East Asian Studies - "Work-In-Progress" talks.
- “Weeping for ‘the Person Outside’”: Lamenting Their Husbands’ Death
Lingheng He, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University
For married women in historical China, losing their husbands referred to losing their primary identities of wives in the Confucian patriarchal society, concomitant with a series of problems including emotional breakdowns, moral dilemmas, and disorders in domestic lives. By focusing on Ming-Qing women’s poetry mourning their husbands, this study investigates women’s literary representation of grief and conjugal relationships at the loss of their husbands and discusses how, through these representations, women expressed their emotional struggles regarding marital lives and discovered selfhoods in tension with the Confucian gender norms.
- State Critique and Lyric Horror in The Deserted City by Obayashi Nobuhiko
Marianne Tarcov, Assistant Professor, Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University
In 1911, the Japanese poet Kitahara Hakushū (1885-1942) published the collection Memories about his childhood in the small town of Yanagawa, a town he calls "the deserted city." Kitahara critiques the Japanese state's efforts to bring Western-style modernity to his hometown, commenting on everything from the Meiji state's imposition of modern clock time, to public health, to increasing censorship and surveillance. In 1984, horror director Obayashi Nobuhiko (1938-2020), famous for his 1977 masterpiece House, revisited Memories in his film The Deserted City. The town of Yanagawa, crisscrossed with a decaying, polluted canal system dating to the Tokugawa Period, becomes a reminder of a recent yet premodern past, reminiscent of Freud's notion of the uncanny as the return of the repressed, a hallmark of the horror genre.
Why would a horror filmmaker known for his wild, over-the-top style revisit a decades-old poetry collection characterized by subtlety and restraint? I suggest that it is Kitahara Hakushū's critique of the Japanese state's coercive imposition of modernity that draws Obayashi to his work. Obayashi provides a transtemporal critique of capitalistic modernity and its obsession with productivity and speed during the 1980s, Japan's period of high economic growth.