Paper short abstract:

In this presentation I will show how in his short novel “Koi suru genpatsu”, Takahashi Gen’ichirō (b. 1951) exploits parody to show the critical function of self-reflexive literature, rising a political incorrect voice against the supremacy of the “not said” in the Japanese society.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation is focused on the short novel “Koi suru genpatsu” (“A Hot Nuclear Reactor”) by Takahashi Gen’ichirō, published for the first time in the November 2011 issue of Gunzō, a few months after the Tohoku’s “Triple Disaster”. The novel is summarized in the table of contents of the issue as “A tale about the love, the adventures and the spirit of a group of men who struggle to realize a charity adult movie for the victims of the great earthquake”. The provocative association of “porn” and “charity” is not new for Takahashi: he had previously published on Gunzō (October 2002-August 2004) a series of texts based on the same theme and titled “Meikingu obu dōji tahatsu ero” (“Synchronized Erotic Attacks: The Making Of”), punning on the term used to describe the September 11th terrorist attacks to US (dōji tahatsu tero). This deliberately outrageous approach and the recourse to explicit material, could echo the dissident attitude of the avant-garde Japanese filmmakers that in the 1960s created a counter-cinema in a moment of great political ferment, to which Takahashi is not unrelated: it is known that he took part in the student protests of those years and that the activist experience had a tremendous impact on his artistic production. Since the first novels and essays published in the early 1980s, Takahashi showed a clear path running through all his works: his literary engagement is an incessant attempt “to renew political and literary sign systems as a means of resisting the limitations imposed by the state, the media, and literary criticism” (Yamada 2011). Takahashi constantly shows his intolerance to the coercion of imposed discourse, be it by social convention or literary interpretation; his works are highly metafictional and very often openly parodic, as in the case of “Koi suru genpatsu”. As remarked by Hutcheon, postmodernist parody is both “deconstructively critical and constructively creative, paradoxically making us aware of both the limits and the powers of representation” (1989). In this presentation, I will show how Takahashi exploits parody to show the critical function of self-reflexive literature, rising a political incorrect voice against the supremacy of the “not said” in the Japanese society.