Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan

Description

Fusako Innami offers the first comprehensive study of touch and skinship—relationality with the other through the skin—in modern Japanese writing. The concept of the unreachable—that is, the lack of characters’ complete ability to touch what they try to reach for—provides a critical intervention on the issue of intimacy. Touch has been philosophically addressed in France, but literature is an effective—or possibly the most productive—venue for exploring touch in Japan, as literary texts depict what the characters may be concerned with but may not necessarily say out loud. Such a moment of capturing the gap between the felt and the said—the interaction between the body and language—can be effectively analyzed by paying attention to layers of verbalization, or indeed translation, by characters’ utterances, authors’ depictions, and readers’ interpretations. Each of the writers discussed in this book—starting with Nobel prize winner Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, and Matsuura Rieko—presents a particular obsession with objects or relationality to the other constructed via the desire for touch. In Touching the Unreachable, phenomenological and psychoanalytical approaches are cross-culturally interrogated in engaging with literary touch to constantly challenge what may seem like the limit of transferability regarding concepts, words, and practices. The book thereby not only bridges cultural gaps beyond geographic and linguistic constraints, but also aims to decentralize a Eurocentric hegemony in its production and use of theories and brings Japanese cultural and literary analyses into further productive and stimulating intellectual dialogues. Through close readings of the authors’ treatment of touch, Innami develops a theoretical framework with which to examine intersensorial bodies interacting with objects and the environment through touch. Cover Half-title Series Information Title page Copyright information Table of contents Acknowledgments Notes on Citations and Names Introduction: Literary Touch to Mediate the Senses Touch, Embodied, or Fantasized Translating Sense Experiences into Language in Context Toward the Unreachable Chapter 1 Loved Object: The Unreachable Loved Object Ruptured Incorporation Love of the Object and of the Self Reciprocity in Sleep Chapter 2 Touch in Plays of Distance, Shadow, Light The Potentiality of an Unbridgeable Distance Light and Darkness Shadows Animated beyond the Surface The Imagined through Touch Coda Chapter 3 Mediated Touch: Membrane, Skin, the “I” The Membrane that Narrates The Imaginary Membrane to Mediate the Body and Language Mediated Construction of the Self Giving through the Surface Chapter 4 Renewing Relationship through the Skin Skinship Writing Intimate Relationships through Alternative Sensualities Ambivalent Feelings about Love The Unsaid Performative Renewing Relationality Conclusion: Touching through Language Bibliography Index