Paper short abstract:

This paper presents a reading of the female protagonist's train ride in Shono Yoriko's "Taimu-surippu kombināto" as a non-linear, private, yet historical mode of remembering that calls into question the notion of a coherent self/narrative and historical other whithout erasing the female I.

Paper long abstract:

In "Origin's of Modern Japanese Literature" Karatani Kōjin wrote of landscape that it was a 'structure of perception' before it became a representational convention. The discovery of landscape, he argues, gave birth to modern subject/object relations as well as modern Japanese literature. We need not go back to Kaja Silverman or Theresa de Lauretis' re-readings of Lacan to know that such divisions run alongside gendered lines. As is the case with the 'home' and furusato in Japanese literature: Both tend to be the scenic object of an aestheticizing, desiring male gaze, whereas woman does not 'have' a furusato. For as the phrase "haha naru furusato" indicates, she often is (made) the home, coalescing with the landscape, becoming one with the furusato. Female characters moving out of the 'home', through space, thus, have always been an important focus point for feminist inquiries into representation. This is the broader framework I situate my analysis of Shōno Yoriko's "Taimu-surippu kombināto" (1994) in.

The more specific frame crystalizes around the question of how the female protagonist's train ride functions within this novel. Not quite circular but not linear either, her moving through the post-industrial urban spaces of Tokyo on lines such as the Chuo- and Keihin-Tohoku, but especially the Tusurumi line enables, as I will demonstrate, a non-linear, private, yet historical mode of remembering. Not a post-modern mode of remembering from 'beneath' or into the 'beyond' of dominant History, this moving through space instead tells histories as what we, with Eve Sedgwick, could call the synchronic, spatial "besideness" of "a number of elements" lying "alongside one another": A mode, so Sedgwick in "Touching Feeling", that "permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce dualistic thinking" such as "subject versus object". Yet while "Taimu-surippu kombināto" through this mode of moving between personal/historical elements does call into question the notion of a coherent self/narrative and an objectifiable (historical) other, the female I does never completely dissolve; A point, as I will argue, that makes this novel a potentially feminist one.