academic post: notes on Indra Levy's Sirens of the Western Shore

[katekat]

Levy, Indra. Sirens of the Western Shore : Westernesque Women and Translation in Modern Japanese Literature.
New York, NY, USA: Columbia University Press, 2006.



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Sumako's stage performances offered a stunning resolution to a problem that had counfounded radical vernacularists like Futabei and Katai:  not the proper literary representation of women, but rather the proper literary deployment of the Westernesque in and as language.

...the movement from New Woman to femme fatale.  If, as Kano argues, this trajectory in Sumako's career was a function of the sexualized and commodified female body exceeding the limits of transparent expression placed upon it by the theater of logos, it can be said that language itself also always exceeds the bounds of transparent expression.

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"vernacularization" of the body

Talking about the notion that in theatre/performance the body has different languages -- and how to convey a new kind of linguistic sensibility through theatre

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Talking about the translation by Shoyo of Othello where the people hired to come and kill Iago (they were hired to shoot him) actually shot Othello instead:

...in the performative context, speech that imitates translation easily spills over into the realm of the absurd. 

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Shoyo's Hamlet thus became an excercise for the Japanese body to remember and refine native forms of both verbal and bodily stage language, rather than to learn new ones.

Shoyo "translated" Hamlet (and other plays) but turning the Elizabethan language into old court language; he used Japanese names and got the "heart" of things rather than maintaining a strict fidelity to the source text.

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"In acting as Westerners, it is only necessary to give off an exotic air."

From Shoyo's description of how to do a play properly.  The other interesting point in these pages is the notion that the literati hated Shoyo's plays because they (using the term loosely) "naturalized" the foreign work -- Shoyo dismissed the literary origins of the play and concentrated on the performance (somtimes even having the actors speak gibberish)


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As we have already seen, the exoticist or Futabateian approach to literary translation seeks to preserve linguistic difference even in the attempt to bridge the gap between two languages.  The result is a radical transformation of the target language, the creation of a vernacular style that hangs suspended in the phantasmatic space between languages.  The attempt to then physically reenact this kind of translation on the stage required not only a grand conceptual leap but also a radical transformation of the body itself.

Levy goes on to talk about Osanai (who believed in the power of text over the body of theatre - took Kabuki actors and tried to get them to forget their training) Hogetsu (who saw the importance of the actor as a body on stage...and took untested people and turned them into actors), two of the people in the Ibsen school who made fun of Shoyo's tactics and who thought the supremacy of the Western style of play meant the actor and translator (and they thought the best training for actors was to translate the plays they were going to work on) were puppets of the script (that should be translated with every comma and no extraneous words).

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As long as we keep the focus on translation, it is quite clear that the primary purpose of Japanese Naturalist theater was to establish an ideologically correct (i.e., properly textual) relationship between the exotic script and the Japanese reader, writer, and actor, not to represent some objective reality in a more natural way.

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modern Japanese actress in Sumako’s Nora. In essence, what Hōgetsu and Sumako brought to the New Theater stage was the aesthetic, rather than the purely ideological, appeal of translation.

It was Hōgetsu’s attention to the intangible aesthetic questions, the stylistics of speech and body language, that ultimately gained a lasting foothold for the New Theater in Taishō Japan. In his work as both translator and director he was highly sensitive to the desire, exemplified by Watsuji, to forge a conspicuous identification with the foreign without assimilating its most exotic qualities to the banal realm of the domestic.

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If genbun-itchi began as an uneasy coalescence of the native body of speech with the exotic textuality of foreign letters, then embodying the values of that project on the stage also necessitated an attempt to harmonize the Japanese body with the written language of translation and the Western body vernacular it represented. As the above example of one particular fusion of Western and Japanese body languages suggests, Hōgetsu sought to achieve this harmony by means of subtle aesthetic choices that could neither be deduced from nor reduced to the ostensible ideology of Naturalism as transparent expression. The “feeling of satisfaction” that resulted from this process must certainly have derived from the fact that quotidian Japanese gestures thereby assumed the appearance of being immanent, rather than antithetical, to the expression of the Western text.

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of Japanese writing or for writers like Doppo and Katai to then project the language of Aibiki onto the domestic landscape. As Hōgetsu observed, as a medium of translation, the body is much less malleable than written language. On the one hand, for an actor trained

Like its counterpart in fiction, Naturalist drama sought to strip the stage of all “extraneous” stylistic adornments. Yet the apparent simplicity of purely spoken drama was arguably even more difficult to master than the vernacular style had been for the Meiji novelist. Osanai’s attempt to make the body of the Kabuki player conform to a completely different set of theatrical demands was not only painful, but inherently ill-conceived. As Karatani points out with respect to the face, the Kabuki player is in himself “a figure, like kanji” or what Leonard C. Pronko has called “the hieroglyphic actor.” 56 By contrast, as we have already seen in Futon, the Naturalist concept of the body was that of a transparent window onto the complex interiority of the modern individual. While that was the theoretical ideal, New The-

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Thus the modern Japanese actress was not only compared with the Japanese onnagata but implicitly with Western actresses as well.

In terms of the hierarchy of cultural legitimacy that emerges from the discourse on the actress in Japan, it is the Western actress who stands unchallenged at the top of the totem pole, with the onnagata and the Japanese actress battling it out for second place.

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Echoing the Naturalist rhetoric we encountered in Katai, the desire to see more variety in “facial expression” is informed by an assumption that the typical Japanese woman is nothing but a set of conventions, so strictly bound to their forms that she either possesses no interiority to speak of or that that interiority is so deeply submerged beneath the thick layers of socially encoded femininity as to be irretrievable for the purposes of Naturalist art. What we cannot but notice here is the critical ways in which the terms feminine and masculine, female and male, actress and onnagata are all informed by an overarching distinction between Japanese and Western, feudal and modern, convention bound and liberated, particularly as deployed in Naturalist discourse. While none of these terms are stable, even within the relatively restricted context of late Meiji theater discourse, it is nonetheless clear that the latter half of the second set of binaries— Western, modern, and liberated— consistently bears the greatest weight of all.

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Whereas the Naturalist rhetoric of transparent language sought a seamless union between art and life, Hōgetsu points to the actual gap between Matsui Sumako’s “art” and her “daily life” in a way that neatly encapsulates the double bind that textual exoticism helped to create for the modern Japanese woman. If the Japanese woman was seen as finally capable of manifesting expressions no less vivid and intense than her Western counterpart, the characterization of her daily life as deeply mired in conventional gender behaviors left these expressions strangely untethered to a stable source of subjectivity.

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First, by implication the modern Japanese actress would have to compare favorably to the eminent Western actress, a hurdle that Kawakami Sadayakko had already crossed without actually “settling” the actress question. In addition to what Sadayakko had already achieved, the truly epoch-making Japanese actress would also have to project a more natural image of woman than the onnagata, she would have to be more “modern” and more Westernesque than both the onnagata and the onna yakusha, and she would have to distinguish herself from virtually all other Japanese players by exhibiting a special talent for manifesting the subtleties of “female psychology.” 25

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In his words, Sumako’s Nora offered her audience the thrill of seeing a Western ideal literally embodied by a woman “born in Japan.” Part and parcel of this experience, particularly for the generation of theatergoers who supported New Theater, was the actress’ representation of the Western text. This is an area where Sumako simply outstripped all competition. The

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By contrast, Hōgetsu’s Ningyō no ie reads much more like the dialogue of a vernacular novel. Moreover, it has a rhythmic flow that breaks from the traditional 7– 5 pattern while still maintaining mellifluous enunciability.

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the process of being formed. As a true newcomer to the stage, she was thus particularly well situated to make a vernacular translation, rather than a conventional adaptation, of Western body language: having no old forms into which she might pour the contents of a given role, she in fact had no choice but to create something new.

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This fantasy of the perfectly understanding female disciple whose language reflects the heart and soul of her mentor is by now a familiar theme in the narrative of the Westernesque femme fatale, as is the betrayal necessarily built into it. In the love story of Hōgetsu and Sumako— retold so often (mostly by Sumako’s male detractors) as to eclipse both their careers— we observe the ease with which a common fiction of the Westernesque woman could be transferred to the biography of the first Japanese woman to embody the images of modern Western women on the stage. As with Osei and Yoshiko, Sumako’s sirenlike allure derived from her apparent fluency in an idealized, exotic language of the self, but her self-conscious manipulation of that language ultimately laid the foundation for her bitter betrayal of (and by) the entranced male subject. Sumako paid a high price for her position as Japan’s first modern actress: she committed suicide ...

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Indeed, it would be most accurate to say that Matsui Sumako was not the sum product of the life of Kobayashi Masako, but rather a radical break from that life catalyzed by the twenty-three-year-old Masako’s sudden and intense engagement with modern European drama in translation. There was little or nothing in Masako’s life that could have prepared her for the experience of going straight from the “ABC’s of English” to Shakespeare, much less Ibsen. Moreover, as the depictions of a physically robust and hardworking but culturally challenged country bumpkin attest, the way in which that experience affected and transformed Kobayashi Masako clearly counfounded all expectations.

What is missing from the historical portrait of Matsui Sumako is her identity as a reader and any serious consideration of how her acts of reading enabled her stunning transformation from an unsophisticated woman of the backwaters of Matsushiro to the triumphant Japanese female embodiment of theatrical modernity.

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The stigma of hollow imitation that haunts the East-West divide was displaced onto the figure of the Westernesque femme fatale, whose linguistic acts all turn out to be performative rather than referential— treacherous rather than truthful. This is how the history of vernacular textual exoticism created a double bind for the modern Japanese woman: by insisting that she both represent the purported freedom of spoken language and possess the kind of subjectivity that can only be formed by submission to the authority of the hallowed (and, in this case, Western) text. If the performative aspect of language

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The modernity of Japan does not afford the special appeal of postcolonial studies, which directly rewrites the history of English literary culture and identity formation from the perspective of its most significant others, its very own colonial subjects. If anything, the case of modern Japan deserves comparison to that of modern Russia, the original example of an empire that inhabits the liminal space between the West and the rest, being fated to switch sides according to the dictates of the political moment. When