Modern Japanese Fiction

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Angela Carter and Modern Japanese
Fiction: Her Reencounter with Western
Literary Legacies
Y U TA K A O K U H ATA
Abstract
This paper discusses the echo of modern Japanese literature in Angela Carter’s The
Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), which was written in Tokyo
and Chiba, paying particular attention to four of the most influential authors in this
intertextual novel: Junichiro Tanizaki, Ryunosuke Akutagawa,Yasunari Kawabata, and
Yukio Mishima. Significantly, as well as being innovators of Japanese fiction, these writers
were also great reinterpreters of Western literary legacies, who constructed their own
original styles by absorbing both Japanese and non-Japanese literary traditions.The article,
therefore, explores how Carter reencountered Western literary legacies through reading
modern Japanese literature in order to clarify her feminist and political responses to the
reinterpretation of the European and American canon by authors from the Far East.
In a 1985 interview with Kerryn Goldsworthy, Angela Carter stated that all “books
were about other books” and regarded her “own writing as a kind of elaborate
form of literary criticism” (5). This notion of writing fiction as a way of responding
to other fiction is demonstrated in her sixth novel, The Infernal Desire Machines of
Doctor Hoffman (1972), which contains multiple references to literary, philosophical,
and artistic legacies in history, from Plato to contemporary science fiction. Whereas
her first collection of short stories, Fireworks (1974), has often been discussed in
relation to Japanese literary culture and traditions, critics have paid less attention
to the effect of modern Japanese fiction on this intertextual novel written in Tokyo
and Chiba. As I will argue later in this paper, Carter’s own essays, interviews, and
208 Contemporary Women's Writing 16:2 July 2022. https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpac019

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unpublished journals owned by the British Library—as well as Edmund Gordon’s
biography (2016) and a book-length memoir written by her ex-boyfriend Sozo
Araki (2017)—clearly show that, while creating this novel, she was deeply interested
not only in Japanese classic authors such as Murasaki Shikibu (from the turn of the
eleventh century) and Matsuo Basho (1644–1694) but also a number of twentieth-
century writers, including Soseki Natsume (1867–1916), Junichiro Tanizaki (1886–
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1965), Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927), Osamu Dazai (1909–1948),Yasunari
Kawabata (1899–1972),Yukio Mishima (1925–1970), Kobo Abe (1924–1933), and
Kenzaburo Oe (1935–present).
My specific project here is to discuss the intersections between Japanese and Western
literary traditions, focusing on four of the most influential figures on The Infernal Desire
Machines of Doctor Hoffman:Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Kawabata, and Mishima. Because the
history of modern Japanese literature after the Meiji Restoration was inseparably linked
to the social reception of European and American cultures, it is possible to argue that,
as well as being innovators of Japanese fiction, all of these authors were also great
reinterpreters of Western literary heritage, who constructed their own original styles
by absorbing both Japanese and non-Japanese literary traditions. For Carter, reading
modern Japanese fiction was not merely an act of discovering Japaneseness, which is
itself a mythic concept but also an act of (re)discovering Japanized legacies of Western
literature. In this respect, the current paper will not only scrutinize the echoes of
Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Kawabata, and Mishima in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor
Hoffman but will also examine a chain of (re)interpretations from Carter to Japanese
writers to the Western canon. In brief, I will explore the way Carter paradoxically
reencountered Western literary legacies through reading modern Japanese literature
in order to clarify her feminist and political responses to such reinterpretations of the
Western canon by authors from the Far East.
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and Japanese

Literature
Carter was clearly aware of a range of Japanese literature and literary traditions.
In her article about Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari), Carter
views this eleventh-century work as “a masterpiece of narrative fiction,” saying that
Murasaki, a woman author, “had the capacity for dealing with emotional complexity
of a Stendhal and a sensibility rather more subtle than that of Proust” (Shaking
a Leg 262). The strong interest Carter shows here in Japanese literature derived
from her experience of living in Tokyo and Chiba for about two years from 1969 to
1972. Her private journals written in this period indicate that, whilst creating The
Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Carter read not only Japanese novels
but also traditional poems, folk legends, and essays translated into English. In one of
her notebooks (Add MS 88899/1/93, 110), for example, she quotes a passage from
The Pillow Book (Makura no soshi), written by a woman author called Sei Shonagon
209 Contemporary Women's Writing 16:2 July 2022

Yutaka Okuhata • Angela Carter and Modern Japanese Fiction
(966–1017 or 1025) in the same period as The Tale of Genji as well as the tanka
and haiku poems of Priest Saigyo (1118–1190), Matsuo Basho, and Kobayashi Issa
(1863–1828). Moreover, Carter’s reading list includes Basho’s The Narrow Road to the
Deep North (Oku no hosomichi, 1702), which consists of his haiku poems and travel
diary, D. T. Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture (1959), Richard Dorson’s Folk Legends of
Japan (1961), and the works of modern writers, such as Soseki Natsume’s The Three-
Cornered World (Kusamakura, 1906), Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Kappa (1927), Junichiro
Tanizaki’s “The Tattooer” (“Irezumi/Shisei,” 1910), The Makioka Sisters (Sasameyuki,
1944–1948), and Yasunari Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties (Nemureru bijo,
1961) (Journals Add MS 88899/1/92, 93, Notebook Add MS 88899/1/110).
According to Sozo Araki’s memoir published in 2017, Carter also read Osamu
Dazai, Kobo Abe, and Kenzaburo Oe when she was living with him. Whilst being
fascinated by Abe (39), Carter severely criticized Dazai and Oe, pointing to the
former’s “[h]orrendous immaturity” and the latter’s “narcissism” (38–39). Araki
even witnessed Carter throwing her English copy of Dazai’s No Longer Human
(Ningen Shikkaku, 1948) “at the wall when she was reading it” (38). In contrast to
her criticisms of Dazai and Oe, according to Natsumi Ikoma in “Encounter with the
Mirror of the Other”—based on her interview with Araki—Carter at that time
praised Akiyuki Nosaka (1930–2015) and his novel The Pornographers (Erogotoshi-
tachi, 1966), which she viewed as offering “more in terms of the male-centric sexual
formation of contemporary Japanese society” (“Encounter” 88). Since, as Edmund
Gordon notes in his biography, Araki himself was a writer working on his first novel
and knew a great deal about world literature (139–40), Carter must have learned a
lot about modern Japanese fiction through her interactions with him.
Carter employs her broad knowledge of both Western and Japanese literature as
a basis for reimagination in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. The novel
is narrated by Desiderio, who works for the Minister of Determination in the fight
against Hoffman’s fictional Reality War. Just as Hoffman, trying to defeat the Minister
by distorting and modifying realities, strongly believes that everything in the world
can be structured by the arrangement of his inventions, called “samples” (111–13),
the entire narrative “samples” cultural and literary heritage from throughout the
world. In other words, the sets of samples that constitute the world’s phenomena,
as described in the text, parallel or are paralleled by the literary fragments or relics
that make up the text itself. That is not to characterize the novel as a surrealist
pastiche. It has its own narrative logic and a well-developed plot, so that while
drawing on a wide range of literary references and intertextual allusions, it is not
limited to them.
Indeed, as Ikoma summarizes in an article analyzing Marcel Proust’s influence on
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, numerous names and ideas have
been advanced by critics in relation to this work, including E.T.A. Hoffmann, Sigmund
Freud, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jonathan Swift, Claude
Lévi-Strauss, feminism, surrealism, and Oedipus (“The Proustian Mystery” 155).

Similarly, the portrayal of the River People in the third chapter presents a mixture
of Japanese legends or folklore and traditional Native American culture, in addition
to the butterfly dream story told by Lafleur in the sixth chapter (176–77) that is
associated with ancient Chinese philosophy.
Thus, reminding readers of Roland Barthes’s famous definition of a text as “a
tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of cultures” (146) or
Julia Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality as “a mosaic of quotations” (66), Carter
aesthetically plays with the literary, cultural, and philosophical relics not only from
European and American but also from Asian history in The Infernal Desire Machines
of Doctor Hoffman. Carter’s interest in Japanese literature had a significant effect
on this encyclopedic novel written in Japan: Aoi of the River People is named after
Aoi no Ue, Genji’s first official wife; in her journal, Carter links Albertina in The
Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, a character named after Marcel Proust’s
Albertine, to Sade’s Juliette, and to Lady Purple—Murasaki no Ue—in The Tale
of Genji (Add MS 88899/1/110). Moreover, the legend told by Nao-Kurai relating
to the curse of a dead “snake” living inside a woman’s body (102–05) probably
originates from various stories about serpents collected in Dorson’s Folk Legends
of Japan. Most of these tales describe the serpents’ transformation into human
beings and their curses on people (Dorson 117–27). Carter excerpted one of
them, “The Serpent Suitor,” in her journal (Add MS 88899/1/93), which depicts the
transformation of a village headman’s beautiful daughter after discovering her suitor
is a big serpent living in a rock cave. In addition, Priest Saigyo’s tanka, quoted in her
journal, is closely connected to the subject of Carter’s novel:
I cannot accept
The real as real
Then how do I accept
A dream as a dream? (Add MS 88899/1/93)
This short poem, written in the twelfth century, seems to grasp the essential theme
of Carter’s novel, which portrays the distortion of reality and the chaotic world
that has become “the arbitrary realm of dream” (12–13) as a result of Hoffman’s
Reality War.
In addition to old tales and poems created in the pre-modern era, Carter utilized
modern Japanese fiction and a modern feminist view of the world to construct this
complicated novel. As I will discuss in the following sections, among the modern
Japanese authors to whom Carter refers in her essays, interviews, and notes for
The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Kawabata, and
Mishima can be seen as the most important figures. As well as being innovators of
Japanese fiction, they were great reinterpreters of Western literary legacies since
the history of modern Japanese literature was undoubtedly related to the social
reception of European and American cultures. J. Scott Miller, for instance, argues

that “translations and adaptations of Western literary texts found their way into the
Japanese publishing mainstream,” especially in the Meiji period (1868–1912), and that
they “likewise reveal both the naïveté and curiosity of Japanese readers for things
Western” (3). Writing about the relationship between Japanese works of fiction
and their original models in Chinese or Western literature, moreover, J. Thomas
Rimer explains that such influences are “a sign of Japan’s longstanding, cosmopolitan
attitude toward other civilizations” (5).
What is called the “Japaneseness” expressed in modern Japanese fiction, of
course, originated not only from Japan’s cultural traditions but also from the
enormous influence of other cultural products imported from China, Korea, India,
and the West. For Carter, therefore, reading modern Japanese fiction was not simply
a way of discovering the essence of Japanese culture and tradition but rather a
reencountering of the legacies of Western literature through Japanese adaptations
and reinterpretations. The rest of this paper will closely analyze such fiction, with a
specific focus on Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Kawabata, and Mishima, as well as reveal how
the motifs appearing in their writings underlie the feminist and literary strategies of
Carter’s intertextual novel: the motifs, that is, of conflict between reason and desire
or between reality and dream.
Tanizaki and Akutagawa
In the late 1920s, the rivalry between Junichiro Tanizaki and Ryunosuke Akutagawa
was widely known to Japanese readers due to their debate over the roles of plot
and fictionality in literature, which lasted for several months in Kaizo magazine until
Akutagawa’s sudden death by suicide in July 1927 (this debate is summarized well
by Kojin Karatani 155). While Akutagawa, a former pupil of Soseki Natsume, was
famous for his witty and intellectual short stories in the 1910s and 1920s, such as
“Rashomon” (1915), “The Nose” (“Hana,” 1916), “Hell Screen” (“Jigokuhen,” 1918),
and “In a Grove” (“Yabu no naka,” 1922), Tanizaki was considered one of the leading
figures of the Japanese aesthetic school in his early years. In spite of the differences
in their styles, as I will discuss in this section, both authors had profound knowledge
of Japanese and Western literary traditions.
As can be seen in her review of Tanizaki’s novel, Naomi (Chijin no ai, 1925), Carter
admires his work, arguing that he is as great as Thomas Mann (Shaking a Leg 267).
In an interview with Roland Bell in 1973, she also describes him as “one of the
world’s great novelists” and analyzes Some Prefer Nettles (Tade kuu mushi, 1929),
pointing out that his work is all about “the great confrontation” or “the mini-
confrontation” between East and West (Bell 34). According to Carter, Tanizaki took
an active interest in the relationship between Eastern and Western cultural legacies.
Whereas Tanizaki’s reputation came partly from his portrayal of traditional Japanese
beauty in his later masterpieces, such as The Story of Shunkin (Shunkinsho, 1933) and
The Makioka Sisters, according to Martin Seymour-Smith, this novelist was a great

inheritor of nineteenth-century, Western decadent literature and counted amongst
his influences Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, and Charles Baudelaire (813).
As Noriko Mizuta Lippit explains, in his first and most famous short story “The
Tattooer,” which is about the male protagonist Seikichi’s artistic desire to create
a “tattoo masterpiece” on the body of a beautiful girl, there is an echo of Poe’s
writings, especially “The Assignation (The Visionary)” (1834), which romantically
depicts the tragic fate of two separated lovers in Venice who ultimately commit
suicide on the same day, hoping to be united in death (221–40). Although Wilde’s
influence on this Japanese author is undeniable (Lippit 225), Tanizaki and Poe also
share the view that art “plays a significant role in [the] grotesque endeavor to
restore the sense of life” (Lippit 231). (Junichiro Tanizaki’s brother, Seiji [1890–1971],
translated all of Poe’s short stories.) As Lippit explains:
The similarity to Poe’s art here is obvious, although in Poe’s case the diabol-
ical women do not have the same fleshly eroticism. Poe’s dreamers create
their own “bower of dreams,” the “arabesque” room, by decorating it with
their art of interior decoration. The arabesque room is meant to induce a
dreaming consciousness in the inhabitant’s mind; there he indulges in his
grotesque dreams of transcendence by destroying his own and his lover’s
physical being or sanity. The agents of the hero’s grotesque imagination,
evoked by his art, are Poe’s vampiric women with supernal beauty. (231)
In Poe’s “The Assignation,” the male protagonist creates his “bower of dreams,”
believing that “to dream” had been the business of his life (Poe 301). In a “full-length
portrait of the Marchesa Aphrodite” in his room, which delineates “her super-human
beauty,” this woman points, with a “stain of melancholy” on her face, to “a curiously
fashioned vase” with her left hand (301). Just as the painting of a Chinese princess
and her male victim indicates the future relationship between Seikichi and his
woman client in “The Tattooer” (Tanizaki 165), this portrait in Poe surely predicts
the tragic ending in which both Aphrodite and the male protagonist kill themselves
by taking poison. According to Mizuta Lippit, in Tanizaki’s story, in which Seikichi
turns the innocent girl into a “diabolical woman,” art is mainly represented as
“both the secret agent for creating evil and the means of inducing a masochistically
ecstatic state of consciousness” (Lippit 231). Like Poe, Tanizaki seeks to separate
“art from life and from morality (goodness) in order to associate beauty with evil”
(231), even though he does not directly imitate Poe’s stories in “The Tattooer.”
Poe is an important author also for Carter, as evidenced in her short story “The
Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe” in Black Venus (1985) and in her 1988 essay on “The
Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) (Shaking a Leg 482–90). For decades, Carter has
been read as a feminist writer, and her critique of patriarchal society is evident in
her rewriting of traditional European fairy tales from a feminist perspective as well
as in novels and nonfiction works such as The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of
Pornography (1978). In The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Carter’s main
focus as a feminist is not the concept of art itself or beauty, which both Poe and

Tanizaki problematize, but the motif of a woman’s body transformed into a mere
work of art; this motif also appears in both Poe’s “The Assignation” and Tanizaki’s
“The Tattooer.” In the former, Aphrodite is represented as a “statue-like” woman
(Poe 294): “The pallor of the marble countenance, the swelling of the marble bosom,
the very purity of the marble feet, we behold suddenly flushed over with a tide of
ungovernable crimson” (Poe 295). Contrastively, Tanizaki depicts a tattooed artwork
on the woman’s back as a “malevolent creature”:
At every thrust of his needle Seikichi gave a heavy sigh and felt as if he had
stabbed his own heart. Little by little the tattoo marks began to take on
the form of a huge black-widow spider; and by the time the night sky was
paling into dawn this weird, malevolent creature had stretched its eight
legs to embrace the whole of the girl’s back. (Tanizaki 167–68)
Significantly, we can see the “intricate tattoo work” on the upper bodies of the
centaurs described in Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (207)
as a feminist reinterpretation of Tanizaki’s work, which can itself be viewed as a
reinterpretation of Poe.
Borrowing this motif of tattooing (irezumi) from Tanizaki—a motif that appears
frequently in Carter’s other works, including Heroes and Villains (1969), Love (1971),
and Wise Children (1991)—she links it here to the social victimization of women in the
centaurs’ society and highlights their misogynistic view of the world: “These tattoos
were designed as a whole and covered the back and both arms down as far as the
forearms; and the middle of the chest, the upper abdomen and the throat and face
were all left bare on the males though the womenfolk were tattooed all over, even their
faces, in order to cause them more suffering, for they believed women were born only
to suffer” (Infernal Desire Machines 207–08). Here, the centaur men’s discriminatory
view is connected to Tanizaki’s tattooer, who sees women’s bodies as his own canvas. In
“The Tattooer,” the story is narrated only from Seikichi’s perspective, and the nameless
girl is portrayed merely as an object onto which he projects his own sadomasochistic
desire. Instead of illustrating her psychology, the third-person narrator repeatedly
emphasizes Seikichi’s fetishism or his “male gaze” on her body parts: “To his sharp eye,
a human foot was as expressive as a face.This one was sheer perfection” (Tanizaki 163):
“Seiikichi had her sit on the veranda, and he studied her delicate feet, which were bare
except for elegant straw sandals” (164). Pivoting on the androcentrism presented in
Tanizaki’s narrative, Carter utilizes it for her own feminist critique.Whereas Tanizaki
and Poe separate beauty from social morality and norms, Carter critically responds to
these authors by connecting the beauty of tattooing causing intense pain in the body
with the image of the social suffering of women.
While parodying Tanizaki from a feminist point of view, Carter also seeks to
reinterpret Akutagawa’s novella Kappa (1927) with an aim to overthrowing social
realities of the oppression of women through her literary imagination. Like Carter,
who had profound knowledge of both European and non-European literature,
Akutagawa was a keen reader of not only Japanese but also French, German,

Russian, and, most importantly, English fiction: he studied British literature at Tokyo
Imperial University from 1913 to 1916.Yasuhira Ozawa has shown how, in Kappa,
Akutagawa demonstrates awareness of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726;
1735) and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) (“Kappa kenkyu [Jo]” 1; “Kappa kenkyu
[Ge]” 30–31), both of which are satiric novels. In addition, his intertextual novella
reminds readers of Lewis Carroll’s works for children. With at least four different
English translations (Sekiguchi 38), Kappa is one of Akutagawa’s most popular works
in Anglophone countries. While in Japan, Carter read the novella in Seiichi Shiojiri’s
first English translation, published in 1949.
In Kappa, Akutagawa plays with the tradition of utopian and dystopian fiction
in English literature and satirizes his contemporary Japanese society through the
portrayal of a fictitious world of legendary creatures called “kappas”: these creatures
are about the size of a small child and “have a short-haired head and webbed hands
and feet,” While the tops of their heads are “concave, forming an oval, dish-like
hollow” (39). The story is narrated by a mad man called “Patient No. 23,” who
claims that three years ago, he happened to find a kappa at a riverside in Kamikochi,
a mountainous highland valley in Nagano prefecture, and tried to chase it. As if he
were Carroll’s Alice, the protagonist suddenly falls into a hole in the ground and
finds himself on his back, “surrounded by a large number of kappas” (34).
The characterization of “Patient No. 23,” who has been in a lunatic asylum since
his return from the kappa’s country, also resembles that of Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver,
who is in a state of misanthropy after his voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms.
Like Gulliver, who feels that “the Smell of Yahoo [is] continuing very offensive”
in his own house in England (Swift 304), in Akutagawa’s novella, this “insane”
narrator states:
When I returned from the land of kappas, I was greatly upset for some
time by the smell of men. Compared with human beings, kappas are aw-
fully clean. Moreover, the human head struck me as being a very uncanny
spectacle. I am afraid you don’t see how I felt about it, because you have
never lived among the concave-headed kappas....
For some time, I took great pains to keep human beings away, but little by
little I got used to them, and in the course of half a year or so I could go
anywhere and see anybody. (Akutagawa 130)
In Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, which, like Akutagawa’s
Kappa, contains various allusions to Swift’s novel, the community of centaurs is
apparently associated with the country of the Houyhnhnms, and Desiderio uses a
translation of Gulliver’s Travels as a textbook when teaching Nao-Kurai of the River
People to read and write (85).
As Carter will also do, Akutagawa goes beyond superficial references to the
canonical story of Gulliver to extend Swift’s satirical style into criticism of social
oppressions in his time. Much as Carter’s novel depicts the Minister’s war against

Hoffman, who intends to distort every reality in the world, Akutagawa’s Kappa
portrays a world where social rules, customs, and what human beings usually call
“reality” are inverted. In the world of kappas, for instance, it is not parents but
babies in the womb who control their own destinies, in that the fetus can decide
whether or not he or she will be born (42–44).
From a feminist point of view, moreover, what Akutagawa demonstrates here
may represent the possibility of deconstructing or overthrowing the “reality” of
an oppressive, male-centered society. Importantly, Akutagawa’s representation of
“love-making among kappas” reverses the roles of people in patriarchal Japanese
society: “The moment a she-kappa comes upon a likeable he-kappa,” the author
explains, “she takes any means whatever, fair or foul, to catch him” (53). A male
kappa called Gael, “one of the biggest capitalists,” with the power to control the
media and government, is controlled by his wife (64, 70–72): thus, as the protagonist
says, even the cabinet “is after all controlled by Mrs. Gael” (72). When writing about
the kappas’ religion, known as “Life-Worship” (104), Akutagawa inverts the story of
Adam and Eve in the Bible, remarking that their God first created a female kappa
and then “took a bit of her brain and made a male kappa for her” (112).
Akutagawa’s critique of biblical myths and gender stereotypes resonates with
Carter’s feminism in seeking to deconstruct gender norms; according to Araki,
she believed that “everyone in the West, contaminated by Judeo-Christianity” is
“repressed, especially with regard to sexuality” (Araki 45). In Akutagawa’s novella,
the enormous Great Temple of Life-Worship generally satirizes the authoritarianism
of corrupt, secularized religions in modern Japan. Carter quotes a passage from
Kappa about this temple in her notebook: “It stood there as imposing as ever,
stretching out numberless lofty domes and spires like so many feelers toward the
dull, cloudy sky, and shrouded in a strange mist of eeriness like a mirage hanging
over a desert” (Akutagawa 114; qtd. in Carter, Add MS 88899/1/110). However, when
Carter recreates this Great Temple with spires in the Cathedral in her own novel,
she represents it as the symbol not only of reason or order but also of masculinity.
Although a comment added in her notebook may seem to have nothing to do with
her feminist intention—“[a] cathedral of mist & lace constructed in the expectation
of mass conversions amongst the Indians” (Add MS 88899/1/110)—the cathedral
in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman embodies male chauvinism and
religious authoritarianism.
While regarding it as “a masterpiece of sobriety,” Carter’s Minister of
Determination says that, for himself, “not a religious man,” the Cathedral, which
“had brooded over the city like the most conventional of stone angels for two
hundred years,” stood “as a kind of symbol of the spirit of the city” (33). According
to Desiderio, whereas “some cities are women and must be loved, others are men
and can only be admired or bargained with” (33). Standing at the center of the
capital—a “solid, drab, yet not unfriendly city,” “thickly, obtusely masculine” (10)—
the Cathedral becomes a symbol of masculinity and androcentrism in this society.
Hoffman’s subsequent destruction of this building symbolizes Carter’s feminist

critique of the same oppressions in her contemporary world. Like Akutagawa’s
Kappa, which strategically parodies European classics of utopian and dystopian
fiction in order to utilize them as tools for social criticism, Carter’s novel attacks
socially created realities of women’s oppression.
Kawabata and Mishima
As we have observed, the motifs and images borrowed from Tanizaki and Akutagawa
play significant roles in Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. These
motifs and images were not so much original inventions as they were products of
their artistic struggles to “modernize” Japanese literature through reinterpreting
its legacies from the perspectives of Western literary traditions. Such attempts may
display somewhat Occidentalist views. Nonetheless, Carter’s feminist strategy in The
Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman to demythologize gender norms or beliefs
by making use of Japanized legacies of the Western canon is clearly linked to her
anti-Eurocentric and non-Orientalist attitude; without Westernizing or exploiting
Japanese literary legacies, she deconstructs the fixed image of the Orient/Occident
relationship by centering Japanese adaptations of Western canon. Similarly, we can
view Carter’s representations of the Count and the “House of Anonymity” in the
fifth and sixth chapters of this novel as her literary engagement with the works
of Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima, who constructed their own worlds of
Japaneseness under the influences of English and European fiction.
Both Kawabata and Mishima were Carter’s contemporaries, although they had
died by the time The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman was published. The
former committed suicide in 1972, four years after receiving the Nobel Prize for
Literature, while the latter killed himself in 1970, in what is known as the Mishima
incident. In the 1920s and early 1930s, along with Riichi Yokomitsu (1898–1947),
Kawabata was regarded as a representative member of the Neo-Perceptionist
School (Shinkankaku-ha), a group of Japanese Modernists who “read and rehashed
the arguments they found in European and American literary journals” (Miyoshi
98). When Mishima published his first critically acclaimed novel, Confessions of a
Mask (Kamen no kokuhaku, 1949), Kawabata was already a successful writer, having
become famous for his early masterpieces such as “The Dancing Girl of Izu” (“Izu
no odoriko,” 1926) and Snow Country (Yukiguni, 1937). Unlike Mishima, who was,
as Damian Flanagan explains, influenced in his early days by various European
writers—such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Raymond Radiguet, Marcel Proust, and Oscar
Wilde—and inherited the philosophical exploration of death and eroticism from
Georges Bataille in his later years (56–7, 172), much of Kawabata’s “early work was
deemed Modernist in a fundamentally Western sense of that word,” as Thom Palmer
explains, and one can easily detect the influence of James Joyce (392). According
to Donald Keene, in Kawabata’s short stories, such as “Crystal Fantasies” (“Suisho

genso,” 1931), he “practiced the stream-of-consciousness technique that the
Japanese Modernists associated with Joyce” (33).
In House of the Sleeping Beauties published in 1961, categorizable as part of his
late work, the influence of European literature on Kawabata seems considerably
more crucial than in his previous writings. The novella, acclaimed by Mishima as
“an esoteric masterpiece” (Introduction 7), is the story of a Japanese-style secret
inn where elderly men or the rich and trustful guests who are old enough to
have lost their sexual ability can share a bed with naked girls, sleeping soundly
for a night. After reading this work in Edward Seidensticker’s 1969 translation,
Carter wrote notes for the “House of Anonymity” in her notebook, as follows:
“like Kawabata’s ‘House of Sleeping Beauties’ [sic], the shaded rooms are full of
beautiful women, stark naked, sunk in profound & dreamless sleep” (Add MS
88899/1/110).
As previous studies have shown, along with Gothic romance and decadent
literature, Kawabata’s novella was inspired not only by the European surrealism of
the early twentieth century but also by the fifth volume of Proust’s Remembrance of
Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu, 1913–1927; see Kawakatsu and Yoshikawa),
in which the narrator repeatedly describes his lover, Albertine, sleeping in his bed
like “a watch that does not stop, like an animal that goes on living whatever position
you assign to it, [and] like a climbing plant” (Proust 457). While gazing at this
sleeping beauty, he feels he can “possess” her only when she is sleeping: “In keeping
her before my eyes, in my hands, I had that impression of possessing her altogether,
which I never had when she was awake” (426). In impressive scenes such as this
one, which seem, as Rosa Slegers argues, to have affected Kawabata’s depiction of
the “sleeping girls” in the secret inn, Albertine “is present, but completely passive, a
mere mute thing of natural beauty” (142).
As I will discuss later, we can easily find the echo of Proust not only in Kawabata’s
novella but also in Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, especially
in her characterization of Albertina. In this context, however, we should not ignore
the fact that in addition to Proust’s sleeping Albertine, both Kawabata and Carter
were interested in Charles Perrault’s “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.” Mari
Takahashi notes that the former was already aware of this fairy tale while creating
House of the Sleeping Beauties (40–41), while the latter translated it into English in
The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977). According to Scott Dimovitz, the motif of
the “sleeping beauty,” which repeatedly appears in Carter’s major works—such
as The Passion of New Eve (1977) and Nights at the Circus (1984)—represents the
woman in the “ultimate passive position” (152). Moreover, in analyzing Carter’s
translation from French, Rebecca Munford claims that the sleeping beauty in
Perrault is expressed “as a divine and untouched body,” with a “radiant exterior
linking her to the Virgin Mary” (33). Both Carter and Kawabata present this motif,
found (as I have noted) in Perrault and Proust, as an inhuman or materialized object
onto which the male gaze and men’s desire are projected, as if it were a voiceless
“living doll” (Kawabata 20).

But while Carter’s depiction of the House of Anonymity is based on Kawabata’s
reinterpretation of Perrault and Proust, in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor
Hoffman their classical “sleeping beauty” figures are ironically transformed into
the ugly, grotesque women freaks or the “inverted mutations part clockwork, part
vegetable and part brute” (157), and even her Proustian heroine, Albertina, does
not sleep like them. Furthermore, whereas sexual intercourse is prohibited in the
inn portrayed in Kawabata’s novella, the House of Anonymity is presented as a
brothel in which “nameless” silent women with masks are standing in cages like
“wax mannequins of love” (155). According to Desiderio’s narrative, “[t]here were,
perhaps, a dozen girls in the cages in the reception room and, posed inside, the girls
towered above us like the goddesses of some forgotten theogeny [sic] locked up
because they were too holy to be touched” (157).
In spite of these differences, while not simply reproducing the traditional sleeping
beauty figures, Carter utilizes Kawabata’s representation of their anonymity as
silent “living dolls” specifically as a fiction artificially created from men’s desire. The
anonymous freak girls in The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman reflect the
intense and perverted desire of the Count, a crazy misogynist who calls himself “a
connoisseur of catastrophe” (145). Carter intentionally stresses the fictitiousness
of these prostitutes in the cages, stating that they “presented a dream-like fusion of
diverse states of being, blind, speechless beings from a nocturnal forest where trees
had eyes and dragons rolled about on wheels” (158).
The Count, who visits the House of Anonymity with Desiderio and Lafleur
searching for the perfect pleasure, reminds readers of another major Japanese
novelist in the twentieth century, Mishima. While Carter rarely mentioned Kawabata
in her published writings, she often criticized Mishima’s work and death. “That
evening in November,” as Carter recalls in her essay entitled “Mishima’s Toy Sword”
(1971), “the television screen [was] filled with the face of the novelist,Yukio Mishima,
quite unexpectedly” (Shaking a Leg 238). Published in New Society, this article
describes her experience of the shocking TV news of Mishima’s seppuku—a form of
ceremonial suicide by self-disembowelment – at the Ichigaya Military Base in Tokyo
in 1970: Carter views him as an anachronistic “clown” in “the rice and circuses of
modern Japan,” stating that “his action seemed wishfully laughable” (240, 244). In
her conversation with Bell, she talks frankly about the “unpleasant” feeling that she
experienced when reading Mishima, humorously remarking that “reading his novels
is like being on a train with someone very unpleasant, [or] like being on a train with
a compulsive madman” (34–35). She continues:
[A]nd he starts a conversation with you and he goes on and on and on,
and he starts telling you about himself and he tells you how he first mas-
turbated when he was eleven and he realized it was terribly wicked and
how his grandmother used to hit on the ceiling with a stick and it used
to frighten him very much because he masturbated and his voice gets,
you know, more and more and more and more, agitated and his hands,

he starts pawing you with his hot hands and his hot breath is blasting in
your face and … well, he’s forcing you to listen to this very, well, really
rather adolescent … well, Angst. I don’t know, but I think he’s really trying
to write about evil, but he really doesn’t know what evil is. He thinks it
might have something to do with … well, you know, very beautiful young
boys, he’s not sure. (35)
The work denounced in this interview is Confessions of a Mask, Mishima’s
autobiographical novel narrated by a man confessing his homosexuality,
sadomasochistic desires, and nihilism.
In The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Carter projects her negative
image of Mishima—as well as that of his persona in Confessions of a Mask—onto
the characterization of the Count. Negating God and the world itself (146), the
Count repeatedly praises nihilism and is always accompanied by a “young slender
boy” (143), his faithful servant Lafleur. The masks that he and other characters
wear in the House of Anonymity also allude to Confessions of a Mask. Like Carter’s
imaginary Mishima on a train, once he starts talking, the Count never stops in his
long speech about his nihilistic world view and sexual desire. In Carter’s novel, this
character thus articulates Mishima-esque megalomania, narcissism, egoism, and male
chauvinism:
It was impossible to converse with him for he had no interest in anyone
but himself and he offered his companion only a series of monologues of
varying lengths, which often apparently contradicted themselves but al-
ways, in a spiral-line fashion, remained true to his infernal egoism. I never
heard another man use the word ‘I’, so often. But I sensed exemplary
quality in his desperate self-absorption. (147)
Even though critics such as Elaine Jordan merely adduce the Marquis de Sade and
Friedrich Nietzsche as models for this character (34), I view him as a mixture of
1
Mishima with those figures. That is because both writers were important sources
Carter analyzes Sade’s
pornographic works, for of creativity, not only for Carter1 but for Mishima, who is known for his play
example, in The Sadeian Madame de Sade (Sado koshaku fujin, 1965) and, according to Shuji Takayama, for his
Woman.
longstanding admiration of Nietzsche’s philosophy (283–85). Both the masochism
and the death drive that appear in Carter’s characterization of the Count thus
derive from Mishima, de Sade, and Nietzsche.
Those themes can also be found in Mishima’s other major works. Since the Count
identifies extreme pain with pleasure, as Mishima himself as well as the “inverted”
men protagonists do in his novels, including The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
(Kinkaku-ji, 1956), The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (Gogo no Eiko, 1965), and
The Sea of Fertility (Hojo no Umi, 1969–1971), Carter’s “connoisseur of catastrophe”
(145) is obsessed with self-destructive desire. At the moment of death, when he is
executed by an African cannibalistic tribe, the Count, who has traveled around the
world exploring pleasure, is overjoyed by an acute pain he had never experienced in

his life before. In his autobiographical novel Confessions of a Mask too, the persona
notes the experience of his “first ejaculation” (29) after seeing a reproduction of
Guido Reni’s “St. Sebastian”:
The black and slightly oblique trunk of the tree of execution was seen
against a Titian-like background of gloomy forest and evening sky, somber
and distant. A remarkably handsome youth was bound naked to the trunk
of the tree. His crossed hands were raised high, and the thongs binding
his wrists were tied to the tree. No other bonds were visible, and the
only covering for the youth’s nakedness was a coarse white cloth knotted
loosely about his loins. (28–29)
While seeing this picture, the protagonist’s “blood soared up,” and his “loins
swelled as though in wrath” (28). Moreover, in Mishima’s most famous short
story “Patriotism” (“Yukoku,” 1961), which appears to predict his suicide in 1970,
Lieutenant Takeyama makes love to his wife Reiko and feels an intense “joy”
(Patriotism 36) just before his bloody and painful but “honorable” suicide by seppuku,
or his traditionally happy death for the divine Emperor. In the film adaptation of this
short story (1966), Mishima himself played the role of the lieutenant who commits
seppuku.
The sadomasochistic motifs of self-destruction and the death impulse, which
Mishima frequently portrayed in his works and demonstrated in his own life, were
related not only to his interest in the Japanese samurai tradition and the Buddhist
notion of mujokan (a sense of the evanescence of life) but also to his longstanding
adoration of Raymond Radiguet, a French writer who died at the age of twenty
after completing two novels: The Devil in the Flesh (Le Diable au corps, 1923) and
The Count’s Ball (Le Bal du comte d’Orgel, 1924). According to Keene, Mishima was
struck by the exceptional literary talent of this author in his high school days and
“remained fascinated with youth, and especially with youthful death, throughout his
career as a writer” (49). Hence, despite the fact that Carter’s characterization of
the Count might seem simply a sarcastic parody of this Japanese novelist, Mishima
himself constructed his work and identity as an artist through consuming both
Japanese and Western cultural texts. In her conversation with Bell, Carter agrees
with his statement that Mishima, both physically and psychologically, built himself
into a new person, “[a]s though he were a work of art” (35). The Count’s complex
characterization thus personifies a chain of (re)interpretations, from European
writers such as Radiguet, de Sade, and Nietzsche, through Mishima, to Carter.
In Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, hidden behind the violence caused by the
male protagonist’s death impulse and his sadomasochistic desire for self-destruction
are his misogyny and acclamation of masculinity, probably as gay. In The Infernal
Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, however, Carter never portrays the Count as
gay. Instead, by emphasizing his manliness and extreme misogyny and by describing
a cruel scene where he exerts violence on women prostitutes at the House of
Anonymity (who themselves seem generated by his own sexual desire), Carter

intentionally makes use of this Mishima-esque character for feminist critique of male
chauvinism. In a “phallic carnival costume” (166), the Count murders a prostitute
without hesitation by snatching a candle and igniting the plumage of a freak girl with
2
This character appears to wings (159).2
prefigure Fevvers, a winged-
Then again, in the House of Anonymity, Carter’s Count finally laments his
woman circus performer, in
“frigidity” (160) and inability to feel pleasure, while forcing violence on women. In
Nights at the Circus.
addition to implying that only his own death can give him real pleasure, this scene
illustrates the more interesting fact that the Count’s grief over his “frigidity” is
related not only to the Mishima-esque motif of sadomasochistic desire but also to
Kawabata’s portrayal of the old protagonist Eguchi in his novella, who projects his
own loss of sexual desire onto the sleeping girls by touching their warm bodies. To
return, then, to Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties, which both utilizes and
recreates the models of sleeping beauties presented by Perrault and Proust, we find
Eguchi achieving pleasure by holding a girl in his arms and projecting the internal
images of his former lovers onto her young body. When Eguchi touches a sleeping
girl, for example, “[h]e took her loose hair lightly in his hand” (68). According to
Kawabata’s description, Eguchi “strove to quiet himself, seeking confession and
repentance of his misdeeds; but it was the women in his past that floated into his
mind” (68). In an earlier passage, the author writes as follows:
Eguchi thought of the several days when he had run off to Kyoto, taking
the back-country route, with the girl whose breast had been wet with
blood. Perhaps the memory was vivid because the warmth of the fresh
young body beside him came over to him faintly. There were numerous
short tunnels on the railroad from the western provinces into Kyoto.
Each time they went into a tunnel, the girl, as if frightened, would bring
her knee to Eguchi’s and take his hand. (28–29)
Kawabata seems to borrow the Western framework of the “sleeping beauty,”
yet he is not merely copying the models presented by the French precursors.
Here, describing the beauties as anonymous, fictional figures who lack subjectivity,
Kawabata emphasizes the irony that these dreaming girls themselves are dream-like
existences whose images are created by Eguchi’s erotic memories. Although one
morning, Eguchi is shocked to find that one of the two girls in his bed is dead, the
woman of the inn calmly says to him, “Go on back to sleep. There is the other girl”
(98). In this secret inn, the dead girl is no more than a nameless, replaceable “doll,”
whose body has lost its value as a sexual object.
More importantly, it is also in the House of Anonymity that Desiderio meets
Albertina for the first time; the heroine of the novel named after Proust’s
Albertine, whose image had always attracted and haunted him. Unlike Albertine in
Remembrance of Things Past, Carter’s Albertina, who begins “to melt like a woman of
snow” and disappears when the police break into the house (164), is represented
explicitly as a fictional, imaginary figure created from Desiderio’s desire. In Hoffman’s
castle, Desiderio eventually notices that he looks very much like Albertina (243).

Before killing her, he views her as his “Platonic other” and that his “dream made
[her] flesh” (263). Although Albertina’s relationship to Proust’s Albertine has been
investigated by several critics (see Ikoma, “The Proustian Mystery of the Black
Swan” and Tonkin), the fictionality of the former character emphasized in Carter’s
novel derives also from Kawabata’s dream-like sleeping beauties, through which he
recreated the heroine of Remembrance of Things Past. Hence, Carter’s Albertina may
be interpreted as a feminist parody not only of Proust’s original Albertine but also of
Kawabata’s Japanized model of this canonical woman character.
To sum up, whereas Kawabata’s novella illustrates the old man’s nostalgic
reminiscences in relation to his loss of sexual ability, the Count, a Mishima-like
figure seeking extreme pleasure, ironically grieves over his “frigidity” (160) because
nothing, except his own death, can gratify his limitless, perverted desire. In The
Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, especially in the scene of the House of
Anonymity, Carter strategically responds to Kawabata and Mishima, who engaged
in reinterpretation and reconstruction of Western literary achievements in their
own works and lives; Carter does so to express her own political criticism against
socially constructed mythologies of women and femininity.
Japanized Legacies of Western Literature
Modern Japanese literature, especially in the works of Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Kawabata,

and Mishima, proved an indispensable source of literary and feminist imagination for
Carter when writing The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, even though
the novel does not overtly refer to Japanese culture or tradition. Borrowing the
motif of tattooing from Tanizaki’s “The Tattooer” and parodying Akutagawa’s Kappa,
for example, Carter utilizes them to attack the social victimization of women and
various rules or customs in a society dominated by men. While projecting her own
skeptical attitude towards Mishima’s work and death onto the characterization of
the Count, who represents a Mishima-esque obsession with narcissism, misogyny,
and masculinity, Carter also represents the House of Anonymity, based on
Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties, as a place where the women prostitutes
are treated as anonymous “living dolls” without subjectivity.
“In Japan,” Carter said, she “learned what it was to be a woman, and became
radicalised” (Nothing Sacred 28). While the country provided plentiful inspiration
for her literary work, reading modern Japanese fiction was, for this author, neither
an experience merely of encountering Japaneseness nor an act of exploiting
Japanese literary heritage in a kind of cultural imperialism. Rather, it became a
paradoxical way of reencountering Western literary legacies through the lenses of
Japanese writers and of discovering that what has been called “Japaneseness” in
modern Japanese fiction is constructed from the country’s longstanding, dynamic
relationship with Western cultural influence. In The Infernal Desire Machines of
Doctor Hoffman, instead of Westernizing Japanese elements that she picked out from

English translations, Carter presented the Japanized legacies of Western literature.
By (re)introducing Japanized legacies of Western fiction into her English novel,
Carter not only unsettles Orientalism, Eurocentrism, and Occidentalism but also
makes full use of such a strategy for her own feminist and social critique of her
contemporary world.
Japan Women’s University, Tokyo, Japan
[email protected]
Acknowledgments
I appreciate the Estate of Angela Carter for generously allowing me to use Carter’s unpublished journals
and notebooks owned by the British Library. (These are Copyright © The Estate of Angela Carter.
Reproduced by permission of the Estate c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., 20 Powis Mews, London
W11 1JN.)
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The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and Japanese

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Tanizaki and Akutagawa

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Japanized Legacies of Western Literature

Modern Japanese literature, especially in the works of Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Kawabata,

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Akutagawa, Ryunosuke. Kappa. Translated by Seiichi Shiojiri, Hokuseido P, 1949.

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