [Taiyō to tetsu]
(Mishima), 162
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 26
Symbolism
Italian Decadents and, 28
Iwano on, 38, 42; see also
Indulgences [Tandeki] (Iwano)
Katagami and, 20
Morita’s use of, and Naturalism, 34,
57–8, 61, 72–4
Nagai and, 6–7, 9–10, 80, 90
Ueda and, 80, 81, 91
Symbolism, The Sacred, and the Arts
(Eliade), 133
taihai (degeneration), 1, 25, 131,
165–6, 168
Taishō period
literary characteristics of, 103–5
literati withdrawn from official
capacities during, 46
Meiji transition to, 147, 148–9
uselessness and, historical
perspective, 21–2, 179
see also Fool’s Love, A [Chijin no ai]
(Tanizaki); Pastoral Spleen, A
[Den’en no yūutsu] (Satō)
Takahashi Isao, 24
Takahashi Toshio, 54
Takayama Chogyū, 66
Takeda Taijun, 139
Tale of the Hamamatsu Counselor
[Hamamatsu chūnagon
monogatari] (Sugawara no
Takasue no Musume), 146
Tamura Taijirō
Decadent Sisters (Shimada)
compared to works of, 165, 167
Gateway to the Flesh, body and
sexuality, 34–5, 130–1
Gateway to the Flesh, plot and
characters, 140–4
Gateway to the Flesh compared to
The Idiot (Sakaguchi), 132–40
Tanemura Suehiro, 26
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō
exoticism and, 21
A Fool’s Love, and artificial paradise,
34, 103–5, 123–5
A Fool’s Love, plot and characters of,
113–23
A Fool’s Love compared to A Pastoral
Spleen (Satō), 113–23
Tao Qian, 107
Tatooer, The [Shisei] (Tanizaki), 105
Tayama Katai, 38, 39, 42, 52, 82
Théorie de la Décadence
(Bourget), 31
“Theorizing Aesthetic Life” [“Biteki
seikatsu o ronzu”] (Takayama), 66
Theory of the Three Human Treasures,
The [Jinsei sampōsetsu] (Nishi), 19
Thornton, R. K. R., 30
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 66
tōhigata (escapism), 46–7
Tōjō Hideki, 129
 index / 243
Tokuda Shūsei, 7
Tokugawa shōgunate
class hierarchy of, 64
kabuki plays and, 96
Tokutomi Sohō, 19, 47, 148–9
Tokyō Mainichi Shinbun
(newspaper), 83
Tolstoy, Leo, 59
Tōyama Shigeki, 129
Triumph of Death, The [Il Trionfo della
morte] (D’Annunzio), 33, 58–60,
61–2, 63, 67, 68, 73–4, 76
Turgenev, Ivan, 107–8
Ueda Bin
“Aristocratism and Populism”
[“Kizokushugi to Heiminshugi”],
80–1, 88
D’Annunzio’s work and, 59
fin-de-siècle Decadence and, 30
Subaru (magazine) and, 20
The Vortex, plot and characters,
91–100
The Vortex as kichōsha story, 34,
79–83
The Vortex compared to Sneers
(Nagai), 83–91, 100–101
Ueno Chizuko, 64
Unagami Masaomi, 109
uselessness
alea, 33, 123, 156, 164
defined, 3–7
historical background, 18–27,
177–80
ideology of uselessness and, 13–18
inja (hidden men), 5
muyōsha (useless man), 85
potlatch and, 147, 151; see also
Spring Snow [Haru no yuki]
(Mishima)
utilitarian theory and, 19, 29,
31, 146
Utilitarianism (Mill), 19
Valéry, Paul, 12, 13
Verga, Giovanni, 60
verismo (realism), 60
Verlaine, Paul, 53
Visions of Excess; or, The Accursed Share
[La Part Maudite] (Bataille), 15
Vita Sexualis (Mori), 20
Vittorio Emmanuele II, King, 59
Vortex, The [Uzumaki] (Ueda)
as kichōsha story, 34, 79–83
plot and characters of, 91–100
Sneers (Nagai) compared to, 83–91,
100–101
Wagner, Richard, 12, 28, 87, 96, 97
Waki Isao, 60
Walker, Janet, 64
Watsuji Tetsurō, 24, 25
Watteau, Antoine, 92, 99
Weltschmerz (worldly pain), 75
“What Does the Challenge of Life
Mean?” [“Jinsei ni aiwataru towa
nanno iizo”] (Tōkoku), 65
Whistler, James McNeill, 109
Wilde, Oscar, 7, 29, 58, 72, 105, 147,
149, 154
Willmot, Glenn, 68
Wilson, Michiko, 213n45
Women [Josei] (magazine), 113
Wordsworth, William, 108, 113
World War II
postwar body and sexuality and,
127–30, 134, 137–8, 139; see
also Gateway to the Flesh [Nikutai
no mon] (Tamura); Idiot, The
[Hakuchi] (Sakaguchi)
prostitution and comfort facilities,
165–6, 167–8, 169–70, 172
Yamaji Aizan, 65
Yamamura Kōzō, 189n2
Yasuda Yojūrō, 23–4, 105–6, 127
Yasunari Sadao, 8, 10, 12, 55
Yiu, Angela, 107
Yoko’o Tadanari, 26
Yōrō Takeshi, 135
Yoshida Seiichi, 84
Yoshii Isamu, 7
Yoshimoto Takaaki, 57
Youth, The [Seishun] (Fūyō), 39
Zola, Émile, 6, 7, 9, 59, 85, 90