Dominant ideologies privilege particular ways of being, prescribing how to achieve them without consideration of subjective diversity. This privileging propagates conflicting conventions: for example, the insistence that a woman’s greatest happiness lies in the productive use of her body persists alongside warnings against being too emotional and concerned with her own happiness, and even the notion that she is intrinsically irrational or psychologically unstable.

In this panel we investigate various ways in which popular contemporary Japanese narratives resist such views encouraged by dominant ideology. We examine how emotions and states of being such as happiness and misery are typically attached to genders and sexualities, arguing that heteronormativity reduces complex discourses to simplistic binaries, where masculine rationality is pitted against feminine emotionality, while those that do not fit neatly into either category fall by the wayside.

In the stories of Kirino Natsuo’s OUT, Urobuchi Gen’s Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and Midorikawa Yuki’s Natsume Yuujinchou, the value of strengthening homosocial bonds and recasting the way emotionality and rationality is understood present themselves as ways of resisting reductive or normative logic, at times even turning it on its head when it attempts to bar possible alternatives. Through analyses of these texts, we highlight the capacity of popular narratives to restore specificity to problems of ontology, restoring agency to the most marginalized of characters and, perhaps by extension, to the identities they were constructed to represent.

Dismembering Japanese Male-dominated Society: KIRINO Natsuo’s OUT

Sachi Komai (University of Tsukuba)

This presentation aims to explore the relationship between a dismembered body and the destruction of Japanese male-dominated society in KIRINO Natsuo’s novel OUT.

In 1994, twenty-four pieces of a human body were found in Inokashira Park, Tokyo. This shocking incident hit the headlines but remains unsolved. Kirino, one of the most famous mystery novelists in Japan, based OUT on this murder. In this novel, Yayoi, a housewife working in a factory, spasmodically kills her husband. Her co-workers, also housewives, dismember the body to cover up the murder.

Several studies have been made on this novel in terms of women’s social mobility, as the characters work part-time, which reflects 55% of working Japanese women. OUT has been read as the model of the Japanese male-dominated system since it expresses feelings of insecurity in women who are forced into menial employment because of expectations on them to raise children, care for the elderly, or act as homemakers.

However, few studies have focused on the act of dismemberment. Contrary to the portrayal of the Inokashira incident in the media as an act of mental instability, the wives in OUT dispose of the body rationally, utilizing their homemaking skills through knife cuts and cleaning up the evidence. Why did Kirino reverse the media’s interpretation of the event? I would like to read the disposal of the body as the destruction of Japanese male-dominated society.

This presentation discusses the representation of the dismemberment in OUT to provide an analysis of women’s retaliation against Japanese society.

Emotional Currency: Magical Girls and the Utility of Emotion

Maria Ana Micaela Chua Manansala (University of Tsukuba/University of the Philippines)

Emotional reasoning involves the evaluation of reality relative to one’s own feelings. It is a type of cognitive distortion and an oxymoron. This study investigates a similar kind of “illogic” at work in retellings of the Faust Myth, where the traditional opposition between rationality and emotion is interrupted. Primary focus is given to the Japanese animated series Puella Magi Madoka Magica, grounding it in comparisons with the works of Goethe and Bulgakov in order to investigate relations between power, human emotion, and utilitarian logic.

Of particular interest to this study are (1) narratological devices that function as “cognitive distortions” directed at the viewer, often through the focalization of the lead female character; (2) diegetic discourse regarding the use of emotion, as when characters attempt to determine the usefulness/uselessness of having emotions; and (3) how these elements interact with established tropes of the myth, particularly the objectification and commodification of the soul, as is symptomatic of the Mephistophelian worldview.

In Puella Magi, emotion is reduced to currency for exchange and, in a move typical of Faustian tales, that currency is turned, through one “heartfelt” speech act, into the key to salvation. Following David Hawkes’ work on the Faust Myth, this study revisits the “uses” of emotion that enable both interpellation and resistance to systems that seek to reduce female subjective autonomy and, finally, lays bare the irony of relaying a Faustian cautionary tale through a franchise that encourages the consumption of character-based merchandise.

Tracing New Paths for Queer Happiness: Asexual Overtones in Natsume Yuujinchou

Emily Butner (Stanford University)

In popular discourse, the concept of “happiness” bears a fraught relationship to normative convention. In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed explains “how happiness is imagined as being what follows a certain kind of being.” Heteronormative logic privileges the idea that certain choices are paths to happiness, encouraging women in particular to find happiness in “a good man” (91) or in having children. Such discourse marginalizes the desires of those who do not desire (heterosexual) sex, projecting unhappiness with such force onto queer bodies as to ultimately reproduce it.

How might we imagine different paths for queer happiness, and what would it take to realize them? In this essay, I examine what that “happiness” might look like for asexual people, using Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology to engage in an asexual analysis of popular animated media. I explore the concept of male homosociality in the animated television series Natsume Yuujinchou, or “Natsume’s Book of Friends,” and argue that Natsume Yuujinchou’s representation of its main character’s platonic intimacies with friends attaches a positive affect to asexuality, questioning the heteronormative logic of queer unhappiness and tracing a fresh path for an asexual life. While resisting the argument that these case studies speak to the experiences of all asexual people, or that Japanese media can neatly map on to contemporary English language queer discourse, I hope to use transnational media representations to challenge the heteronormative logic that consigns queer people to misery, and to uncover alternative queer modes of being.