A person is free only when they can 'read the same book differently'
I had a conversation with Chizuko Ueno in the July issue of Bungakukai currently on sale. The title is, quite simply, "Jun Eto, Norihiro Kato, and Feminism". Two excerpts for PR are also available online (I will provide the other link later).
As I have written before, although I received a book band for my book "Jun Eto and Norihiro Kato", this conversation was our first time meeting in person (I have heard Ueno-san speak at large venues before, though). Reading the finished text, I felt a sudden sense of nostalgia.
The idea of a "first meeting being a conversation" is a sensibility from an era where print media was the main medium.
Now that video streaming has become established, if you are co-starring with someone for the first time, it would likely be "via video rather than text." Since COVID, more casual events have been held via Zoom. Often, people have already interacted on social media and become friendly before meeting.
Live streaming starts with a "Hey there" greeting, and because it is a medium that is enjoyed including that sense of friendliness, the comfort (as if the viewers were also present at a drinking party) is its appeal. Conversely, that means the "formal" feeling is kept to a minimum, and it is easier to proceed with the conversation based on what you share with each other.
I published a collection of conversations in 2013, and I think that was right at the turning point from "print to video." It had been a long time since I had experienced that feeling of sitting up straight and asking for a match, in a state where you still don't know if you will get along with the other person.
The merit of this style, which is not popular these days, is that thanks to that formality, you can ask about completely different backgrounds and engage in a dialogue while reconciling them. For example, it goes like this.
Ueno Even when you say "legitimate successor," it doesn't go from Eto-san to Kato-san, but rather someone like you appears who traces back to Eto-san through Kato-san.
Yonaha It's because of the generation, isn't it? What you often say in your recollections, Ueno-san, is that you spent your youth in the 60s indulging in Hideo Kobayashi and Takaaki Yoshimoto, but there were almost no women like that at the time...
Ueno I have a sad past of being obsessed with Kobayashi. I thought of myself as an unhappy woman (laughs).
Yonaha I am a man whose youth was in the 90s, but I felt that Kobayashi and Yoshimoto were ancient thinkers who wrote arrogant texts, and the content of their "greatness" was completely unclear. (Omitted) I think it is a weakness of my book that I cannot fully read the key person who connects Eto and Kato. I would like to ask you, Ueno-san, who often speak of the "shock of Yoshimoto" as the
impetus for turning toward women's studies.
Next, Ueno-san talks about how Takaaki Yoshimoto's "Theory of Communal Illusion" (1968) influenced her feminism, but for me, who referred to the conversation between Kojin Karatani and Norihiro Kato (1985) in my book, the discrepancy in the treatment of Yoshimoto was interesting. Karatani-san speaks as follows to Kato, whom he still considered a "promising young person" at the time.
Karatani Even with Yoshimoto-san or Eto-san, things written in the 50s can still be read as fresh today. However, the ones after 1960 have become insular, and an independent, self-reliant discursive space has been created, and everything has come to be given meaning within that. (Omitted) I feel like such a thing
doesn't exist anywhere. ...This is because there is a world that the "whole" can encompass. The "America" that Eto-san speaks of also emerges from the perspective of encompassing the "whole." It wasn't like that in the 50s.
"Kyodo Genso Ron" (Theory of Communal Illusion) is the number one book that people give up on after being drawn in by the title. Yoshimoto deduces what a "nation" is from the Japanese myths in the Kojiki, but the reader (or rather, me) cannot share the too-mysterious premise that the origins of the community are "all written" in the Kojiki.
Similarly, Jun Eto also assumed that America was a "mighty father that defines everything for postwar Japanese people," and began to position various novels under that Eto world. That is likely Mr. Karatani's criticism.
In contrast, what Ms. Ueno read from Yoshimoto's books was completely different. Of course, there is a generational difference (Karatani was born in 1941, while Ueno and Kato were born in 1948), but the difference in gender is surely significant as well. I hope you will check out the magazine to see those various aspects.
After a classical dialogue for the first time in a while, what I reaffirmed is the following.
Even if you read the same text at the same time, what you take away from it differs from person to person. That difference reveals "who the reader is and what kind of life they have led." Therefore, unless you totalitarianly standardize everyone's mode of living, differences in interpretation and the conflicts they create will not disappear.
However, if we call the person who reads differently an "other," we can enjoy a dialogue while confirming where we diverged. Above all, there are quite a few others within oneself, and finding a self that has diverged from the past—thinking, "Wait! Can it be read this way?"—is the real thrill of reading.
Yonaha Eto's writing titles are things like "So-and-so and I," and even "Maturity and Loss" just laments the lost past of his own country, so I would say he is actually a thinker of the "self". That impression changed after I suffered from mental illness and quit history. As a scholar of Japanese history, if you calculate backward from "Jun Eto as introduced by Norihiro Kato," Mr. Eto looks like a nationalist painting a "self-portrait" of Japan. But in fact, for Eto,
postwar Japan is not a self to begin with. Rather, it is an incomprehensible time-space, an other. ...To grasp that feeling, I had to be ill myself and alienated from society once.
Lately, when you say that, it tends to become a conversation about how there are others with whom dialogue is impossible, who clearly pick fights with unreasonable interpretations. I am often harassed by such people, so I understand the concern.
Of course, it doesn't mean that anything goes as long as it's different. How do you convey your own unique way of reading to the other party without falling into "the squealing of pigs" (see the link below for the meaning)? That is where the degree of maturity through reading is tested.
Specifically, what kind of attitude is necessary? I believe we clearly demonstrated that in the dialogue as well.
I want those who are tired of SNS child scholars who use "reading" or "feminism" to insult others and assert dominance to read this dialogue with Ms. Ueno, a pioneer of Japanese feminist criticism. You should be able to understand that true, mature diversity begins with the diversity of ways of reading.
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