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Tsushima Yūko and the Ethics of Cohabitation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
Borrowing from Judith Butler's notion of the ethics of plural and heterogeneous cohabitation, this essay reads two of Tsushima Yūko's novels in light of how they negotiate proximity and distance in forging ethical connections that constitutes such cohabitation; the first is her autobiographical work of mourning, On Grieving (2017). The second is the historical time-travel novel, Laughing Wolf (2000), crowded with humans and animals both spectral and real. The essay argues that reading these two modes of writing together can enhance the felt connection between the personal and the historical by turning thin relations into thick ones through the act of remembering.
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Notes
1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented as part of the panel, “The Rebirth of the Author,” chaired by J. Keith Vincent at the European Association for Japanese Studies in Lisbon, and at the Art and Politics of East Asia Workshop, University of Chicago in 2017. I am grateful for critical feedback received on these occasions. I would also like to thank the editors, Michael Bourdaghs and Anne McKnight, for their insightful comments.
2 “Precarious Life, Vulnerability and the Ethics of Cohabitation,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 26, 2012. Butler's efforts to reimagine ethics based on difference and vulnerability have attracted the attention of political scientists as well. See Judith Butler's Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters (London: Routledge 2008), eds. Terrell Carver and Samuel Chambers.
3 Butler, “Precarious Life,” 137–8.
4 She ascribes “precariousness” to all because “life requires various social and economic conditions to be met in order to be sustained as a life.” Lecture at Nobel museum in Stockholm, 2011, “Precarious Life: The Obligations of Proximity.” (accessed February 10, 2018).
5 Butler, “Precarious Life,” 141.
6 Butler, “Precarious Life,” 143.
7 Butler, “Precarious Life,” 144.
8 Well-known examples include Child of Fortune (Chōji, 1978), Woman Running in the Mountains (Yama o hashiru onna, 1980), Driven by the Light of the Night (Yoru no hikari ni owarete, 1987) and In the Afternoon (Mahiru e, 1988).
9 Well-known examples include Nara Report (Nara repōto, 2005), Amarini yabanna (2004), Ōgon no yume no uta (2010), Ashibune tonda (2011), Yamaneko dōmu (2013), Jakka dofuni (2016), Hangenki o iwatte (2016), and Kari no jidai (2016). The range of localities in these novels encompasses Hokkaido and Okinawa in Japan, occupied Taiwan and Manchuria, Macao and Australia, and covers a timespan from the eighth century to the postwar era. For a succinct summary of Butler's critique of communitarianism, see “Vulnerability, vengeance, and community” by Robert E. Watkins in Judith Butler's Precarious Politics (2008).
10 Laughing Wolf, translated by Dennis Washburn (Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2011) and Kanashimi ni tsuite (On Grieving), Jinbun shoin, 2017
11 See here (accessed January 6, 2018).
12 Judith Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics” In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2006, 22–23.
13 See Butler, “Violence”: “The body is not quite ever only our own. Constituted as a social phenomenon in the public sphere, my body is and is not mine,” 26.
14 “Kanashimi ni tsuite” in On Grieving, 215 (my translation).
15 “Jakka Dofuni: natsu no ie” in On Grieving, 104 (my translation).
16 “Mahiru e” in On Grieving.
17 See Andō Hiroshi, “Mahiru e: hikari no shisō,” in Kawamura Minato, ed. Gendai josei sakka dokuhon vol. 3 Tsuhima Yūko (Kanae shobō, 2005): 100–103.
18 Laughing Wolf, 113.
19 Laughing Wolf, 115.
20 Given the enormous popularity of animated and/or retold versions of The Jungle Book in Japan, I believe the appeal that Tsushima takes advantage of comes mostly from recent productions rather than the original 1894 English version by Kipling with its jarring Orientalist elements.
21 Laughing Wolf, 155.
22 Laughing Wolf, 171. Messua, Mowgli's human mother, too, later adopts and cherishes him as his own son. In Nobody's Boy, Remi's adoptive mother brings him up like her own son (in spite of the father's objection).
23 Laughing Wolf, 231 and 233.
24 Shishōsetsu handobukku, ed. Shishōsetsu kenkyūkai (Bensei shuppan, 2014), 201; 203–204.
25 Finding the seed for the same mechanism of discrimination that the Nazis exercised in her own Japanese relatives' and neighbors' gaze toward her handicapped brother and elsewhere, she tries to grapple with it in her last, posthumously published novel, Kari no jidai (2016).
26 Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2017), 3.
27 Attridge, The Singularity, 31.
28 Attridge, The Singularity, 108.
29 Attridge, The Singularity, 43.
30 Natsume Sōseki, Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings, edited by Michael K. Bourdaghs, Atsuko Ueda and Joseph A. Murphy (Columbia University Press, 2009).
31 For a discussion of differences in our critical approaches deriving most of all from our dispositions, see Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (University of Chicago Press, 2015).