Dismembered but Not Disembodied: The

Girl’s Body in Yumeno Kyūsaku’s Stories

TOMOKO AOYAMA
The University of Queensland
The Gentle-Hearted Monster
Modern Japanese literature has been enriched by contributions from a number of extraordinary and
eccentric writers. Though still relatively obscure outside Japan, Yumeno Kyūsaku (1889–1936) is
certainly one of Japan’s most outstanding and larger-than-life literary figures – a ‘‘gentle-hearted
monster’’, to borrow Nada Inada’s term (1991, p. 460).1 In common with any of a number of characters
straight from his own fiction, it is impossible to pin Yumeno down to a single identity, vocation or
personality. At one point he was a soldier in the Imperial Guards (1908– 09), and later he became a
Second Lieutenant of the Imperial Army (1912), although his military career, like his tertiary education
at Keiō University (1911) and his management of a farm (1913), was relatively short-lived. He also
spent periods as a homeless drifter (1914), a professional performer/teacher of traditional Noh
theatre, a vagrant Buddhist monk (1916), a newspaper journalist (1919–), an illustrator and a novelist
who contributed to popular and modernist magazines in the first decade of the Showa period (1926–
89). Despite Yumeno’s popularity as a mystery writer, after his sudden and premature death in 1936
he was almost forgotten until the early 1960s. Critics unanimously agree that it was the 1962 essay
by Tsurumi Shunsuke that revived interest in Yumeno, particularly his magnum opus Dogura magura
(Dogra Magra, 1935).2

As Tsurumi has maintained for nearly half a century, Yumeno’s work is complex and full of
intriguing ambiguities and fascinating contradictions. During the oppressive prewar years, it offered
escape and consolation to his readers, presenting as it did anarchistic cosmopolitan views often
mixed, strangely and stunningly, with ultranationalist and provincial views. With its wide-ranging
themes, styles and genres (mystery, horror, modernist meta-fiction, humour, science fiction,
children’s literature, biographies, poetry, reportage, interviews, and so on), Yumeno’s writing has
attracted and inspired generations of readers of various socio-political and cultural backgrounds and
convictions.3 Of the numerous possible readings of the Yumeno literature, some have attracted much
attention and become the focus of Yumeno studies while others have remained on the periphery. For
instance, Yumeno’s personal links with quixotic ultranationalists such as his own father Sugiyama
Shigemaru (1864–1935) and his friend Tōyama Mitsuru (1855–1944),4 and nationalist elements in
Yumeno’s writing, have been the focus of a number of studies of his work (e.g. Yamamoto, 1986;
Matsumoto, 1993; Williams, 1999; Momokawa, 2004; Tsurumi, 2004). There has also been interest
in Yumeno’s narrative structure, metafictional qualities, intertextuality and stylistic features (Karigari,
1971; Tabata, 2005), as well as in his contributions to, and position in, wider socio-cultural contexts
such as modernism (Ōishi, 1992; Kawasaki, 1993) and scientism (Kawana, 2001, especially pp. 104–
10; Nakamura, 2007). His interests in mental illness, psychology, ‘‘perverse’’ sexuality and
criminology have also triggered critical commentaries,5 as well as adaptations and parodies.
Neglected Girls
There is, however, a curious void in the quite substantial body of Yumeno studies. The shōjo [girls,
young women] who are so prominent in Yumeno’s fiction have generally been neglected in serious
critical examinations of Yumeno’s texts – with only a few exceptions.6 This neglect can be seen as
part of the general paucity of gender-related discussions in existing Yumeno studies. The numerous
studies of Dogura magura, for instance, concentrate on the (highly disturbed) psyche of the male
protagonists, more or less ignoring the significance of women characters and their strong will, desire,
passion and determination. The absence of the girl in discussions of Yumeno’s work must also be
attributed to the difficulty in categorizing the young women in Yumeno’s texts; they are far from the
(stereo-)typical images of the shōjo in prewar Japanese culture. Referring in particular to Yoshiya
Nobuko’s popular fiction for girls, Hana monogatari (Flower Tales, 1916), the pioneer of shōjo
studies, Honda Masuko, explains the essence of the girl, especially her ambivalence, liminality and
transiency, with the onomatopoetic term hirahira [flitter, flutter] (Honda, 1982, pp. 135–202). Honda
also reminds us of the ‘‘thinness’’ and total absence of the lower half of women’s bodies as they are
represented in 1920s art (e.g. that of Takehisa Yumeji). When this torso was ‘‘enclosed and decorated
with ribbons and bouquets’’, the shōjo was born (Honda, 1982, p. 197).

Honda’s notion of hirahira encapsulates not only the aestheticized ephemerality of the girl
and her culture in wide-ranging forms and genres from late Meiji to the present day, but also her
subversiveness against the patriarchal norms. There have been persistent tendencies, however, to
view the girl as the mindless consumer and consumed – by the desiring male subject and late
capitalist society. Summarizing these general views ‘‘over the last couple of decades’’, Napier defines
shōjo as:

a shorthand for a certain kind of liminal identity between child and adult, characterized
by a supposedly innocent eroticism based on sexual immaturity, a consumer culture
of buying ‘‘cute’’ (kawaii) material goods, and a wistful privileging of a recent past or
free-floating form of nostalgia (2005, p. 148).

Napier does not include in her scope the highly developed girls’ magazine culture of the early
twentieth century or its postwar versions such as ‘‘Junior’’ novels and ‘‘Cobalt’’ stories, let alone
representations of young women in other ‘‘popular’’ and ‘‘serious’’ genres more or less throughout
the century.7 The shōjo defined above, therefore, is different from the subject of Honda’s study.
Nevertheless the notion of physical and sexual lack, immaturity or underdevelopment can be found
in both.8 One may assume that this ‘‘lack’’ disappears as the shōjo grows older. There is, however,
another kind of ‘‘lack’’: female genitals, as Elisabeth Bronfen notes, ‘‘have [. . .] served as a privileged
trope for lack, castration and split and by metonymic association, as a trope for decay, disease and
fatality’’ (1992, p. 11). As we see shortly, these tropes are prominent in Yumeno Kyūsaku’s fiction.
However, as Kawasaki Kenko notes, his representations of young women and their bodies are
‘‘always excessive rather than lacking’’:

‘‘Women are weaker than men’’; ‘‘girls are smaller in physique than their mothers’’ –
as long as we base our judgment on lack like this, we will never be able to perceive
Yumenoesque girls. . . There is a girl with a gigantic body like that of a woman from
another planet. The girls’ bodies are always excessive rather than lacking. The
damned girls in Yumeno’s literature surely hold much more power than girls who are
born to be mothers (Kawasaki, 1990, p. 79).

This assessment forms the basis of my discussion here, for it subverts the widely circulated
contemporary view of the shōjo as lacking in sexual maturity and intellectual and physical power, if
not in buying power. Furthermore it suggests the girl’s rejection of the kind of associations attached
to women’s sexual and reproductive organs – paradoxically by focusing and exaggerating rather than
covering or avoiding them.

Some of Yumeno’s young women protagonists predate the recognized emergence of shōjo
culture (which is outlined in Kawasaki’s essay in this issue), and are called in the stories musume
[daughter], a term that is usually associated with loyalty and even subservience to the patriarchal
family and nation. In popular orientalist views, musume has further been associated and confused
with images of Madame Butterfly and geisha. Just as Yumeno’s shōjo transgress the shōjo category,
so do his musume protagonists. Because they are radically different from the usual cultural
representations of shōjo or musume, and perhaps also because Yumeno is neither a woman nor a
feminist writer, the subversion represented and implied in these ‘‘excessive’’ girls and identified by
Kawasaki has not yet been widely recognised.9

Another closely related factor is the violence and death these girls are almost always
associated with in Yumeno’s texts. Unlike Yoshiya’s Flower Tales, whose readership was clearly
girls and young women, the Yumeno stories we discuss are usually categorized as mystery or horror
and are mostly published in popular magazines such as Shinseinen (The New Young Man).
Pervading the popular culture of the 1920s and 30s were the ero guro nansensu [erotic, grotesque
and nonsense] themes, styles and motifs. Rather than simply paraphrasing each of the three
elements as ‘‘pornographic’’, ‘‘malformed or unnaturally unseemly’’ and ‘‘silly and meaningless’’,
Miriam Silverberg gives her own definitions:
 . . .erotic connotes an energized, colorful vitality. Grotesquerie is culture resulting from
such deprivation as that endured by the homeless and by beggars. Finally, nonsense
makes a great deal of sense. . . The boisterousness of popular vaudeville can, and in
modern Japan did, challenge relationships of domination of one class, culture, or
nation-state by an other (Silverberg, 2007, pp. xv–xvi).

As we shall see, these descriptions fit nicely with Yumeno literature. Even given this cultural and
historical context, however, the degree and nature of violence in Yumeno’s texts are still quite
extraordinary. There are so many grotesque scenes in Yumeno’s stories that it is difficult to decide
which is the most horrible. Men and women of all ages are drawn into horrifying incidents, but many
of the more spectacularly terrifying scenes involve young women (both shōjo and musume) – not
only as victims of violent crimes and/or cruel fate but also as perpetrators and murderers. Some of
these women share certain characteristics – such as aggression, promiscuity and independence –
with the ‘‘Modern Girls’’, ‘‘Cafe´ Girls’’, and ‘‘Bad Girls’’ 10 discussed in Suzuki (1989), Saitō (2003),
Sato (2003), Miller and Bardsley (2005) and Silverberg (2007), among others. However, none of
these studies mentions Yumeno. Moreover, many other Yumeno girls either predate the shojo and
the Modern Girl or simply transgress even the Modern Girl’s transgressions.11

This paper examines just a few examples of the numerous extraordinary girls who run about
in Yumeno’s texts, crossing and annihilating many borders and limits. Yumeno’s depictions of these
young women contain elements that may incite sadomasochistic and voyeuristic pleasure;
nevertheless they also contain aspects that are both highly performative and actively gender
troubling. As the examples I discuss below indicate, Yumeno’s stories may dismember the physical
bodies of these girls but they do not disembody the girls themselves.

Displaced Women and Their Bodies

In Silverberg’s examination of the mass culture of the 1920s and 30s there is a chapter entitled
‘Down-and-Out Grotesquery’ (2007, pp. 203–30), which is placed in a section on ‘‘honky-tonk’’
Asakusa culture, with ‘‘the energy, the tempo, and the sensuous pleasures’’ (p. 177). Those who
appear in the sub-headings of this chapter – namely beggars, vagrants, juvenile delinquents,
hawkers and ‘‘Foreigners as Freaks’’ – are all familiar figures in Yumeno’s fiction (as well as in his
own life). His beggars, vagrants, juvenile delinquents and so on, however, are not centripetally
gathered in the ‘‘lower’’ part of Tokyo, Asakusa, where the corporeal pleasures are, as Silverberg
notes, inseparable from worship, as symbolised by Sensōji Temple. Instead, the ‘‘down-and-out’’
people in Yumeno’s texts can be found all over the place – in the city, in the country, inside and
outside state and cultural borders.

Let me cite two examples. In a novella tellingly titled ‘Ningen sōsēji’ (Human Sausages,
1936),12 a young woman – not from Asakusa, but from Amakusa Island, west of Kyushu – becomes
one of the mistresses of an American gangster in St Louis around the time of the 1904 World’s Fair
and ends up, literally, in his sausage machine, which has been specially designed for mincing human
bodies. My second example is from a short story entitled ‘Gaikotsu no kuronbo’ (Smutted Wheat for
the Skull), published in 1934 but set in the late 1880s.13 In this story, a young vagrant girl, Hana, kills
herself after killing her half-brother, who had murdered their father and raped her.

Chronologically, the young women in these two stories would fit into the category of musume,
rather than shōjo. Yet these young women are dramatically different from the stereotypical and
prescriptive meek and subdued daughters of the house. To begin with, they have no house; they are
displaced from the supposedly safe and respectable home and nation, or more accurately, they never
had a home or nation that would acknowledge, nurture and protect them.

To cope with their displacement, both women have to use their bodies in their own ways.
The Amakusa woman is one of the women, usually known as karayuki, who were trafficked out of
Japan to work as prostitutes. As Vera Mackie points out, ‘‘[t]he institution of prostitution supports the
family system and existing gender relations by providing a momentary sexual outlet free of emotional
commitment, which poses no threat to family bonds’’ (1988, p. 219). Contributing thus to the nation
and the family system, however, the karayuki women themselves were not only taken out of their
home village and country but also distanced from their own and other families. In Yumeno’s story the
situation is further complicated. Although ordered by her American gangster pimp to assume a
Taiwanese identity to lure the narrator of the story, a Japanese carpenter, into the dangerous criminal
zone of St Louis, the Amakusa girl tries to save this pathetic young man. The pimp rewards her
bravery and kindness, however, with disposal in the despicable sausage machine.

This machine is not quite the same as the automaton and the ‘‘mechanical uncanny’’ 14 that
Nakamura discusses; nevertheless her more or less passing remark that ‘‘if any human body in
1930s Japan could be described as ‘mechanical’, it was the female body, specifically in the context
of the reproductive organs’’ (2007, p. 26, note 34) seems highly relevant here. What we must also
note, however, is that in Yumeno’s texts the girl’s body – dead or alive – does not remain in its
silenced, mechanized or institutionalized position; it communicates the narrative of violence, violation
and exploitation it suffered – often through a letter, a note or a testimony, but even when verbal
communication is impossible, by letting the parts and remains of the body speak out somehow. In
the case of the girl from Amakusa, now literally made into sausages and packed in a tin, she is nearly
eaten by the man she has rescued – stopped only by a woman’s black hair found inside the sausage,
along with a piece of paper that looks rather like the unfortunate girl’s last note. 15

The vagrant girl of the second story, Hana, belongs to the group of nomadic people called
sanka, or ‘‘Japanese gypsies’’. Like the burakumin, the sanka have been subjected to terrible and
systematic discrimination. The pioneering buraku liberation organization, Suiheisha (The Levellers’
Association, established in 1922) lodged a strong protest against Yumeno and his publisher,
condemning this story as discriminatory. It is true that the sanka people are depicted here as a bunch
of beggars and criminals. The father, though now leading a life as a kind and humane bar owner,
accidentally killed a man when he was young, and this forced him into the underworld, where he
subsequently became a powerful boss. He is murdered by his own estranged son, who is also a
notorious criminal – and much more scheming and cold-blooded than his father. Even the girl, also
estranged from her family, is a robber in the guise of a beggar. It is far too simplistic, however, to
dismiss this as reinforcing dark images and encouraging further discrimination against the sanka.
The father and daughter are in fact treated with empathy in the story. Hana, especially, is depicted
not only as stunningly beautiful but also as clever, agile and skillful (in criminal and other artistry).
Furthermore, she is proud, loyal and honorable. She thus does not fit into any of the categories:
shōjo, musume, the Modern Girl, the Bad Girl, or her particularly demonized sister, dokufu [poison
woman].16 With the police completely unaware of what has happened or what is about to happen,
she manages to kill her half-brother on police grounds and then kill herself. The superintendent
concludes that ‘‘those people’’ are just as incomprehensible as Christians, and instructs his
subordinate to put down insanity as the reason for the girl’s suicide.17 It is quite clear whose side the
reader is expected to take.

Yumeno spares us too much detail of the sausage machine. And the rape in the second
story is only suggested. There are much more gruesome and graphic scenes in other stories, in
which women are literally dismembered,18 dissected,19 shot in the groin with precious stones instead
of bullets,20 and burned to death.21 These horrendous deaths, however, disturb and unsettle, rather
than reinforce, prevailing hierarchical binaries such as male/female, active/passive, subject/object,
perpetrator/ victim, spectator/spectacle, noble/common and so on. As already seen in the above
stories, identity shifts all the time – a kindly old man turns out to be a murderer; a Taiwanese waitress
is in fact a Japanese prostitute. In Yumeno’s texts nothing is fixed and the twists and turns are used
not simply for their horror-mystery effect but to reveal the viewpoints of the displaced and
marginalized.
The Girl’s Body, Desire and Vengeance
In Yumeno’s novels, young women (and occasionally young men) are depicted not merely as an
object of scopophilia but also as a subject/spectator with passionate desires, even obsession. This
may be combined with masochistic pleasure and/or narcissism, but once the shōjo (or musume) is
determined to achieve or obtain something, no one can stop her. Good examples can be found in
the collection of three stories entitled Shōjo jigoku (Girls’ Hell, 1936), throughout which the letter form
is fully explored. The second story, ‘Satsujin rirē’ (Murder Relay),22 for instance, consists of six letters
written by a bus conductor girl Tomiko to her girlfriend. Tomiko confides that she has fallen in love
with the bus driver Niitaka, who, she knows from another conductor friend’s letter, is a serial killer –
a plebeian Japanese Bluebeard, if you like:

Dear Chieko, don’t be alarmed. I’m completely in love with Niitaka. This is certainly a
desperate love affair. At the same time I really want to avenge poor Tsuyako. Wouldn’t
it be lovely if I could corner him, make him repent, and even make him kill himself!
(YKz, vol. 8, p. 351).

Her attachment to him grows and for a while naturally suppresses her desire for revenge. But soon
she realizes his intention to kill her – just like his other victims – by driving the bus too fast and too
close to trees and telegraph poles on the roadside, while she is standing on the step working as the
conductor.23 However, it is Niitaka who is killed – in an ‘‘accident’’ at the railway crossing. The
conductor girl survives – though she is determined to kill herself with his child inside her. We might
recall Kawasaki’s comment, quoted earlier, that ‘‘the damned girls in Yumeno’s literature surely hold
much more power than girls who are born to be mothers’’. Even in the heyday of the ryōsai kenbo
[good wife, wise mother] education and discourse, these girls have no illusions about motherhood,
pregnancy, marriage and family, all of which always lead to disaster and tragedy, or at least create
difficulties, in Yumeno’s texts.

Equally determined is the eponymous protagonist of another Girls’ Hell story ‘Kasei no onna’
(Girl from Mars). This girl, Utae, is so called because of her highly distinctive physical characteristics:
she is by far the tallest at her school and is unbeatable in sports. She is embarrassed about her
athletic abilities and hates her excessive height. Eight years before the publication of this story,
athlete Hitomi Kinue (1907–31)24 won a series of medals in national and international competitions
and became a national hero. Hitomi herself was much taller than the average for girls at that time.
She was nineteen – the same age as Yumeno’s ‘‘Martian’’ girl – in 1926, when she participated in
the International Women’s Olympic Games in Sweden. Fujimoto Megumi notes that this pioneering
athlete’s physique and physicality threatened the gender norm: the media often deridingly
emphasized Hitomi’s masculinity with descriptions such as ‘‘170cm, 56.25kg, the huge dark body
that looks like that of a man, with superbly developed muscles’’.25 While emphasizing that the story
has no connection to the historical athlete, Fujimoto argues that the discursive threat inspired
Yumeno’s creation of the Martian girl.

Despite the ‘‘revolution in women’s sports’’ (Hitomi, 2000, p. 5), women elite athletes were
almost all schoolgirls (p. 12), as once they were older, women were expected to marry and stay at
home. Hitomi repeatedly uses the motherhood and nationalist discourses to promote women’s sport.
The first line of her book reads: ‘‘The aim of women’s sports can be explained simply: ‘to improve the
maternal body that creates second generation people for the nation’’’ (p. 1). Referring to a German
athlete in her late twenties who was expecting her third child, Hitomi writes:

This is such a wonderful example that I would love to thrust in the face of those
medical doctors and girls’ school headmasters here in Japan who spread such
unfounded rumour to society that modern athletic games are bad for women’s health
(Hitomi, 2000, p. 17).

Headmasters and doctors, whose power and authority directly affect women athletes, are just as
prejudiced as the press. While Hitomi’s aim is to fight against this prejudice and advocate women’s
sports and sporting women, Yumeno’s Martian girl has no such mission. She is clearly stigmatized
because of her excessive height and other visible differences from her peers, as symbolized by her
nickname. Overhearing other girls’ conversation in the school toilets, Utae realizes that it was the
headmaster who compared her – the invincible athlete – to a Martian. This headmaster, though widely
respected in the region as a devout Christian educationalist, is a total hypocrite. For decades, he has
been using his position to take advantage of women, including his students and their mothers. In
fact, his victims include both Utae and the mother of the ‘‘Venus’’ of the school, the bright and
beautiful Tonomiya Aiko, whom Utae deeply admires. Utae finds out that when Aiko’s mother was
his student, the headmaster made her pregnant and then arranged her marriage to his friend,
Tonomiya. Furthermore, the headmaster and his friends are also involved in many other kinds of
crimes, misconduct and corruption. We can see here a series of reversal and annihilation of
hierarchical binaries: the physical ability and strength become a disability and handicap; the
supposedly virtuous is the immoral; the seemingly privileged Aiko is unfortunate.

The headmaster unashamedly preaches at a graduation ceremony to his students, ‘‘children

of [his] heart’’, to become loving mothers of pure and honest children of their own and by doing so
contribute to the nation. In his speech he also tells the girls that they should be grateful to have been
born women and thus exempt from the fierce wars and battles of the men’s world: ‘‘Women’s beautiful
instinct, their purest love at home, is their sole and invincible weapon to use in their fight against the
world of men’’ (YKz, vol. 8, p. 417). The ‘‘Martian’’ girl and Aiko certainly do ‘‘fight against the world
of men’’, though in a completely different manner from that advocated by the headmaster and the
nation. In a letter addressed to the headmaster, Utae writes:

I am a Martian girl, as you, Sir, labelled me. I am not an ordinary woman. That’s why
I’ve decided to carry out this surprise rebellion against the tyranny of men in this
human world, against the vice allowed only to men. Through this May 15 Incident 26
for women, I wanted to let everyone know that the world isn’t just for men (YKz, vol.
8, p. 381).

Just as the bus conductor girl takes revenge for her best friend who was killed by Niitaka, Utae’s
revenge is for Aiko and her mother, as she declares in her will, which forms the concluding paragraph
of this story:

Dear Headmaster,
This is my thanks to you for making me a woman. At the same time I’d like the dearest
love of my heart, Miss Tonomiya Aiko, to be a dutiful daughter in a true sense. Without
clearing everything in this way, I cannot return to the original nothingness. So please
accept the last present of the Martian girl, her black, burnt body. My body is eternally
yours. . . spit, spit. . . (YKz, vol. 8, pp. 430–31).27

The two girls ensure that all the hidden vices of the headmaster and his entourage are made public
through newspaper reports before Utae leaves this final ‘‘present’’. Utae uses her body – dead and
alive – to make this revenge most effective. Her athletic talent and skills are useful for the first time
outside the athletic field – for chasing and scaring her target – for instance, by dangling upside down,
pretending to be a ghost, from the roof above the room where the degenerate headmaster and his
friends are having an orgy with geisha. Her large physique is also handy for disguising herself as a
man. The stigmatized, disadvantaged and sexually abused body regains its power to carry out its
revenge – only to be destroyed. Utae sets herself alight in the school building. All identification is
purposely removed from her charred body, and the lower abdomen is especially carefully burnt. This
is obviously to hide her gender, but also to remove any evidence of her loss of virginity. 28 Utae thus
erases the discursive ‘‘lack’’ attached not only to her but generally to women’s sex organs. At the
same time, this grotesque and mysterious body causes such media sensation 29 and police scrutiny
that the headmaster and his accomplices cannot escape or hide the truth.
The Girl’s Annihilating Power
Though equally self-destructive in the end, the passion and desire of Nina (Niina), the young Russian
woman in ‘Kōri no hate’ (The End of Ice, 1933) is romantic rather than grotesque. She takes an active
role in secret political activities in Harbin in 1920, during the Japanese armed intervention in Siberia.
As Tsurumi Shunsuke pointed out (1962/1975, p. 140), this intervention (1918–27) has special
significance because it linked Japan to the two most important international upheavals during the
Taishō period (1912–26), namely World War I and the Russian Revolution.

The narrator of this story, Private Uemura, is stationed in Harbin. Like Shōjo jigoku and many
other Yumeno stories, his narrative, too, takes the form of a letter – a long, final letter to his best
friend in Japan explaining how he has been made a scapegoat for a series of incidents – including
murder, embezzlement and espionage – and has had to run away with a young woman called Nina,
not just from the Japanese Army but from both pro- and anti-revolutionaries. He is now about to make
his final one-way trip with her into the frozen sea off Vladivostok:

After midnight tonight we will set off in this troika. We will give the horse some fine
Korean ginseng and then we’ll pack four or five bottles of good whisky in the handbag
Nina is knitting. Then we’ll go to the loading slope on the waterfront and from there
sledge on the frozen ocean. Cloudless with a full moon, the view will be wonderful
(YKz, vol. 6, p. 147)

Notably, it is not the defector narrator, Uemura, but Nina who makes all the plans and decisions, as
well as collecting information, supplies and materials. Uemura more or less follows her instructions.
Nina is one of the most attractive shōjo characters in Yumeno’s novels. Her identity is very
ambiguous. She claims to be half Corsican and half Gypsy and to have been adopted by a Russian
family. She is aged 19 and looks only about 14 with heavy make-up, but without make-up she looks
22 or 23. She is popular among Japanese officers who are ‘‘prone to shōjobyō’’ [girl sickness]30
(YKz, vol. 6, p. 15), but she is by no means a beautiful doll or a cute pet. She loves dancing, knitting
and drinking, but has many other talents – in languages, arithmetic and driving, to name just a few.
Moreover, she is good at disguising herself – crossing gender, age, cultural, linguistic and political
boundaries with ease. She is fearless and passionate. To the narrator Uemura, whom she loves, she
declares:

I will come with you to the end of the world. Those who decide to kill an innocent and
honest person like you just because you’re in their way become my enemies from the
moment they make such a decision. Japanese authorities, the White Russian Army, and
anyone else who even faintly harms you will be my enemy (YKz, vol. 6, pp. 108–09).
Just as the Martian girl uses her height to disguise herself as a man, Nina uses her small physique
and gender/cultural ambiguities to save Uemura’s life. She does not hesitate, for example, to shave
her head to look like a schoolboy (p. 114). Her ambiguity is clearly different from the two-facedness
of the deceitful villains we have seen earlier, including the half-brother of the sanka girl, the bus-
driving Bluebeard and the headmaster, and of those who surround Nina and Uemura in this story.
She is not driven by sexual, imperialist or pecuniary greed; her ambiguity provides her means for
survival, but it also indicates the complexity and multiplicity of the girl.

How Do We Read These Girls?

Yumeno was not a feminist as such, but his deep sympathy and empathy for marginalized and
displaced people and his admiration and longing for freedom seem to have enabled him to create
stories with unforgettable shōjo heroines who embody powerful ‘‘gender trouble’’ possibilities. Some
scenes are highly disturbing, and yet they are closely connected with transgressing gender, cultural,
national and other boundaries. It is therefore puzzling to see comments such as this from Yumeno
specialist Nishihara Kazumi:

That they [women in Yumeno’s fiction] seem erotic may probably be because they
are types [teikei]. By ‘‘types’’ I mean the tyranny of the author’s ideas [kannen]. These
women themselves have no idea/concept. And thus deprived of their own ideas, they
can appear only as ‘‘madwomen’’ or ‘‘dolls’’ (Nishihara, 1992, p. 6).

Even Nina is regarded by this critic as ‘‘another kind of doll’’ – gender neutral and simply representing
the author’s ‘‘ideas’’ (Nishihara, 1992, p. 7).31 Another critic and regular commentator on Yumeno,
Horikiri Naoto, expresses his reservations about the ultranationalist tendencies he believes to be
evident in Yumeno’s late (i.e. 1935–36) works, ‘‘with the exception of Shōjo jigoku’’ (Horikiri, 1992,
p. 22). Quoting Horikiri, Tabata warns against labelling Yumeno ‘‘ultranationalist’’, ‘‘nationalist’’ or
‘‘right-wing’’, because he was ‘‘anti-American in the sense that he was opposed to corrupt capitalism;
anti-Russian and anti-Communist in that he loathed the darker aspects of Communism; anti-
nationalist in that he was against state conspiracies; and anti-science in that he was against the
tendency of science to dominate human beings’’ (Tabata, 2005, pp. 114–15). This is certainly true of
Nina, who pronounces: ‘‘I hate isms and ideology. . . There are only two things for me: love and hate’’
(YKz, vol. 6, p. 109). Even though her comments that Japanese military officers are too honest and
gullible to compete with manoeuvring Russians and scheming Chinese (ibid., p. 110) seem to confirm
Horikiri’s criticism, the story nevertheless clearly indicates that Japanese military gullibility (in other
words incompetence), combined with the greed and dishonesty of Japanese civilians in Manchuria
(e.g. an accountant, an interpreter and a restaurant owner), bring about the downfall of Uemura and
Nina. It is a fantasy, but a highly subversive fantasy in the political context of 1935.

This article has demonstrated how Nina and other women – who are only a few of the many
extraordinary and resourceful women in Yumeno’s fiction – are anything but dolls, unless they are
the kind of dolls in ‘Oshie no kiseki’ (The Miracle of the Pressed Doll Pictures, 1929) that cause and
create gender, hereditary, marital and other problems and disturbances. As for madwomen, we
should remind Nishihara of the truly stunning example in ‘Warau oshi onna’ (The Laughing Mute
Woman, 1935, in YKz, vol. 4). The eponymous woman, Hana, is mentally disturbed, mute, homeless
and pregnant. Since her father, a crippled hinin [‘‘non-human’’, another derogatory term for
burakumin], committed suicide, she has no one to look after her. Unlike other protagonists, this young
woman cannot narrate her story in written or oral form. Nevertheless she manages to reveal the truth
about her pregnancy simply with her body language and piercing laughter. Hana’s laughter is
certainly as powerful as that of Medusa (Cixous, 1976) or Yamanba (the mountain witch; see
Viswanathan, 1996).

All of the girl protagonists discussed here use their bodies in one way or another to
destabilize gender, cultural and socio-political boundaries and hierarchies. Some of them use the
media discourse that would normally work against them or restrict their freedom in acrobatic ways to
cater to their ends, which could be revenge, protest or the pursuit or revelation of hidden truth.
Yumeno does not hesitate to introduce vulgar or discriminatory language and violent scenes. One of
the most recurrent disturbances concerns reproduction and pregnancy. By depicting the
uncanniness, horror, and foreignness surrounding and caused by pregnancy, Yumeno shows us
again and again the falsehood of good wife, wise mother and many other myths and constructions.
These highly original and powerful girl characters, however, have tended to be neglected or distorted
by even devoted Yumeno fans and readers. Even the Martian girl, for instance, loses her ‘‘grotesque’’
power, although in a way unsurprisingly, in the 1977 Nikkatsu roman poruno [soft porn] directed by
Konuma Masaru.32 It is high time to reclaim and recognise the shōjo in Yumeno’s literature, not from
the conventional author-centred viewpoint or from the male scopophilic viewpoint, but from the
viewpoints of the androgenous, displaced but highly powerful shōjo.
Notes
1. The term ‘‘kaibutsu’’ was used in earlier literary journalism. Yumeno’s brother-in-law, Ishii Shunji, for instance, wrote
a humorous piece entitled ‘Kaibutsu Kyūsaku no kaibō’ (The Anatomy of Monster Kyūsaku, first published in 1936,
just before Yumeno’s death in March 1936). ‘Sono kaibutsuteki sonzai’ (His Monstrous Existence) was Ishida
Kazuo’s title for his mourning piece in the special memorial issue (May 1936) of Tantei bungaku (Detective Novels).
Both pieces are included in Nishihara, 1975.

2. Tsurumi’s essay is included in Nishihara, 1975 and Tsurumi, 2001a. There is a complete (595- page) French
translation of Dogura magura (Yumeno, 2003), but no complete English translation of this work is available. A
synopsis in English by ‘‘Hiroshi Karigari’’, a pen name of Saitō Yukio in allusion to Doktor Caligari (i.e. Karigari
Hakase in Japanese; the second word, which means Dr, can also be read as Hiroshi when used as a male personal
name), is included in Karigari, 1971, pp. 1–33. Apart from the two articles Williams, 1999 and Kawana, 2001, one
book chapter (Nakamura, 2007), a very brief mention in Napier, 1996, p. 119, pp. 189–90, and Lawrence Rogers’
translation of a short essay (‘Terrifying Tokyo’, in Rogers (ed.), 2002, pp. 14– 18), Yumeno’s work has been
overlooked in English-language studies, and the few discussions that are available concentrate on Dogura magura.

3. Tsurumi himself (b. 1922) is a philosopher, sociologist and literary critic, and has been vocal about the difficulties
he experienced in his childhood. Particularly interesting is his reading of Yumeno’s Inugami hakase (Dr Inugami,
1931–32) from the viewpoints of school dropouts and abused children. Tsurumi also proposes a reading of
Yumeno’s children’s stories as a means of understanding the writer’s attitude to the emperor system. Nada Inada
(b. 1929), whose comment about Yumeno as a ‘‘gentle-hearted monster’’ is quoted earlier, is a literary critic and
psychiatrist. Other devoted Yumeno readers include: writer Nakai Hideo (1922–93), actor playwright Kara Jūrō (b.
1940), poet Tsukamoto Kunio (1920–2005) and film director Matsumoto Toshio (b. 1932).

4. Tōyama was the right-wing political leader and founder of Gen’yōsha (1881–1946). He was a close friend of
Yumeno’s father, who was also a powerful (though ambiguous) ultranationalist.

5. Apart from Dogura magura, Yumeno’s collection of tanka poems entitled ‘Ryōki uta’ (Grotesque Songs, included in
Yumeno, 2001, vol. 6, pp. 275–318) has captivated generations of readers and critics. See, for example, a tribute
titled ‘Yumekyū no shi to ryōki uta’ (The Death of Yume Kyū and Grotesque Songs) written shortly after Yumeno’s
death by Kyūketsu Musōotoko (obviously a pseudonym, meaning a dreaming vampire), originally published in the
May 1936 issue of mystery magazine Purofiru, included in Nishihara (ed.), 1975, pp. 129–30.

6. Kawasaki, 1990 has a chapter entitled ‘Kyokutō no shōjo/shōjo no kyokuhoku: Yumeno Kyūsaku kikō’ (The Girl in
the Far East/ The Northern End [Ultimate] of the Girl: Travelling through Yumeno Kyūsaku). See also Fujimoto,
2000; Itō, 2006; and Shin, 2007a and b. Published in a coterie journal, Fujimoto’s fine article does not appear in the
National Diet Library OPAC search. I thank Fujimoto for making her article available to me upon my request.

7. This is clear from her statement: ‘‘Although the shōjo genre used to be a popular genre confined to manga and
anime (especially in manga, which has been producing a wide variety of shōjo comics for decades), the shōjo
phenomenon now seems to permeate contemporary Japanese culture’’ (Napier, 2005, p. 149). For ‘‘Junior’’,
‘‘Cobalt’’ and other types of girls’ fiction series and sub-genres, see Saitō, 2002.

8. It must be noted that the etymology of shōjo [少女] does not indicate lack in femininity. According to Kōjien, it was
an eighth-century legal term for young women aged between 17 and 20, i.e. the female equivalent of shōtei [少丁],
young men of 17–20, who were taxed a quarter of what seitei [正丁] [healthy adult males] were charged. Younger
 girls, aged 4–16, were called shōjo [少女]. I am grateful to Fran Martin for prompting me to this discovery through
our email discussion in early 2006.

9. Besides Kawasaki, the only relevant discussions I have found are Fujimoto, 2000; Itō, 2006; and Shin, 2007a and
b. All these articles are written in Japanese and all except Kawasaki concentrate on Shōjo jigoku (Girls’ Hell). In
English-language material, as mentioned later, Nakamura includes an interesting note on the role of the female
bodies in Dogura magura, but states that it is beyond the scope of her essay (2007, p. 24, note 34).

10. The most obvious and notorious ‘‘bad girl’’ would be murderer Abe Sada (see Silverberg, 2007, pp. 83–85 and
Christine Marran’s chapter ‘So Bad She’s Good: The Masochist’s Heroine in Postwar Japan, Abe Sada’, in Miller
and Bardsley, 2005, pp. 80–95).

11. Shin Ha-Kyoung (2007a and b) proposes an interesting reading of Yumeno’s text, linking it to the decline of both
the socialist movements and the Modern Girl.

12. The story was first published in the March 1936 issue of Shinseinen, just before Yumeno’s death on the 11th of the
same month. It is included in Yumeno Kyūsaku zenshū, 1992, abbreviated hereafter as YKz, vol. 6.

13. The story was first published in the December 1934 issue of Ōru yomimono, included in YKz, vol. 4.

14. As Nakamura summarizes in reference to Freud, Rosemary Jackson, Homi Bhabha and Julia Kristeva, ‘‘the
uncanny always connoted a certain discourse of fear associated with the foreign other’’ and ‘‘this idea was taken
further [. . .] as a way to discuss the heterogeneity and paranoia that exists within the borders of the nation’’ (2007,
p. 21).

15. For a discussion of the theme and trope of cannibalism in twentieth-century Japanese literature, see chapter 4 of
Aoyama, Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature (forthcoming).

16. See Marran, 2007 for detailed discussion of dokufu. Yumeno’s sanka girl is also completely different from the
celebrated vagrant girl protagonist of Kawabata Yasunari’s Izu no odoriko (The Dancer of Izu, 1926), whose pure
and immature physique satisfies the scopophilic pleasure of the young male protagonist.

17. YKz, vol. 4, p. 362. The police also compare the sanka people to Jews. The story begins with a kind of disclaimer:
‘‘It is around the late 1880s, when the police operation was still fairly sweeping’’ (ibid., p. 337). Yumeno’s diary,
cited by Nishihara Kazumi in his ‘Kaidai’ (Commentaries) for this story (ibid., p. 433), briefly mentions that during a
meeting with the Superintendent-General the author requested protection from Suiheisha. My interest here,
however, is in the text.

18. In ‘Kū o tobu parasoru’ (A Parasol Flying in the Air, first published in Shinseinen in 1929) there is a detailed
description of the body of a young woman, a nurse five months pregnant with the baby of a villainous doctor, killed
in a railway accident (YKz, vol. 4, pp. 186–87). This is one of numerous Yumeno stories about a woman’s death
that is connected to pregnancy.

19. A scene in Dogura magura, in the form of a horror film script, describes a mad scientist dissecting a young woman
(YKz, vol. 9, pp. 304–08).

20. ‘Shigo no koi’ (Love after Death) in YKz, vol. 6, pp. 149–77. The girl in this story first appears as a young man – a
Russian soldier – but turns out to be a young woman who, the narrator believes, was none other than Grand
Duchess Anastasia of Russia.

21. ‘Kasei no onna’ (The Woman from Mars) in the collection of three stories entitled Shōjo jigoku, included in YKz, vol.
8. This work is discussed in the next section.
22. This particular story was originally published in the October 1934 issue of Shinseinen, while the other two stories
were written for the 1936 book that was published as the first volume of Kuroshiro Shobō’s detective novel series.

23. Bus conductors, like telephone operators, typists and cafe´ girls, were regarded as typical ‘‘modern girl’’ occupations
(see Suzuki, 1989, p. 475 and Saitō, 2003, p. 52). Kawasaki (1990, pp. 73–74) regards the step of the bus where
the conductor girl stood as the border between inside (family, marriage, house) and outside (street).

24. I am grateful to Jan Bardsley for suggesting the link with Hitomi and the Olympics.

25. Fujimoto, 2000, p. 24, citing the obituary of Hitomi in the Tōkyō Asahi shinbun (3 August 1931). Fujimoto also notes
that reports on Hitomi’s athletic talent began to appear shortly after the approach of Mars to the Earth, which
attracted much media attention in August 1924 (ibid, pp. 22–23).

26. On 15 May 1932 a group of young navy officers attempted a coup and assassinated Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi.

27. The last weird (and comic as in comic books) words are the onomatopoeia pe, presumably indicating the Martian
girl’s disdain and disgust for the headmaster.

28. In an earlier scene Utae’s father tells her that the doctor who tested her blood sample found that she was no longer
virginal (!) (YKz, vol. 8, p. 407).

29. As Tabata Akeo (2005) discusses in detail, Yumeno fully exploits various media discourses in his work. The Martian
girl story begins with a series of sensational newspaper reports, with headings shown in a larger font, about the fire
on the school grounds and the charred body of a young woman.

30. ‘Shōjobyō’ is the title of Tayama Katai’s short story published in 1907. It is available online at Aozora Bunko:
http://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000214/files/1098.html, accessed on 17 December 2007. The story, which may be
read as an early example of rorikon [Lolita complex] and bishōjo-moe [obsessive yearning for beautiful girls], depicts
a middle-aged man’s scopophilic obsession with young women he finds on trains and in streets. See Levy, 2006,
pp. 147–62 for a detailed analysis of this text. Levy translates shōjobyō as ‘‘maidenitis’’.

31. In contrast, Yumeno’s gender-ambivalent male protagonists such as the little boy in Inugami Hakase are regarded
as god-like and compared to the androgynous heroes of Japanese mythology. See Matsuda Osamu, ‘Inugami
hakase ni okeru kami naru mono’ in Nishihara (ed.), 1975, pp. 401–03.

32. While Yumeno’s novel contains no graphic descriptions of sex or rape scenes, the soft porn film, as generically
expected, adds many heterosexual and lesbian sex scenes as well as a sub-plot about the Martian girl’s pregnancy
and abortion, neither of which is in the novel.
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