a season in purgatory (6)

Sexual helplessness bears monsters of perversion. Symposia of Amazons, and other horrible themes. A threefold cycle: Carmen-Gretchen-Isolde. A Nana cycle, Théâtre des Femmes. Disgust: a lady, the upper part of her body lying on a table, spills a vessel filled with disgusting things.

--Paul Klee, Diaries.

Another perplexing contradiction in Kyoka's depictions of women (or of 'Woman', as he never really describes real women, but an archetypal, ghostly femininity): on the one hand, he has been regarded as a fierce critic of the then new ethics of Meiji society that pursued worldly success at all costs, to which he opposed, in the gothic tradition of Poe, love as a substitute for social and economic power. Yet, on the other hand, his fascination with women as the embodiment of evil was also unwittingly attuned to that very same emerging ethos within which the evolving male was expected to combine an attitude of socioeconomic belligerence and distrust of others with an ideal of personal sacrifice or abstinence in the service of worldly success.

Such dynamics were already at full throttle in the West, as Bram Dijkstra illustrates in his wonderfully provocative study Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture:

The symphonic incantations of ever newly curving female bodies were like the choral movements of a satanic invitation to worldly abandon. Women offered melodies of cradled melancholy to the laboring brain of sainted masculinity. Steely-browed and lean-loined Ulysses sailed past these aching calls, seeking financial self-sufficiency among the shoals of vice. The late nineteenth-century middle-class male already knew that Superman's ego was powered by gold. He feared that the Kryptonite of beauty could only weaken the essence of a transcendent power he knew to embed in his seed. Even the thought of a strong woman with a will, a mind, and wishes of her own was enough to weaken the musculature of a selfhood nourished by the bitter herb of monetary gain. The ardor of man's will to power seemed to shrivel into insignificance before the tumescent homage of his body to the wonder of a woman radiant with life and unmoved by the commands of cash. (p. 235)

(The recently) modern Japan, of course, had its own blend of native and imported traditions—Shintoism, Buddhism, Confucianism—which, combined with the newly imported Western logic of capitalism, did even more ruthlessly contribute to put women in their proper place. (And thus the 'natural order of things' has been, to this very day.)

Hence the wanderers and the 'holy men' who traverse the anxiety-ridden sexual territory of Kyoka's stories are not, ironically, that different from the men of the business world he so intensely despised for their lack of refinement and taste. What all these male 'ascetic' figures have in common is their search for some form of transcendence and their ultimate determination to keep Woman within her role as the soft, passive human clay that can be molded according to male fantasies and perceptions concerning the structures of ideal beauty and behaviour.

The idyll is shattered, lo and behold, when she slithers out of the frame of domestic bliss and motherly self-negation to reveal, in Dijkstra's words, 'the animal beneath the veneer of civilization with which the poetic spirit of man had covered her'—'a swamp, a palpitating expanse of instinctive physical greed whose primary natural function [is] to try to catch, engulf and, if possible, absorb the male and make him subservient to her simplistic physical needs' (p. 237).

And in Kyoka, as usual, the escape from such predicament is self-denial and/in death.

*       *       *

My base desires had brought me to this, to this point of indecision. As long as I could see her face and hear her voice, what did it matter if she and her idiot husband shared a bed? At least it would be better than enduring endless austerities and living out my days as a monk.

I made up my mind to go back to her, but just as I stepped back from the rock , someone tapped me on the shoulder. "Hey, Monk."

I had been caught at my weakest moment. Feeling small and ashamed, I looked up, expecting to see a messenger from Hell. What I saw instead was the old man I had met at the woman's cottage. . . .

"What are you doing here?" he asked me. "You should be used to this kind of heat, or did you stop for something else? You're only twelve miles from where you were last night. If you'd been walking hard, you'd be in the village giving thanks to Jizo by now.

"Or maybe you've been thinking about that woman. Your earthly passions are stirred, aren't they? Don't try to hide it. I may be a bleary-eyed old man, but I can still tell black from white. Anyone normal wouldn't still be human after a bath with her. Take your pick. Cow? Horse? Monkey? Toad? Bat? You're lucky you're not going to be flying or hopping around for the rest of your life. When you came up from the river and hadn't been turned into some other animal, I couldn't believe my eyes. Lucky you! I guess your faith saved you. . . .

"So now that you know her story, you probably feel sorry for her. You want to gather firewood and haul water for the woman, don't you? I'm afraid your lustful nature has been awakened, Brother. Of course, you don't call it lust. You'd rather call it mercy or sympathy. I know you're thinking of hurrying back to the mountains. But you'd better think twice. Since becoming the idiot's wife, she's forgotten how the world behaves and does only as she pleases. She takes any man she wants. And when she tires of him, she turns him into an animal, just like that. No one escapes. 

"And the river that carved out of these mountains? Since the flood, it's become a strange and mysterious stream that both seduces men and restores her beauty. Even a witch pays a price for casting spells. Her hair gets tangled. Her skin becomes pale. She turns haggard and thin. But then she bathes in the river and is restored to the way she was. That's how her youthful beauty gets replenished. She says 'Come,' and the fish swim to her. She looks at a tree, and its fruit falls into her palm. If she holds her sleeves up, it starts to rain. If she raises her eyebrows, the wind blows.

"She was born with a lustful nature, and she likes young men best of all. I wouldn't be surprised if she said something sweet to you. But even if her words were insincere, as soon as she gets tired of you, a tail will sprout, your ears will wiggle, your legs will grow longer, and suddenly you'll be changed into something else.

"I wish you could see what the witch is going to look like after she's had her fill of this fish—sitting there with her legs crossed, drinking wine.

"So curb your wayward thoughts, Good Monk, and get away as quickly as you can. You've been lucky enough as it is. She must have felt something special for you, otherwise you wouldn't be here. You've been through a miracle and you're still young, so get on with your duties like you really mean it." The old man slapped me on the back again. Dangling the carp from his hand, he started up the mountain road.

I watched him grow smaller in the distance until he disappeared behind the mass of a large mountain. From the top of that mountain, a cloud rapidly blossomed into the drought-cleared sky. Over the quiet rush of the waterfall, I could hear the rolling echoes of clapping thunder.

Standing there like a cast-off shell, I returned to my senses. Filled with gratitude for the old man, I took up my walking staff, adjusted my sedge hat, and ran down the trail. By the time I reached the village, it was already raining on the mountain. It was an impressive storm. Thanks to the rain, the carp the old man was carrying probably reached the woman's cottage alive.

This, then, was the monk's story. He didn't bother to add a moral to the tale. We went our separate ways the next morning, and I was filled with sadness as I watched him begin his ascent into the snow-covered mountains. The snow was falling lightly. As he gradually made his way up the mountain road, the holy man of Mount Koya seemed to be riding on the clouds.

--Izumi Kyoka, ‘The Holy Man of Mount Koya’ (1900), from Japanese Gothic Tales, trans. Charles Shiro Inouye (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), pp. 65-72.

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