The themes of transformation, indefinite form, and disintegration haunt the work of many post-World War II artists, who had witnessed the animality of human beings as well as the depths to which human beings can fall in wartime. This paper looks at falling as an artistic and phenomenological practice of the body in the work of the Japanese butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata, whose notations refer in places to the work of the Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon and offer new bodily lexicons with which to graph the movement of falling. Drawing explicitly on Bacon and using cross-media collage to produce movement, a body in Hijikata could be deformed or made formless onto the ground. In falling, inhabiting and simultaneously vacating oneself, the body makes contact with a surface and leaves or exteriorizes a graphic mark, visual, and performative, in its wake. This attention to falling was part of an ongoing process at the rise of phenomenological boom in postwar Japan by which artists attempted to understand and recompose the kind of body that could inhabit the nuclear age. KEYWORDSFalling; senses; phenomenology; Tatsumi Hijikata; Francis Bacon "We fall because we are human, it is only because we live that we fall . . . We must discover ourselves and save ourselves, by falling to the best of our ability." (Sakaguchi 1986, 5) Deformation and the sensesIn his 1972 performance Hōsō tan (A Story of Smallpox), 1 Japanese dancer Tatsumi Hijikata performed the body of "not standing," or of "being unable to stand," by crawling on the ground [See Figure 1], nearly naked, covered with white butoh make-up like vernix or some sort of dust or cobweb. Hijikata, emphasizing its weakened, sickened, fragmented state, called it suijaku tai, the weakened body. The performance seems literally to be an attempt to stand in the midst of falling. In Hijikata's performance filmed as Natsu no Arashi (Summer Storm) in 1973(Hijikata 2003, at the Westside Auditorium of Kyoto University, the slow movements of the dancer(s) in the series on leprosy seem to blur the boundary between the living and the dead. In "Slackness," a section performed in darkness and accompanied by chanting a baby's cries, three dancers come on stage making small jerky movements that seem to defy any straight body lines supported by the spine, after which Hijikata, trembling, crumples to the floor, with the make-up seemingly CONTACT Fusako Innami
On touching, an object mediates and equally prevents our contacts with others. But what if one incorporates other's body? Japanese author Kawabata Yasunari, in his 'One Arm', describes a peculiar encounter with the other's body: the protagonist's replaces his arm with a girl's arm and incorporates her arm, causing him some spasm, the sense of otherness, and affective as well as repulsive feeling. This replacement of body parts questions the possibility of getting in touch with the other, as well as risky intersections with the other. Considering this (fictional) bodily encounter and the process of being together with another body, I aim to examine the rupture of contact, the (im)possibility of accepting otherness, and the ethics of communication in Kawabata, through the phenomenon of incorporation. By examining the under-researched topic of incorporation and touch in Kawabata in dialogue with relevant theories by Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas and Melanie Klein, this paper aims to advance theorisations of touch and incorporation at the intersection of literature and critical theories. Introduction: Incorporating affection as well as repulsion '"I can let you have one of my arms for the night"', says the girl to the protagonist. She removes her right arm at the shoulder and uses her left hand to lay it on the protagonist's knee. The girl's right arm is still warm (Kawabata 1969: 103). This is the beginning of a short story, 'One Arm' (originally published as 'Kataude'), written by Japanese author Kawabata Yasunari in 1964. Kawabata (1899-1972), the first Japanese Nobel Prize-winning author, played a pivotal role in a prewar Japanese literary group called Shinkankaku-ha (New Sensationalist School), organised in 1924, trying to capture immediate sensations through language while applying this sensibility in his literary creations. Regarding the description of perceptual experiences, Kawabata's protagonists are generally hesitant to conduct even surface contact with others; descriptions of touch are carefully hidden for a combination of aesthetic and censorial reasons. Despite such a careful attention to physical contact and a subtle tension between touching and not touching in Kawabata's works, an arm is radically joined with another's body in 'One Arm': the male protagonist incorporating the girl's arm
This paper investigates the Japanese concept of ma/aida, the space in-between, discussed by French author Roland Barthes as the Neutral, not signifying the medium of the opposite poles but the bare existence. It first analyzes how the discourse of contiguous relationships and the space between others has functioned in modern and postwar Japan, and further employs the works of the Japanese female writer Matsuura Rieko as counterexamples, with particular emphasis on the space between the sensual and the sexual. It provides a fresh view on the conceptions of space and indirectness between and within the body
Le corps comme identité Le corps malade Corps humain/corps animal/corps végétal : le corps comme sujet poétique Conclusion Imaginaire du corps dans les récits fantastiques de web-littératureShuang Xu 1. La préface, ainsi que la postface de ce numéro intitulé « Les épreuves du corps en littérature. Le cas de la Chine et du Japon », offrent une approche comparatiste de la question.
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