Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan
Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan
by Fusako Innami
University of Michigan Press, 2021
ISBNs
Cloth: 978-0-472-07498-3
Paper: 978-0-472-05498-5
eISBN: 978-0-472-90587-4 (OA)
eISBN: 978-0-472-12930-0 (standard)
About the Book
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’ichirō, 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.
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.
About the Author
Fusako Innami is Assistant Professor in Japanese and Performance Studies at Durham University.
Reviews
“This is a provocative, well-researched book. It brings an exciting and new tool of analysis—skinship and the haptic imagination—to a range of important Japanese literary texts and offers new, in-depth readings to important writers. The scholarship is sound, impressive, and accessible.”— Doug Slaymaker, University of Kentucky
"Speaking of a culture where one bows instead of handshaking or giving kisses to greet, Fusako Innami finds an innovative angle to haptic touch and skinship between individuals as represented in the literature of Nobel Prize winner Kawataba Yasunari, Tanizaki Junichiro, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, and Matsuura Rieko, combining major with minor writers in a selection that covers the entirety of 20th century modern Japanese literature from the Meiji to the Showa-era."— Japan Forum
Tags
Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, Touch in literature, Asian, Writing, Cultural & Ethnic Studies, History and criticism, 20th century, Literary Criticism, Social Science
Open Access Information
License: CC BY-NC
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