Japanese "Water World" Literature

This paper is a discussion of a particular type of Japanese writing called "water world" literature. Water world describes women who have, throughout Japanese history, provided erotically charged services to men, as courtesans, prostitutes, geisha, cafT waitresses, and club and bar hostesses. Literature around these occupations problematizes women's identities, bodies, gender roles, and sexuality. Writers in this genre often glamorize the erotic industry, objectify the women who work in it, and wax nostalgic for the precapitalist past and the world in which such activities flourished without criticism. This type of literature is not well known in the West; one of the most familiar is Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata, who was the first Japanese writer to receive the Nobel Prize (in 1968) for this haunting novel, first published in 1956. This paper analyzes the book as an example of water world literature.

Anne Allison (1994) writes about the mizu shobai, which she translates as "literally 'water business,' the nightlife of Japan" (p. 7). She (1994) observes, "A woman obtained with money rather than through marriage or romance is generically referred to as a mizu shobai woman, and her appeal is widely acknowledged, even by Japanese wives" (p. 130).

Kawabata features several mizu shobai women in his novel, but the story is primarily about Komako and her relationship with one client, Shimamura. They meet in the snow country along the west coast of the main island of

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blique descriptions of erotically charged encounters and its purposeful depiction of a time and place far removed from contemporary hustle and bustle. Yet it also manages to convey just how emotionally bankrupt such pursuit can be. Its characters think themselves to be free of restrictions while they are in fact even more solidly tied to society's expectations than they realize. The women in Kawabata's world are bodies expected to serve the men without regard for their own feelings or desires, and the men are also prisoners of expectation. References Allison, A. (1994). Nightwork: Sexuality, pleasure, and corporate masculinity in a Tokyo hostess club. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kawabata, Y. (1996). Snow country. New York: Vintage International. Tipton, E.K. (2000). The cafT. In E.K. Tipton & J. Clark (Eds.), Being ___ culture and society ___ 1910s to the 1930s. __: University of ___ Press. NOTE: References are annotated based on articles provided. Additional information is required to make these citations complete. This paper discusses representations of eroticized zones in Japanese literature. It compares and contrasts representations of traditional zones with those of the modern era, l

Category: Literature - J