The Rhetoric of Photography in Modern Japanese Literature

The Rhetoric of Photography in Modern Japanese Literature
Brill’s Japanese
Studies Library
Edited by
Joshua Mostow (Managing Editor)

Caroline Rose
Kate Wildman Nakai
Volume 54
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bjsl

The Rhetoric of Photography in
Modern Japanese Literature
Materiality in the Visual Register as Narrated by
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Abe Kōbō, Horie Toshiyuki and
Kanai Mieko
By
Atsuko Sakaki
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Hervé Guibert, Rue de Vaugirard (1980). Copyright Hervé Guibert. Courtesy of Christine
Guibert.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sakaki, Atsuko, 1963–

Title: The rhetoric of photography in modern Japanese literature : materiality in the visual
register as narrated by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Abe Kōbō, Horie Toshiyuki and Kanai Mieko /
by Atsuko Sakaki.
Description: Boston : Brill, 2015. | Series: Brill’s Japanese studies library ; volume 54 |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015034470| ISBN 9789004306196 (hardback : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9789004306998 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Japanese literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Photography
in literature.
Classification: LCC PL726.65 .S3182 2015 | DDC 895.63/509—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015034470
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Contents
Acknowledgments VII
List of Illustrations XII
List of Abbreviations XIV
Introduction 1
Photography’s Position in the History of Visual Art 4
Against Interpretation 7
Against the Transparency of the Observer 9
The Making of the Book 11
1 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or Photography as Disturbance to Middle-Brow

Life 18
Photography vis-à-vis Cinema 20
Limits of Photographic Authenticity: “Shunkin shō” 22
Images That Blur Memory: “Yume no ukihashi” 25
Identity Lost: “Tomoda to Matsunaga no hanashi” 28
The Voyeur’s Body, the Viewer’s Hand: Chijin no ai 29
Constructing Memory by Photography: “Yoshinokuzu” 34
Peace Disturbed: Sasameyuki 43
Accomplices in the Staging of Fetishism: Kagi 52
Conclusion 56
2 Anonymously Yours: Abe Kōbō’s Engagement with Photography 57

Abe and Photography 63
The Author as Actor 66
Image–Text Conspiracy and Coercion 71
The Image–Text Conundrum 75
Reconfiguring Temporality 79
Snapshot versus Art Photography 83
Photographic Coercion 90
Seer Seen 91
Framing as Releasing 93
Photographic Prints as Things 95
Conclusion 101
vi contents
3 Photography as an Intermediary Art in Horie Toshiyuki 102

Someone to Watch over Me—and Touch Me 104
Camera and Typewriter 108
Photography as a Ladder between Nature and Culture 121
Photography as a Medium in Transition 124
The Desire to See Unclearly 125
Betrayals of Photography 131
Between Color and Black and White 133
Photographs of Paintings, Paintings from Photographs 138
The Photographer’s Body and Its Environs 141
Conclusion 147
4 Photography by Hands in Kanai Mieko’s Narratives 148

The Face in the Shadow of the Camera 149
Why Photography? Between Painting and Cinema 151
The Photographer without Voice 154
Photography as Corporeal Art 158
The Photographer in Relation to the Photographed 161
The Cities of Déjà-Vu or the (In)commensurable Text/Image 165
Translating Rhetorics of Image and Text 170
‘Having-seen-ness’: Anonymity and Banality 180
Photography as Corporeal Reproduction: Kanai Mieko’s Tama-ya 188
The Reader/Viewer’s Body in Relation to the Book 207
Photography and Fabric 214
The Incongruity of Memory and Document: Karui memai 218
Photographic Publicity and Privacy: Uwasa no musume 231
Conclusion 241
Facing Fallacies 244
Bibliography 249
Index of Names 269
Index of Subjects 273
Acknowledgments
This project emerged out of my previous one, on the city, the body and the
text, which was a radical departure for me from narrative studies. I wanted to
place myself outside the comfort and privilege of being a reader at a distance
from the (tame) text, and into the precarious position of a body surrounded by
the (wild) unknown and struggling to make sense of it. As I read through theo-
retical texts relevant to the subject, it became evident that among the visual
registers I was drawn above all to photography, and its hold on me proved irre-
vocable. I felt compelled to embrace the intimacy I had developed with the
medium. With a conference presentation on photography in 2004—a nascent
form of a section of this book’s fourth chapter—I launched a new inquiry, and
here is its first true milestone.
Unlike any of my previous works, this project has had the advantage of an
extensive network of moral and practical support through its preparation,
advancement and completion. It is a great pleasure to recall each and every
one of my able and committed research assistants, in their distinct and highly
specialized capacities, in more or less chronological order since 2005: Baryon
Tensor Posadas, Sara Osenton, Wang Jing, Darcy Gauthier, Michelle Smith,
Banu Kaygusuz Tezel, Joelle Tapas, Katie Fry, Laury Leite and Adleen Crapo.
Thank you all. If any of you ever wondered how your answers to my peculiar
requests for information or assistance might contribute to the whole picture,
now you can find out between the pages of this book.
I have benefited from the extensive resources and exceptional services of
the staff at the University of Toronto Libraries, especially at the Cheng Yu Tung
East Asian Library, the Interlibrary Loan/Resource Sharing Department and the
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. So many librarians have lent me a helping
hand and personal council, among whom I must mention here Fabiano Takao
Rocha, Lynne Kutsukake, Anne-Marie Crotty and Jane Lynch. The National
Diet Library in Tokyo, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography Library
and the Museum of Modern Art Library (Tokyo) are among the other distin-
guished institutions from which I was able to collect essential materials.
Many of the interim results of my research have been shared with and devel-
oped in conversation with students in courses I have taught at the University
of Toronto: EAS 467, The Photographic Narrative of Modern Japan; JLA 5082,
The Rhetoric of Photography; and VIC 410, Seminar in Comparative Literature.
The diversity of these students’ affiliations, ranging from East Asian Studies to
Comparative Literature to English to Art to Visual Studies to Cinema Studies,
viii acknowledgments
enabled me to address my thoughts in a way that has helped make this book
relevant to various interdisciplinary studies of image and text.
At the Department of East Asian Studies, I was fortunate to have Andre
Schmid, Vincent Shen and Tom Keirstead as extremely supportive and encour-
aging chairs, coming to rescue me from predicaments, large and small, and
showing faith in my ability to overcome adversities. The department’s admin-
istrative staff members, Celia Sevilla, Norma Escobar, Paul Chin and Natasha
VanderBerg, have always been kind and helpful to me, ensuring that my
life there is as easy as possible. I thank my current and former colleagues in
East Asian Studies, including Jōtarō Arimori, Linda Feng, Yuki Johnson, Ken
Kawashima, Ikuko Komuro-Lee, Johanna Liu, Meng Yue, Janet Poole, Graham
Sanders, Jesook Song, Curie Virag and Yiching Wu for their help, support,
understanding and encouragement.
On the side of the Centre for Comparative Literature, I thank the Directors:
Roland Le Huenen, for inviting me to teach in the Centre and guiding me
through the preparation of the aforementioned course in Comparative
Literature; Neil Ten Kortenaar, for offering moral and practical support when-
ever needed and most willingly; and Eva-Lynn Jagoe, for her enthusiasm for
facilitating my teaching experience there. Graduate Coordinators Barbara
Havercroft and Jill Ross were very helpful in establishing the course on the sub-
ject for the Centre. I am genuinely grateful to the administrators at the Centre
Bao Nguyen and Aphrodite Gardner for their thoughtful and cordial assistance
with all my needs. I appreciate the pleasant and productive conversations with
Veronika Ambros, Linda Hutcheon, Julie LeBlanc, Victor Li and John Ricco
on our shared research interests. Ann Komaromi and Rebecca Comay of the
Literary and Critical Thought Program at Victoria College invited me to work
with their students on the subject, and the staff members there, in particular
Maureen Peng and Pavi Chandrasegaram, oversaw this arrangement helpfully.
I had a chance to spend a year as a Faculty Research Fellow at the Jackman
Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto in the academic year of
2010–11, addressing that year’s theme of image and spectacle. The experi-
ence provided me with a significant mental leap from an area specialist to
an interdisciplinary and translingual scholar. I thank directors Bob Gibbs and
Mark Cheetham for their support and encouragement, and Kim Yates, Cheryl
Pasternak and Monica Toffoli for their administrative help and friendship,
which have been nothing short of remarkable and unforgettable. I rejoiced in
and was inspired by conversations with members of the Institute community,
including Mohan Matthen, Charlie Keil, Jon Bath, David Francis Taylor, Bradley
Rogers, Sarah O’Brien, Eddie Bacal, Julia Bolotina, Polina Dessiatnitchenko and
Andrew Campana.
Acknowledgments ix
My affiliation with the Institute continued as I was invited to join one of

the JHI working groups, Documentary Realities, organized by Jordan Bear
and T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko. Participating in that group reassured me that
my work is relevant to visual and performing art scholars, with whom I have
begun a productive communication of ideas. From the side of literary studies,
it was beneficial to join the conference “New Narratives,” conceived and led
by Andrew Lesk, as the occasion enabled me to participate in an intellectual
exchange in a larger, translingual context.
Many conferences have offered me invaluable opportunities to present
works in progress and exchange notes with peers. I appreciate the support
from the following organizations (again roughly in chronological order):
the Association for Japanese Literary Studies (hosted by the University of
California, Los Angeles, the University of British Columbia and Yale University),
the European Association of Japanese Studies (hosted by the University of
Vienna), the University of Toronto, the Association for Asian Studies (in San
Francisco and Honolulu), the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations
Orientales in Paris, the American Comparative Literature Association (in Long
Beach and New Orleans) and the Association for Asian Studies Japan (hosted
by Rikkyō University).
I am grateful to the following publication venues that granted me oppor-
tunities to disseminate my preliminary work prior to the publication of this
book. An earlier version of Chapter 1 appeared as “Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or
Photography as Violence” in Japan Forum 22, no. 3–4 (2010): 381–404. A sec-
tion of Chapter 4 was published in its earlier form as “The Face in the Shadow
of the Camera: Corporeality of the Photographer in Kanai Mieko’s Narratives”
in Mechademia 7 (Fall 2012): 57–76. Portions of two articles in Periodicals of
the Association for Japanese Literary Studies (PAJLS) were revised and inte-
grated into Chapter 4: “Breezes through Rooms with Light: Kanai Mieko by
Roland Barthes by Kanai Mieko,” in Sharalyn Orbaugh and Joshua Mostow,
eds., Parody, PAJLS 10 (Summer 2009): 204–19; and “Materializing Narratology:
Kanai Mieko’s Corporeal Narrative,” in Michael F. Marra, ed., Hermeneutical
Strategies: Methods of Interpretation in the Study of Japanese Literature,
PAJLS 5 (Summer 2004): 212–26. Another section of Chapter 4 was first pub-
lished as “Photography as Corporeal Reproduction: Swapping Pregnancy for
Photography in Kanai Mieko’s Tama-ya” in the special issue on translation and
transmediation of Poetica: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Linguistic-Literary
Studies 78 (December 2012): 49–68. I have learned a great deal from my conver-
sations with the academic and managing editors at these journals.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude for the encouragement, advice
and support I have received from a number of peers, including Jonathan Abel,
x acknowledgments
Giorgio Amitrano, Tomoko Aoyama, Reiko Abe Auestad, Anne Bayard-Sakai,

Shunji Chiba, Brett de Bary, Christopher Bolton, Toshiko Ellis, Anke Finger,
Gala Follaco, Sarah Frederick, Manabu Fujiwara, Aaron Gerow, Irena Hayter,
Howard Hibbett, Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit, Hosea Hirata, Charles Inouye,
Faye Yuan Kleeman, Mary Knighton, Yoshiko Kobayashi, Thomas LaMarre,
Akira Lippit, Seiji Lippit, Michael Lucken, Frenchie Lunning, Shiho Maeshima,
the late Michael Marra, Carol Mavor, Paul McCarthy, Noriko Mizuta, Chikako
Nagayama, Shigemi Nakagawa, Sharalyn Orbaugh, Nancy Pedri, Franz Prichard,
Catherine Ryu, Cecil Sakai, Eiji Sekine, Tomoko Shimizu, Doug Slaymaker,
Keiko Sotokubo, John Treat, Gennifer Weisenfeld and Ayelet Zohar.
I am indebted to many authors, artists and their representatives for permis-
sion to reuse their materials in this book: Dr. Abe Neri, Mr. Bernard Faucon,
Mrs. Christine Guibert, Mr. Horie Toshiyuki, Ms. Kanai Mieko, Ms. Kanai
Kumiko, Mr. Watanabe Kanendo and Mr. Yamada Kōichi. I am grateful to my
contacts at Sōgensha Inc., Publishers, Shinchosha Publishing Co., Ltd., Parco,
Éditions Gallimard, Morioka shoten, Heibonsha Ltd., Publishers, Kodansha
Ltd., Chikumashobo Ltd., Chuokoron-Shinsha, Inc., and Weides shuppan for
their permission to reprint from their publications.
I would like to acknowledge financial assistance I have received for research
that yielded this book: the Japan Foundation Conference Grant (2005), Standard
Research Grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada (2003–07 and 2008–12), SSHRC Institutional Grants, University of
Toronto Faculty Association Grants and the Faculty Research Fellowship at the
Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto (2010–11).
During the ten years from this book’s conception to its completion, I have
been challenged by multiple health issues, some of which threatened to derail
the project a number of times. I cannot thank enough the many health care
providers, including Dr. Shital Gandhi at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto,
Dr. Upen Kawale at Toronto Eye Care, Dr. Cheryl Jaigobin and Dr. Robert
Devenyi at Toronto Western Hospital, and Dr. Erik Yeo and Ms. Susan Jenkins at
Toronto General Hospital, for their treatment, diagnosis, prognosis and after-
care. Without them I could not have even begun to complete this book. I owe
a great deal to their teams, from caring, discreet and encouraging receptionists
to professional and pleasant technical staff members to capable and compas-
sionate nurses. It has certainly been a long journey from the day I found myself
in emergency care at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital.
It took me a long time to find a home for this book, a study that is interdis-
ciplinary and yet resolutely literary, based in theories of visual culture and the
procedure of traditional close reading. In August 2014 on the campus of the
University of Ljubliana, it was a stroke of good fortune to run into Dr. Joshua
Acknowledgments xi
Mostow, who, as a series editor of Brill’s Japanese Studies Library, encouraged

me to consider submitting a manuscript to the publisher. Ever since I took his
advice, it has been smooth sailing. Ms. Patricia Radder, acquisitions editor, has
been wonderfully responsive, encouraging, thoughtful and efficient in propel-
ling the review and production of this book. I thank Ms. Dinah Rapliza for her
professional help with the completion of this project on photography and nar-
rative as a photographic book itself. I am immensely grateful to the anonymous
reviewer of the manuscript, whose unconditional support of its contents and
invaluable suggestions for improving its conceptual framing have brought the
book to another level. The final stretch of preparation of the ultimate manu-
script was riveting, almost breathtaking, in self-fulfillment; I found an orches-
tra to enwrap and enhance my solo part.
I cannot find words to adequately thank Mr. Martin Townsend, my copy
editor, who has looked after the long process of writing, offering thoroughly
professional and wonderfully sensible editing in a most communicative,
timely, patient and congenial manner. It has been invaluable to be able to
count on him not only for polishing of the text but also for unflagging moral
support through ups and downs. With his help, I am confident that the book
has become the best it could possibly be.
Today the journey of this project does not feel as if it has come to an end.
Though the path up to here and now has been difficult and more prolonged
than first projected, there are still many loose threads that I had to set aside for
this book to take shape as a presentably discrete piece of fabric, threads that I
do not wish to sever ties with. I feel I will continue to pick up one after another
of them, mumbling about them if not commencing another long narrative.
List of Illustrations
1 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Jun’ichirō Rokubushū: Yoshinokuzu (Osaka: Sōgensha,

1937), 25. Photograph by Kitao Ryōnosuke 38
2 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Jun’ichirō Rokubushū: Yoshinokuzu (Osaka: Sōgensha,
3 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. Jun’ichirō Rokubushū: Yoshinokuzu (Osaka: Sōgensha,
7 The slipcase of Abe Kōbō, Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 28. Designed by Kondō
Kazuya 59
8 The back endpapers of Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 19. Photograph by Abe
Kōbō. Designed by Kondō Kazuya 61
9 Abe Kōbō, “Shōko shashin.” Geijutsu Shinchō 31, no. 8 (August 1980):
62–63. Photograph by Abe Kōbō 76
10 Bernard Faucon, Les Papiers qui volent (1980). Photograph by Bernard
Faucon 86
11 The dust jacket of Bernard Faucon, Tobu kami (Tokyo: Parco shuppan,
1986), with the note on the blurb by Abe Kōbō. Photograph by Bernard
Faucon. Designed by Kimura Yūji 87
12 Abe Kōbō, “Damashie.” Geijutsu Shinchō 31, no. 5 (May 1980): 60–61.
Photograph by Abe Kōbō 96
13 Abe Kōbō, “Damashie.” In AKZ 26: 442–43. Photograph by Abe Kōbō 97
14 Abe Kōbō, “Han fūkei.” Geijutsu Shinchō 31, no. 7 (July 1980): 70–71.
15 “Toki no nagare ga tomaru mise.” Geijutsu Shinchō 32, no. 10 (October
1981): 72–73. Photograph by Abe Kōbō 99
16 “Jiyū jikan.” Geijutsu Shinchō 31, no. 12 (December 1980): 46–47.
17 Hervé Guibert, Belours et Agneaudoux 105
18 The dust jacket of Horie Toshiyuki, Kuma no shikiishi (Tokyo: Kōdansha,
2001). Photograph by Hervé Guibert. Design by Horie Toshiyuki and
Isogami Hirohisa 105
List Of Illustrations xiii
19 The dust jacket of Horie Toshiyuki, Kuma no shikiishi (Tokyo: Kōdansha

bunko, 2004). Photograph by Hervé Guibert. Design by Horie Toshiyuki
and Isogami Hirohisa 106
20 Hervé Guibert, Rue de Vaugirard (1980) 112
21 Hervé Guibert, Villa Medici (1987–88) 112
22 Hervé Guibert, Sans titre (1982) 113
23 Horie Toshiyuki, Mono no hazumi (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 2005),
68–69. Photograph by Horie Toshiyuki 120
24 The dust jacket of Horie Toshiyuki, Kakareru te (Tokyo: Heibonsha
Raiburarī, 2009). Photograph by Horie Toshiyuki 134
25 Untitled photograph by Horie Toshiyuki, in Horie Toshiyuki shashinten
(Tokyo: Morioka Shoten, 2009). Photograph by Horie Toshiyuki. Design
by Hanae Yoshikiyo 135
26 Hervé Guibert, Sans titre (1987) 140
27 Hervé Guibert, Peintures (1983) 141
28 The frontispiece of Kanai Mieko and Watanabe Kanendo, Kishi no
machi (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1980). Photograph by Watanabe Kanendo.
Design by Sakurai Shōji 168
29 Kanai Mieko and Watanabe Kanendo, Kishi no machi (Tokyo:
Shinchōsha, 1980), 97. Photograph by Watanabe Kanendo.
Layout by Sakurai Shōji 178
Shinchōsha, 1980), 98–99. Photograph by Watanabe Kanendo.
Layout by Sakurai Shōji 179
Shinchōsha, 1980), 85. Photograph by Watanabe Kanendo. Layout by
Sakurai Shōji 185
Shinchōsha, 1980), 101. Photograph by Watanabe Kanendo. Layout by
Sakurai Shōji 186
33 The reverse side of the dust jacket of Yamada Kōichi, Godāru, waga
Anna Karīna jidai (Tokyo: Weides Shuppan, 2010). Photograph by
Yamada Kōichi 204
34 The dust jacket of Kanai Mieko, Tama-ya (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1987).
Photograph by Yamada Kōichi. Design by Kanai Kumiko 205
35 The frontispiece of Yamada Kōichi, Tomo yo eiga yo: Waga nūveru
vāgu shi (Tokyo: Heibonsha Raiburarī, 2002). Photograph by Yamada
Kōichi 206
36 The dust jacket of Kanai Mieko, Akarui heya no naka de (Tokyo:
Fukutake shoten, 1986). Photograph by Watanabe Kanendo. Design by
Kanai Kumiko 217
List of Abbreviations
AKZ Abe Kōbō. Abe Kōbō zenshū. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1997–2009.

TJZ Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō. Tanizaki Jun’ichirō zenshū. Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha,
1982.
Introduction
The objective of this book you have opened is to offer some insight into
how the modus operandi of modern and contemporary Japanese narratives
has been illuminated and inspired by the rhetoric of photography. I focus on
four Japanese novelists who grapple with photography as they endeavor in
their texts to register visual and other sensual experience of space-time in non-
positivistic ways. In the process of their pursuits, all four writers reveal the slip-
periness of the enterprise of encapsulating facts by way of photography. These
authors’ engagement with this visual medium has profound implications for
the normative mode of signification celebrated in and definitive of modern
epistemology. Their narrative explorations repeatedly exploit their personal
contact with photography—as connoisseurs, practitioners, collaborators or
critics—to articulate conceptual problems surrounding the production and
consumption of photographs. In examining these procedures through the nar-
rative lens, we shall find that photographs and photography are not only rel-
evant to these authors’ own narrative strategies but also crucial to the modern
formation of knowledge in general. As with vernacular language, upon close
examination the photographic image turns out to be not as transparent or
objective as commonly supposed.
This book negotiates with photography at a different angle from that of
distinguished art historians who have contributed to current scholarship
on photography and/in/of Japan. We have witnessed in recent years several
groundbreaking publications on the history of photography and of photo-
graphic books in Japan: Anne Tucker’s The History of Japanese Photography
(Yale University Press, 2003), Terry Bennett’s Photography in Japan 1853–1912
(Tuttle, 2006), Setting Sun: Writings by Japanese Photographers, edited by
Ivan Vartanian, Akihiro Hatanaka and Yutaka Kambayashi (Aperture, 2006),
Japanese Photobooks in the 1960s and 1970s, edited by Ivan Vartanian and Ryūichi
Kaneko (Aperture, 2009), Karen M. Fraser’s Photography and Japan (Reaktion
Books, 2011), Maki Fukuoka’s The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and
Representing the Real in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Stanford University Press,
2012) and Allegories of Time and Space: Japanese Identity in Photography and
Architecture (University of Hawai’i Press, 2015) by Jonathan M. Reynolds, to
name only a few milestones. This ongoing and increasingly rich study of pho-
tography in Japan is following in the footsteps of the widespread attention to
Japanese cinema in recent years, though undeniably still lagging behind. The
critical acclaim, curatorial currency and media exposure that Japanese pho-
tographers have garnered internationally more than warrant this recent surge
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/9789004306998_002

2 Introduction
of scholarly publications on Japanese photography and demand more work

to come. My aim here is not to supplement the body of knowledge relating to
Japanese photography or, indeed, to the history of photography overall.
Indeed, this book does not even relate a history of photography or Japanese
photography beyond reminders of historical contexts as applicable. The pri-
mary purpose of this book lies elsewhere than in the establishing of historical
or technological facts surrounding the medium of photography.
Thus, rather than striving to add facts to the standard narrative of how pho-
tography has evolved in Japan, this book aspires to critically investigate how
the photographic way of seeing and processing what one sees has inspired
and transformed the way prose narratives have been written, and what that
amounts to in terms of the registration of the human experience of time and
space. I seek to probe the potentials and prospects revealed and taken advan-
tage of by select authors who have engaged photography in their narratives in
a formative way, rather than as a means of bolstering memories or verifying
(supposedly inerrant) scientific facts. Indeed, by writing in the photographic
way, these four authors came to articulate the elusiveness of the two modes
of representation that have been privileged in modern Japan, not just photog-
raphy but prose narratives as well. What is more, they have successfully exe-
cuted the difficult task of simultaneously relinquishing the authority bestowed
upon the two registers as vehicles of representation and reinventing them as
potent ways to explore and convey an alternative knowledge that is based on
sensations rather than representation.
By “writing in the photographic way” I do not necessarily mean employing
the camera or any other tool associated with the reproduction of photographs;
rather, I wish to use the term “photographic” as Thomas LaMarre uses the term
“cinematic,” autonomously of cinema as “an object of knowledge,” to refer
instead to “a structuring of sensory experience.”1 As with the authors this book
looks at, my interest in photography lies in its rhetoric. My focus shall thus
be on the ways photography helps writers to elaborate on problematics of
space, temporality and agency—definitive elements of the narrative. LaMarre
writes of “Tanizaki’s desire to ‘do cinema’ ”2—Tanizaki Jun’ichirō happens to
be one of the four authors I will engage—and extending that idea, I might
say that I am interested in how these authors “do photography” in their writ-
ings that may or may not be directly or primarily about camera work.
1 Thomas LaMarre, Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō on Cinema and “Oriental”
Aesthetics (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2005), 9.
2 Ibid.
Introduction 3
There are many new books on how literary writers working in the European
languages “do photography,” joining the long and diverse history of the study
of image and text, or ekphrasis, which has long been an established field of
scholarly investigation. Following in the footsteps of Norman Bryson, Mieke
Bal and W.J.T. Mitchell, who, while distinct from one another in their meth-
odological and ideological stances, established the critical discourse of how
to engage image and text in relation to each other, a newer breed of works
in this vein has appeared. Limiting the list to those in which literature is the
constant focus and photography is the most important visual register, if not
the exclusive one, there are Photography and Literature by François Brunet
(Reaktion Books, 2009), Touching Photographs by Margaret Olin (University
of Chicago Press, 2012), Literatur und Fotografie: Analysen eines intermedialen
Verhältnisses by Anne-Kathrin Hillenbach (Transcript, 2012), Analog Fictions
for the Digital Age: Literary Realism and Photographic Discourses in Novels
after 2000 by Julia Breitbach (Camden House, 2012), Intermedial Storytelling:
Thematisation, Imitation and Incorporation of Photography in English and
American Fiction at the Turn of the 21st Century by Christine Schwanecke
(Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012), On Writing with Photography, edited by
Karen Beckman and Liliane Weissberg (University of Minnesota Press, 2013),
Shashin to bungaku: Nani ga imēji no kachi o kimeru noka, edited by Tsukamoto
Masanori (Photography and Literature: What Determines the Shape of the
Image? Heibonsha, 2013), Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850–1915 by
Owen Clayton (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015), Miniature Metropolis: Literature in
an Age of Photography and Film by Andreas Huyssen (Harvard University Press,
2015) and Enlightening Encounters: Photography in Italian Literature, edited by
Giorgia Alù and Nancy Pedri (University of Toronto Press, 2015). Other recent
books have explored the role of photography in studies of individual authors,
advancing understanding not only of an author’s work but also photogra-
phy’s impact on literature. These include Kafka and Photography by Carolin
Duttlinger (Oxford University Press, 2007), Searching for Sebald: Photography
after W.G. Sebald, edited by Lise Patt (Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007), ‘Light
That Dances in the Mind’: Photographs and Memory in the Writings of E.M. Forster
and His Contemporaries by Graham Smith (Peter Lang, 2007), In Looking Back
One Learns to See: Marcel Proust and Photography by Mary Bergstein (Rodopi
B.V., 2014), El medio fotográfico en la narrativa de Antonio Muñoz Molina by
María Luisa Fernández Martínez (Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2014),
Le dispositif photographique chez Maupassant, Zola et Céard: Chambres noires
du naturalisme by Andrea Schincariol (L’Harmattan, 2014) and Hervé Guibert:
L’écriture photographique ou le miroir de soi by Jean-Pierre Boulé and Arnaud
Genon (Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2015). These are just a few of the more
4 Introduction
focused critical studies of an established author or authors who have engaged

photography as a trope, as a catalyst of the story, as an analytical tool for the
narrator or observer, or as means of providing varied levels of efficacy for char-
acters to record or remember incidents.
The volume of these theoretical and scholarly works and the velocity at
which they are emerging attest to the urgency of a work on the entanglement
of photography and literature in the case of Japan, especially given the afore-
mentioned international prestige and proliferation of photography from that
country. I feel privileged and humbled to be in the position to submit the first
book-length work in English on the subject of how photography and literature
matter to each other in the Japanese context, as accomplices in resistance to
rather than instrumental to the modern ocular-centric, science-based, ratio-
nalist regime with its faith in the transparency of registers.
Photography’s Position in the History of Visual Art
Throughout its history photography has been defined in terms of what it is

not: paintings on the one hand and cinema on the other. The reproducibil-
ity, affordability and perceived spontaneity of photographic production have
resulted in the ambiguous characterization of photography as a “middle-brow
art,” as conferred by Pierre Bourdieu in his seminal book,3 and its status as infe-
rior to “fine” art. The latter, by contrast, is deemed high-brow, irreplaceable and
invaluable, created intentionally by an author of genius to evoke and convey
the “aura” of an authentic subject matter.4 Compared with cinema on the other
hand, photography, interpreted as imposing death upon an object that would
otherwise be alive and mobile, has earned a reputation for inefficacy. As Victor
Burgin relates:
Photography, sharing the static image with painting, the camera with
film, tends to be placed ‘between’ these two mediums, but it is encoun-
tered in a fundamentally different way from either of them. For the
majority, paintings and films are only seen as the result of a voluntary act
which quite clearly entails an expenditure of time and/or money. [. . .]
3 Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1990).
4 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” trans. Edmund
Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 3, 1935–1938 (Cambridge,
MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 103–04.
Introduction 5
[M]ost photographs are not seen by deliberate choice, they have no spe-
cial space or time allotted to them, they are apparently (an important
qualification) provided free of charge—photographs offer themselves
gratuitously; [. . .] photographs are received rather as an environment.5
What Burgin conceptualizes as the gratuitousness of photography is instru-

mental to the ubiquity of photographic images in our viewing world and con-
sequently the medium’s primacy and predominance in the society of spectacle.
However, it may also be seen as contributing to the resistance to the abstrac-
tion of the visual as a controlling methodology, and to the restoration of other
sensual effects that have been obliterated in the modern scopic regime. As the
modern subject is far likelier to live with photographs than with paintings or
cinema, the thingness of photographs cannot but be felt and negotiated with.
We shall later return to these characteristics, which are most recognizable in
photography among the visual arts.
Kaja Silverman articulates the difference between photography and cinema
in terms of their distinct negotiations with time and space, as follows:
Each is somehow “distant” from the spectator in certain respects, and

“close” in others. However, that distance and that closeness are not equiv-
alent in both cases. The photograph involves temporal remoteness, but
spatial proximity. It brings its referent before us, but only in the guise of
what once was. Roland Barthes suggests that its “reality” is consequently
less of a “being there” than of a “having-been-there.” The cinematic image
might be said to reverse this formulation—to imply temporal immediacy
and spatial remoteness.6
While photographs make their viewers cognizant of a temporal distance from

their contents, in contrast to the spatial closeness of the photographs them-
selves, cinema makes its viewers feel as if they were sharing the time flow-
ing onscreen, even though they are aware of spatial remoteness. The intimacy
created by the spatial closeness of photographs in our quotidian life and
the alienation they make us feel from the time they were taken complicate
5 Victor Burgin, “Looking at Photographs,” in Victor Burgin, ed., Thinking Photography

(Hampshire and London: MacMillan, 1982), 142–43.
6 Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York, NY: Routledge, 1996), 101. The
quotations are from Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Roland Barthes, Image Music
Text: Essays Selected and Translated by Stephen Heath (Hammersmith, London: Fontana
Press, 1977), 44–45.
6 Introduction
photography’s participation in the formation of subjectivity and communal-

ity, a process that is of critical importance to the medium of the narrative
as well.
The effectively tandem appearance in Japan of Western high modern paint-
ings and photography (cinema of course came later) complicated the Japanese
mode of registering space and had profound effects on the development of
the narrative. The rupture Jonathan Crary pronounces in the history of visual-
ity in the West between two-dimensional paintings and photography, one a
“geometrical” system of the optic and the other a “physiological” one, may have
been collapsed in Japan as these two new visual modes spread there more or
less simultaneously.7 The perspectival vision of modern European paintings
arrived in Japan no sooner than the sort of photographic vision that acknowl-
edges the distinction between the camera and the human eye and privileges
the former’s imaginary three-dimensionality for its perceived accuracy and
completeness regarding the grasp of space.
Photographs in their physical proximity to texts easily became the latter’s
accomplices to produce meanings in the mass media of print. James A. Fujii
has called our attention to the fact that installments of serialized novels in the
newspapers (the most common mode of publication for narratives in modern
Japan) shared the same rectangular surface with other entries, such as reports
on contemporaneous events, editorial articles and advertisements.8 Some of
those elements embedded photographs to enhance the authenticity of journal-
istic reports or the attractiveness of merchandise. Thus, in Japan, as elsewhere,
modern print publications as we know them have more often than not been
bilingual in this sense, image and text having been reproduced and presented
adjacently to each other to simultaneously occupy the two-dimensional space
and to vie with each other for attention from viewers/readers.
With that norm in mind, this book will examine the photography—text
relationship beyond or against the two media’s complicity to form and confirm
a narrative as a mechanism of documentation and signification. To do so, it
will seek to elucidate the physical and material relationship of the two media,
a relationship that is not only potentially recognized by viewers but directly
involves them as well. I do not necessarily envision the viewer as the subject
that is deliberately engaged in the act of viewing. As I have mentioned earlier,
7 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 14–16.
8 James A. Fujii, Complicit Fictions: The Subject in the Modern Japanese Prose Narrative (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1993), 149–50.
Introduction 7
with the quotation from Burgin, photographs’ greater reproducibility, transfer-

ability and affordability, in comparison with paintings and movies, increase
their comparative accessibility and permeability in everyday life. It is thus
much more likely for a person to become an incidental viewer of a photograph
than of a painting or a film.
These unplanned encounters with photographic images or printed texts
may be likened to Walter Benjamin’s “involuntary memories,” as he has termed
(with respect to Marcel Proust) recollections that flash through one’s mind
without any consistent or intentional retracing of one’s history.9 Just as pho-
tographing may take place either in conditions of premeditation (as in stu-
dios, during rituals or in the course of projects) or as spontaneous “snapshots”
made by strangers in the street, printed images can pop into our everyday life
at any time without notice. In our quotidian existence, old photographs buried
under or lost among knickknacks or other miscellaneous belongings in draw-
ers or boxes or between pages of books that are seldom opened can emerge at
any moment to arrest the regulated flow of time and bring back a “fossil” of a
past moment.10 The unexpectedness of such encounters with images does not
compromise the intensity of their effects; indeed, the suddenness may render
these moments more captivating or even threatening. Indeed, while photo-
graphs for documentation and archival purposes, which might corroborate
Benjamin’s “voluntary memories,” may be properly archived and presented
(in family albums or in official databases), those loose photographs serve to
challenge the norm of memories as compartmentalized and chronologically
arranged to correspond to facts of the past, as if remembered things were all
tangible and discrete.
Against Interpretation
The focus of this study is not on books that incorporate photographs to

enhance the reader’s understanding of a story. In such books, text and image
conspire as two media instrumental to the production of a narrative that
appears transparent. Blind faith in the authenticity of snapshots, putatively
9 Walter Benjamin, “On the Image of Proust,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings, vol. 2, pt. 1: 1927–1930 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2005), 237–47.
10 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta,
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 109.
8 Introduction
arbitrary and unmediated, can be contested in much the same way in which
the authenticity of putatively confessional literature has been contested in the
study of Japanese literature. Just as waka (lyric poetry), nikki (memoirs) and
shishōsetsu (narratives, formerly known as “I” novels, which invite readers to
understand them as the authors’ confessions, thinly disguised as fiction) have
been revealed as systems of rhetoric rather than unmediated,11 transparent
and spontaneous expressions of interiority—an interiority that, as Karatani
Kōjin argued, is a product of modernity12—photography should be known to
us as materially, physically and ideologically conditioned.
In my earlier book Recontextualizing Texts: Narrative Performance in Modern
Japanese Fiction (Harvard Asia Center, 1999), I endeavored to show that nar-
ratives are not neutral vehicles to convey messages but speech acts consti-
tuted by a web of intentions, expectations and responses from all the parties
involved in their performance. In the present book I propose to similarly resist
the myth of transparency in photography. The authors to be discussed here
not only engage photography extensively, intensively and strategically, but
also resolutely defy the medium’s transparency, revealing that it is materi-
ally conditioned and causes corporeal sensations. By doing so, these authors
not only overcome the putative authority bestowed upon photography as an
infallible scientific medium but also dispute the purported neutrality of text
written in vernacular language. They have not used photographs to illustrate
texts, even when photographs are cited in texts or printed with them. Instead,
their narratives undermine the legitimacy of the objective truthfulness con-
ventionally ascribed to photography. They alert us to the fact that just as the
invention of modern vernacular language facilitated the myth of the homo-
geneous nation that shares a common language, photography purports to be
understood as a repository of consistent meaning. Similarly, the authors’ use
of photographs—printed, cited or described, actual or fictional—erodes the
transparency of the narrative by threatening the perception of its immaterial-
ity. On occasions when it is printed on the same page with photographs that
demonstrate their physical presence, the text takes shape as a thing made of
black characters/letters against a white background, breaking out of the façade
of the intangible system whose function is limited to signification.
11 Tomi Suzuki, “Gender and Genre: Modern Literary Histories and Women’s Diary Literature,”
in Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, eds., Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity,
and Japanese Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 71–95 and Narrating
the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
12 Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. Brett de Bary et al. (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1993).
Introduction 9
Our focus, then, is not on what is represented in photographs (as nothing

can be taken at face value) but on what has transpired around photographs
during the temporal process of their transformation into prints as material
entities, from the moment of their conception up to the moment of contact
with the spectator. Rather than relying on photographs as documentary instru-
ments and striving to restore stories of the past, presumably encapsulated in
those images whose authenticity and legitimacy are ostensibly scientifically
verified, we shall treat photography as a constellation of processes involved
in the production and consumption of images. Instead of dwelling on what
was once expected to become and is now part of the past as it is archived in
photographs, we shall look at photographs as physical things that we live with,
touch and grow old with. Accordingly, we shall consider distinct formats in
which photographs claim a footing in everyday life: photo albums; framed pic-
tures displayed on walls, in photo niches or on tables or other flat surfaces;
photos kept in private places and rarely seen in public; photos distributed for
promotional purposes; photos reprinted in exhibition catalogues; and even
unprocessed film negatives.
Against the Transparency of the Observer
This book will also investigate the inter-corporeal relationships between

agents involved in the production and consumption of photographs, includ-
ing the photographer, the developer, the curator, the purveyor, the collector
and the viewer of photographs. By so doing, it will demonstrate that photo-
graphs are not transparent vehicles for the representation of persons, scenes or
incidents but rather things with which we share space and spend time.
I shall consider cases in which texts register moments when the photogra-
pher’s body manifests itself visibly or tangibly, rather than being conceptu-
ally reduced to a transparent and immaterial container of the eye, as in the
Cartesian regime of visuality. Kaja Silverman, in her above-cited work, eluci-
dates the dialectic of seer and seen in terms of the “gaze” and the “look”—two
ways of seeing that she conceptualizes as distinct. In her terminology, the gaze
is cast to colonize the gazed at, while the look can be returned and makes the
seer feel his/her own physicality and positionality.13 The reminder of the pho-
tographer’s corporeal engagement in a series of actions taking place during
photographic production—preparing and placing the equipment, pressing
13 Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, 125–61, 163–93.

10 Introduction
the shutter button, developing the negatives, editing the images and produc-
ing prints—serves to compensate for the photographer’s perceived neutrality.
By theorizing the dialectics of seer and seen, we may even rescue photogra-
phy from the status of mediocrity that has often been ascribed to it. Ordinarily,
the photographer’s body is carefully withdrawn from the image to create the
illusion of photographs as anonymous, objective and universal, rather than
attributable, subjective and stationed in a specific locale. However, many
contemporary photographers have de-neutralized their own on-site physical
presence, including David Hockney, who famously lets the tips of his shoes
slip into the frame of his photographs; Ernestine Ruben, who calls the viewer’s
attention to her own hands as she holds and uses a camera with them; and
Onodera Yuki, who has entitled one of her exhibitions Jūichibanme no yubi
(The Eleventh Finger, 2006–2010), alerting us to the presence of her finger on
the shutter button. All of these experimentations point to and contest the will
to resist the elimination of the photographers’ bodies from their products in
the name of neutrality and scientific legitimacy. By indicating traces of the
photographer’s body, the space of photographic production becomes adja-
cent to the space framed in the pictures, and the time spent in photo-taking
becomes contiguous with the moment captured in the pictures.
Even when the photographer’s body remains invisible in his/her pictures,
the presence of the figure behind the camera can still sometimes be trace-
able through the way people in a picture cast their look in one way or another.
When the eyes of the photographed person appear to look back at the viewer,
the effect can be complicated in more ways than one. Walter Benjamin has the
following to say on the dialectic prompted by daguerreotypes:
What was inevitably felt to be inhuman—one might even say deadly—in

daguerreotypy was the (prolonged) looking into the camera, since the
camera records our likeness without returning our gaze. Inherent in
the gaze, however, is the expectation that it will be returned by that on
which it is bestowed. Where this expectation is met (which, in the case of
thought processes, can apply equally to an intentional gaze of awareness
and to a glance pure and simple), there is an experience [Erfahrung] of
the aura in all its fullness.14
14 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” trans. Harry Zohn, in vol. 4 of Walter
Benjamin: Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2003), 338.
Introduction 11
While Benjamin’s interest lies in the moment when the eye of the machine
becomes human, Burgin’s “fourth look,” which refers to the human eye return-
ing the gaze of the camera,15 restores its effect in humanly exchange as the
look returned is felt by the viewer of a photograph. It is an illusion created for
and by the viewer, as the look is not cast on the viewer—it has been directed
at the camera, or the person wielding it. This common illusion is essential to
our fetishistic appreciation of photographs—indeed, an instance of this phe-
nomenon is the starting point for Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. However,
the exchange of the look is neither exclusive nor private between the two par-
ties of the model and the viewer. Between the gaze of the person in a print
and its viewer, many apparatuses have intervened in distinct stages of produc-
tion of the image and agents involved in the process. Not only spatial distance
but also temporal distance stands between the two pairs of eyes belonging to
the model and the viewer, along with layers of subjectivities.
The Making of the Book
Each of this book’s four chapters addresses the work by one of four authors—
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Abe Kōbō, Horie Toshiyuki and Kanai Mieko, considered
in loosely chronological order—on whose narratives a contemplation of pho-
tography has made a significant impact. Combined, the relevant texts cover
a period of nine decades, and thus both the technology and the employment
of the camera and its auxiliary apparatuses are historically informed in each
author’s work. This arrangement of the subjects in more or less chronologi-
cal order should not suggest to the reader, however, that this book endeavors
to trace the history of photography as represented in Japanese literature.
Historical conditions are considered here yet are not definitive of the structure
of this book. Neither is it a series of biographical studies of authors in terms of
photography’s influence on their work. Instead of identifying each author as
an object of either historical or biographical study, I propose to see him/her
as a nexus of a set of critical issues, or a vortex into/from which intensities of
thematic concerns flow. Some of the issues or concerns are shared by more
than one author. To name the bundle of problems to be dealt with by each
author, around which photography gains significance: for Tanizaki, the family;
for Abe, the city; for Horie, connoisseurship; and for Kanai, all of the above.
I shall explain below how these themes are related to the four authors’ engage-
ment of photography.
15 Victor Burgin, “Looking at Photographs,” in Thinking Photography, 148.

12 Introduction
The first chapter investigates Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s effective use of photogra-

phy in his narratives published from the 1920s to the 1950s, with stories more or
less contemporaneously set but on occasion slightly extended into the histori-
cal past. Photography performs a crucial role in Tanizaki’s stories of destabiliz-
ing the perceived continuity and order of time and space in the everyday life
of bourgeois families, some more normative than others: some nuclear, others
extended; some biological, others inclusive of servants and frequent visitors;
some including a child or children and some not; and, where the families do
include children, some of them including both of the child’s/children’s parents
and some not. Main characters’ desires for or anxieties about interpersonal
anomalies—some of which we might call perversions—often evolve around
the employment and effect of cameras and photographs—technological
devices and their products that were relatively new to middle-class Japanese
households in the 1920s and then became a more common feature of their
lifestyle by the 1950s. The rarity of photographs/cameras is a premise for sto-
ries set in earlier period. Later stories contest the ubiquity and proliferation of
photographic images. The problem shifts from what would make it possible to
produce images to what would make it special to do so.
Because of the relative novelty and rarity of photography in the lives of
Tanizaki’s characters, the majority of them can be seen to engage in it as view-
ers, models or consumers of the printed products, with just a few (yet note-
worthy) professional and emergent amateur photographers among them who
are actively engaged in the maneuvering of the camera. Another important
distinction of photography in Tanizaki’s fiction is that the subject matter of
photographs is almost always a person or persons; for his characters photo-
graphs mean first and foremost personal or family portraits, some intended for
normative social functions and others for surreptitious viewing. A close look
at the texts reveals that even those characters who only look at photographic
prints or stand in front of the camera without producing images themselves
do not passively or uncritically endorse the socially prescribed idea of pho-
tography as an impartial and inerrant means of achieving documentary and
archival purposes.
By focusing, not on the objects “caught” within the frame or any message
encoded in the image, but on the functions of the camera and the material
presence of photographic prints in the environments occupied by photog-
rapher and spectator, Tanizaki challenges the authenticity of photographs,
which he suggests contest rather than confirm our memory and question
rather than verify the portrayed person’s identity. Instead of reaffirming their
family history and paying respect to it ritualistically by repeated viewing of
commemorative photographs of their family members, as Pierre Bourdieu
Introduction 13
would describe the function of the medium, Tanizaki’s photograph viewers

are intrigued or perplexed by discrepancies between photographic images and
reality as registered in their memory.
Another digression in Tanizaki’s stories from the communal function of
photography is that the reproducibility of photographic prints allows char-
acters’ fetishistic desire to grow in private, especially with the camera in the
hands of amateur aficionados in their own homes. Rather than producing pre-
sentable portraits for the semi-public spaces of family albums, the foyer or the
drawing room, for which the models have posed in prescribed positions and
gazed directly at the camera, consenting to the terms and conditions of studio
portraits, these self-appointed photographic artists take advantage of privi-
leged access to their objects of voyeuristic and/or fetishistic desire to produce
pictures to propel pornographic fantasies.
In Tanizaki’s fiction, photographers do not stay in the privileged position of
the director of the image. Complex maneuvers of the camera and other photo-
graphic and developing equipment resist the reduction of the photographer’s
corporeal presence to the eye. References to this corporeality of both photo-
taking and photo-viewing, grappling with the materiality of photographs, pro-
liferate in Tanizaki’s narratives. The cumulative effect of these references is a
foregrounding of the politics of representation, wherein object and subject,
sight and meaning, body and mind, image and text, now and then, and here
and there are formulated as oppositional and yet complicit. Tanizaki thus ful-
fills photography’s potential for ambiguation of commonsense assumptions
about time, space and the body.
This book’s second chapter features Abe Kōbō’s extensive and explicit
engagement of photography in narratives published from the 1960s to the
1980s, which often include photographs taken by the author, an aficionado
of the art and a collector of cameras. Reflecting his own deep and constant
engagement with the medium, Abe’s essays and fictional narratives tend to
evolve around the position of a photographer or that of a critic of photography,
which is clearly contrastive with the prominence of the viewers, models and
consumers of photographs in Tanizaki’s fiction. Even when photographers are
central in the earlier author’s narratives, they do not deliver their philosophies
of photography. And unlike Abe, Tanizaki did not write critical essays on pho-
tography in any substantial manner.
Investigation of a number of Abe’s photographic practices and theories will
reveal the presence of the photographer wandering through urban space, either
as an anonymous observer (a “flâneur”) or as a physical presence susceptible to
the (often hostile) environs, while the art of photography is defined either as
a means of control over natural phenomena or as an incidentally experienced
14 Introduction
natural phenomenon in its own right (involving light, water and chemicals).
Either way, Abe seems to deny the narrativity of photography, renouncing
meaning in photographic images and privileging the silence (rather than nar-
rative voice), manifested in this art of light—where his philosophy of pho-
tography becomes comparable to that of Jean Baudrillard. The materiality of
photography in turn suggests the materiality of text, which should be received
not just mentally but also visually and tactilely. Consequently, Abe’s photo-
graphic criticism and fiction defy the mandate of modern print culture, which
has worked to neutralize text and image as vehicles for the transparent repre-
sentation of reality.
The city is essential to Abe’s photography both in theory and in practice.
So is the moving body of the photographer, who takes snapshots as he walks
along Thus, photographs that matter to him almost always feature the urban
landscape—a marked distinction from Tanizaki’s, which are almost exclu-
sively portraits. The landscape in Abe’s frame, however, is usually inhabited by
human beings or imbued with their traces—as to be expected in cityscapes.
These human bodies or residues are not in any coordination with the camera,
their presence being more incidental than directed, and more transient than
enduring—characteristics in line with the grammar of street photography.
Photography is not an instantaneous art for Abe, however. He takes the
time to develop his films himself and to examine the images afterward, find-
ing within their frames what did not draw his attention at the time of photo-
taking. In fact, the purpose of his walk with a camera (or cameras) in the city is
to let the lens capture the unexpected. Abe is not one to catch something deci-
sive on the spot. Instead, he anticipates discoveries of what he has overlooked
with his naked eye at the moment of shooting, which the camera incidentally
and unintentionally has managed to frame and register. The privileging of the
camera’s mechanical eye over the anthropomorphic design, which is character-
istic of Abe, suggests a fundamental reconfiguration of the dynamics between
human and machine. Significantly, it urges a reconsideration of photography
in both space and time—its temporality revealing it not only as the capturing
of a moment but also as a bodily process, and its spatiality incorporating not
just what now appears within the frame but what was once adjacent to it.
The third chapter explicates Horie Toshiyuki’s stories of photographers and
photographs as well as commentaries on photography, published from the late
1980s into the 2010s, often in the form of essays written to accompany pub-
lished photographic collections of artists or reviews of their exhibitions. Horie
is an academic who has taught and researched contemporary French litera-
ture at universities in Japan. He is also a visual art critic and book designer,
often using his own photographs for the dust jackets of his books. His position
Introduction 15
vis-à-vis photography matches his professional repertoire, ranging from com-

mentaries to practice, which seems to be reflected in his writing (though it
should not be equated with autobiography); generally the capacities that
Horie’s characters assume in their relation to photographs are those of the art
connoisseur and collector.
Typically Horie’s narratives, which are hard to define exclusively as either
essays or fictional stories, are written in first person, and the narrator-
protagonist either actually or mentally encounters photographs in books,
stores, galleries or friends’ residences. Where encounters are “mental,” as the
“I” character remembers past photographic experiences or reads books about
photographers or thinks about them. Horie’s “I” is usually a perceptive and
contemplative character living on his own (usually without any mention of his
family circumstances whatsoever), often in foreign lands (almost exclusively
in Paris, France), and yet he is open to meeting people and developing loose
friendships with them. The narrator-protagonist also often finds his soul mates
across space and time through publications and other mediations. Resembling
neither Tanizaki’s family-oriented middle-class urbanites nor Abe’s unsociable
city roamers, Horie’s central figures are able to take advantage of the increased
leniency in today’s society afforded to single persons without regular employ-
ment and in transnational migration. While such a lifestyle might often be
associated with late-capitalist consumer culture, Horie’s narrator-protagonists
hold values essentially irrespective of the regime, preferring manual tools to
digital devices, independent stores and old-time markets to supermarkets, and
home cooking to take-out or fast food. Posthuman technology, corporate cul-
ture and mass consumption are gently but firmly nudged away.
By virtue of sharing aesthetic values, Horie’s narrator-protagonist feels
united with photographers whom he may not have met in person. Those kin-
dred spirits often take pictures of things that humans live with, intentionally
and devotedly—houses, tools, commodities, furniture and knickknacks. The
specific genre of photography that Horie focuses his attention on is the portrai-
ture of things—or still lifes. His gaze is not invested with the urge to know the
person in a portrait or to expose a social reality in a cityscape picture; rather
it is absorbed in affection for things and for persons who use, look after or
live with them. Humans are often within the frames, but unlike the humans in
Tanizaki’s photographs, they are featured in relation to things in their posses-
sion, turning the meaning of the synecdoche inside out (a human being may
be seen as more or less an auxiliary part of the picture of a thing). While Abe
may equalize things and humans in his photographs, renouncing anthropo-
morphism, his operation is driven by his interest in the abject, dejected and
discarded. Horie, in contrast, observes in photographs things and humans in
16 Introduction
loving and caring relation to each other, normally within the protection of
domestic space.
It is no surprise, then, that for Horie photography is as much a manual art
as a visual art and as much a craftwork as an art of mechanical reproducibility.
As such, for Horie photography occupies an intermediary space in the history
of technologies. Neither a relative novelty as in Tanizaki’s stories nor a norma-
tive apparatus as for Abe, photography is a “residual” medium,16 which still
manages to co-exist with the newer media of digital image making. Horie’s
thoughts on the camera or photographs tend to be imbued with a tinge of com-
passion or hope for preservation of the now out of vogue technology, a senti-
ment on the verge of nostalgia. This is not to suggest that photographers who
inspire him are of the past only; he keeps abreast with contemporary photog-
raphy and indeed collaborates with some practitioners. It is his perspective on
the medium that differs from the constant chase for the newest, a drive that
perpetuates our media-saturated society.
Photography for Horie is also in-between in another sense: it is “natural” as
well as “mechanical” or “artistic” as it involves light and water. Horie finds yet
another aspect of photography’s medial nature in the human inability to see
clearly, which cannot be rectified by photography’s ostensibly perfect vision.
Neither haunted by the technology as Tanizaki’s characters are nor embracing
it as Abe is, Horie accepts and lives with the camera’s limitations. Photography
thus enables him to recall and restore traces of the author’s corporeal presence
that have often been erased from texts to the effect of neutralizing the texts’
orientation.
The fourth chapter centers on Kanai Mieko’s fiction and criticism, which,
published between the 1970s and the 1990s, feature viewers, models, consum-
ers, connoisseurs, critics and photographers in the period starting from the
1930s through the 1990s, covering most of the ground in the history of the tech-
nology and reception of photography as explored by the three other authors.
Thus, during the time Kanai’s stories are set, the status of the camera and pho-
tographic prints evolved from novel to commonplace to residual, and the use
of the medium changed from the time photo-taking was for special occasions
to the time when it was a nearly universal, everyday pursuit to the present,
when the use of a conventional camera is old-fashioned. Kanai has not only
engaged photography with critical awareness in her fiction but has also writ-
ten illuminating essays on the subject. In fact she occasionally incorporates
the latter into the former, as quotations of texts read, mused over, spoken or
16 This notion is derived from Charles R. Acland, ed., Residual Media (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
Introduction 17
written by characters, including but not limited to photographers. Regardless

of whether or not they are embedded in fictional narratives, these critical writ-
ings by Kanai reveal her keen interest in the central issues surrounding the
rhetoric of photography, such as subjectivity/dialectics, temporality/memory
and materiality/fetishism—issues that are also important in the study of the
narrative register.
The subject matter of photographs that draws in Kanai’s characters may be
portraiture (of a single person or a family, as in Tanizaki’s narratives), land-
scape (with or without humans, as in Abe’s work) or still life (of architec-
tural features, as in Horie’s writings). In some of Kanai’s stories, which relate
details of the quotidian life of city dwellers, we see remnants of the nuclear
and extended families to be found in Tanizaki’s fiction. Contemporary ver-
sions of extended families appear in two types of setting: either in service
providers’ homes that are contiguous with their business space and thus
constantly intruded upon by their employees and clients, or in apartment
buildings where strangers live immediately beyond the walls, allowing char-
acters to peek into the private lives of neighbors. In other stories the narrator-
protagonist is an anonymous and solitary city roamer as in Abe’s fiction,
conceptually negotiating with space and time as he observes and experiences
them. Some of the central characters in Kanai’s narratives, however, are single
renters in the city, making friends through random contacts, much as Horie’s
narrator-protagonists do. As is the case with the other three authors’ work, such
a changing social landscape fundamentally affects the relationships between
the camera and the humans behind or in front of it, and between photographic
prints (isolated or multiply reproduced and distributed in mass publications)
and their producers, viewers or owners.
These fictional figures’ confusion about time represented either by photo-
graphs or in photographic processes is very much like that of Tanizaki’s char-
acters, while their grappling with the space around them as well as the space
within the frame and their inability to bracket their physical presence in their
authorial intent and authoritative control over photographs recall Abe. On the
other hand, an affection for things represented in photographs and an affinity
felt with photographers who select their objects are shared between some of
Kanai’s characters and Horie’s. These complexities that characters endure in
the photographic context help us to articulate the conceptual significance of
photography in rethinking quotidian life in the modern scopic regime and the
consumer society wherein linear and articulated time and geometrically man-
aged space are verified by repetitions of regulated activities.
CHAPTER 1
Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or Photography as Disturbance

to Middle-Brow Life
Many readers of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō would agree, following the lead of Kōno
Taeko,1 that in novelistic discourse he uniquely and compellingly represents
physical sensations produced by sensory stimuli, to the end of affirming a
fulfilling and fulfilled life. This estimation of his work can be simultaneously
verified and contested by considerations of photography represented in his
fiction. While his characters value photographs as both visual images and
material objects, pictures and their production processes in his stories often
contribute to a destabilization of present reality, leaving the viewers feeling
disoriented rather than steady in space-time. Photographic images mentioned
or described in Tanizaki’s narratives (ordinarily not shown on the printed
page) often seem incongruous with the viewer’s memory or expectation.
Serving neither to confirm the portrayed person’s identity nor the represented
thing’s authenticity, instead they instigate the viewer’s interest in the radical
reconfiguration of personal or familial history.
Photographers, both amateur and professional, make their presence
strongly felt in Tanizaki’s stories, but in a way that may challenge the reader’s
expectation. Not content to function as eyes for observation, they fail to stay
behind the scenes and out of the frame. Tanazaki’s narratives encapsulate
the intense bodily intersection between photographs’ objects and observers.
He elaborates the material details of photographic equipment and techni-
cal maneuvers that are often obliterated by the perception of photographs as
finished, flat and framed. This chapter will measure the effects of photogra-
phy in Tanizaki’s fiction that urge us to complicate our understanding of three
elements of his work: his textual representation of the visual and material; his
handling of time, space and the body; and his positioning of representation
(textual or otherwise) vis-à-vis the desire for life or death.
In the context of this book ‘photography’ refers to the various acts that
constitute the photographic process: not just the taking of the pictures, but
the development of the film; the modification, framing and archiving of the
prints; and the viewing of images and accounting for them. Consequently,
1 Kōno Taeko, Tanizaki bungaku to kōtei no yokubō (Tanizaki’s Literature and Desire for
Affirmation; Tokyo: Bungei shunjūsha, 1976).

Photography As Disturbance To Middle-brow Life 19
my engagement with photography focuses on various agents involved in the

making and remaking of the photographs, who may not be visible in the end
product. While the photographic image is conventionally taken to be ‘dead,’
I propose to restore the scenes that have taken place outside the frame—or
in the “space-off,” in Teresa de Lauretis’s terminology, reapplied by Marianne
Hirsch: “the ‘space not visible in the frame but inferable from what the frame
makes visible’.”2 The materiality of photographic prints is also important in my
study. Photographs are not only about what they represent or what they mean
but also, and more importantly, about how they exist in the time and space
shared with their viewers—the space-time that is not shared with the photo-
graphed objects.
When Tanizaki’s narratives engage photography, they characteristically
elaborate material details of the photographs along with the corporeality of
the acts surrounding their production and reproduction. Characters who take
or view photographs are engaged in fetishism and voyeurism, to the extent
that they let photography disturb their quotidian lives, which are predicated
upon the conventional perceptions that time is linear (with the past neatly
archived as intact) and space is geometrical (where each person’s identity
and place of origin/residence/profession are discretely defined). Even though
Pierre Bourdieu has rightly labeled photography a “middle-brow” art, it does
not necessarily follow that photography is always the acquiescent servant of
bourgeois family life. Rather, its complex and ambiguous exploitation of time,
space and the body can contest assumptions about the everyday world.
As Thomas LaMarre extracted the cinematic from the genre of cinema and
revealed the cinematic orientation in narratives, I would like to isolate the
photographic parameters of photography as they are manifested in Tanizaki’s
texts. I will, of course, work my argument around passages that specifically
reference photography. But my intent is to go well beyond the identification
and annotation of references to photography, to account for the ambiguous
and dynamic relationship between image and text that Tanizaki brings to our
attention as he writes about (or around) photographs. My procedure will be
informed by theories of photographic relations beyond the frame of a printed
image expounded by Christian Metz, Mieke Bal and Victor Burgin, among
others. I will address one narrative at a time in a given section, arranging the
discussions in the order of the historical time represented in each work rather
than the text’s publication date.
2 Theresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 26; quoted in Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photogra
phy, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 198.
20 CHAPTER 1
Photography vis-à-vis Cinema
This chapter will further articulate the concept of visuality and its role in
everyday life in Japan in the specific historical space of the early twentieth
century—the era of the advent of full-fledged modernity there—from the
turn of the century up to the late 1950s (the latter years being often conceived
as the end of the postwar period and the beginning of Japan’s reemergence
into the global market economy). A significant series of changes occurred in
Japan during that span of time that are covered by the Tanizaki stories to be
examined below, and these changes are not unrelated to the proliferation of
mechanically mediated images, most significantly in pre-video cinema and
pre-digital photographs. As I shall show below, Tanizaki not only experienced
the dynamic development of visual culture as a producer and a consumer of
media output, but also exploited it strategically and conceptually as a story-
teller in the textual register.
The above-stated period also witnessed the transformation of photogra-
phy from a professional art/medium (a thing of rarity) to a relatively common
practice in the middle-class Japanese household. This conversion of course
involved changes in technology, commerce, aesthetics and lifestyle. The cam-
era became more affordable and more compact and manageable, and the act
of posing for the camera became less limited to the entertainment industry
(still photos, star portraits) and permeated the quotidian space of middle-
class urban consumers of images. Thus, my examination of the role of pho-
tography in Tanizaki’s fictional stories set between 1900 and the 1950s will
reveal varying relations between private and public spaces; between artistic
production, mechanical reproduction and material possession; between art
connoisseurship and family rituals; and between the remote space-time and
the everyday.
It is no coincidence that these changes occurred as the preoccupation with
subjectivity in Japanese literature grew, a process that has been elaborated in
the study of the shishōsetsu, the quasi-confessional narrative, the vogue for
which corresponded to the changing relationships between author and reader
that evolved with the development of mass-market publishing. Acute interest
in self-representation, manifested in the proliferation of (auto)biographical
discourse, is also evident in the expanded presence of the private and the
everyday in visual representation.
Tanizaki, far from being immune to the essential complicity of photography
in all of these changes, appears to have strategically engaged the medium to
articulate the coercion of vision and body, body and space-time, and subjects
and society. As the “society of the spectacle” (Debord 1995) matured in Japan,
ordinary people had to come to terms with the changing notion of the visibil-
ity of their bodies in public and in the visual media; they had to learn how to
look and how to be present in images. The intensifying gaze upon one another
immersed everyday life in theatricality.
Tanizaki’s involvement in cinema has been well documented in historical
and biographical studies. Joanne R. Bernardi (2001) has provided us with a
detailed and informative account of Tanizaki’s activities in the film industry,
mainly as a screenwriter. Eric Cazdyn (2002) has discussed not only Tanizaki’s
involvement in the movie industry but also his response to completed and
unrealized cinematic adaptations of his narratives. Some of Tanizaki’s criti-
cal writings on cinema have been translated into English by Thomas LaMarre
(2005), in a book that also serves to enlighten us about Tanizaki’s aesthetic
stance. LaMarre’s work teaches us that this aesthetic should not be reduced to
a reinforcement of the East–West binary or the traditional–modern one, and
that instead it should be understood in the context of the modernity informed
by cinematic visual representation and Orientalism. Tanizaki’s processing of
visual culture in his writing is deftly elaborated by Akira M. Lippit (2005) and
Greg L. Golley (2008) in works that productively complicate our conventional
understanding of vision and blindness, light and darkness, and vision vis-à-vis
the other senses.
The consideration of photography, rather than cinema, in Tanizaki’s fic-
tion reveals important dimensions of human interrelations, specifically with
respect to power and desire. The reasons for this are manifold. In the pre-video
reception of film, the viewer of cinema was granted affordable and yet limited
access to images. The size of the screen as well as the dark space of the cinema
helped to create an otherworldliness, another ‘Orient,’ while in photography,
the small screen of the camera and the small prints allowed the viewer easy
access to images well within the sphere of everyday life. From the use of the
camera to the long-term ownership of prints, photographic processes took
place in the consumer’s hands, not in some remote place. The viewer of pho-
tography could enjoy a much greater sense of involvement in the production
and distribution of images than the cinema spectator; it was much easier and
much more common to produce, pose for and possess photographs than cin-
ema. Photography was a technology to live with, not a technology to take one
away from the everyday.
Drama unfolds within private space in many of the celebrated works of
Tanizaki’s fiction, such as Chijin no ai (A Fool’s Love, 1924; trans. Naomi, 1985),
which Jordan Sand discusses while examining the historical significance of pri-
vate space (2003). The reader can also easily find cameras and photographic
prints within Tanizaki’s work. Many of his characters are preoccupied with
22 CHAPTER 1
the visual representation of faces and bodies, a pursuit that materializes their
desires and power relations with utmost precision. The strategic use of photo-
graphic rhetoric to articulate the dynamics between characters, between their
past and present, and between their bodies and social positions will emerge
from the examination to follow of instances of photographic production and
consumption within this body of work.
Limits of Photographic Authenticity: “Shunkin shō”
His nostalgia is directed at the time when he was not blind, which is why
these photographs of him [just before he lost his sight] are particularly
important to him. He can no longer see pictures of himself in his child-
hood. Is the face in these pictures the same as the one in his memory? Or
does he reconfigure a distinct face of a boy every time someone describes
it for him?
MINATO CHIHIRO3
The story’s historical setting (1829–1907) accounts only partly for the paucity
of photographic images in “Shunkin shō” (1933; trans., “A Portrait of Shunkin,”
1963). The only reference to a photograph in this story, which I examine below,
problematizes the relationship between portrait and biography, or between
visual and textual representation of someone’s life. First of all, Victor Burgin’s
“fourth look”—which the photographed person “may direct to the camera”4—
is missing from this photograph of Shunkin. The object’s gaze returned to the
camera could disturb the viewer’s gaze upon the photographic image, as
the viewer wants to look at it without being looked at. The spectator’s superior-
ity, or purported neutrality, is contested if the eye of the photographed person
looks back at him/her. The lack of such a threat grants the viewer complacency
with which to interpret the image freely.5
3 Minato Chihiro, “Miru koto no shinwa: Yujun Bafucharu no shashin ni tsuite” (The Myth
of Seeing: On Evgen Bavcar’s Photography), in Riterēru henshūbu, ed., Shashinshū o yomu:
Besuto 338 kanzen gaido (Reading Photographic Books: Complete Guides to the Best 338;
Tokyo: Megarōgu, 1997), 77.
4 Victor Burgin, “Looking at Photographs,” in Thinking Photography, 148.
5 However, Shunkin’s lack of eyesight does not necessarily mean that she is not looking at her
spectators. She may not literally see them but she can still look at them. Or at the very least
she could give the impression of seeing them, and thus could produce affects on the spec-
tators. This tempts us to consider the case of the blind photographer who is the subject of
Minato Chihiro’s work from which this section’s epigraph is quoted (see n. 3 above), but a full
The closed eyes of the photographic object parallel her ignorance of her
biography being written posthumously. The temporal distance and conse-
quential lack of counter-response from Shunkin or anyone involved in her life
grants the narrator the liberty of submitting his interpretive version of her story
(the original title literally means “an abbreviated account of Shunkin”), based
on the preceding biography (the cited and partially quoted putative source,
“Mozuya Shunkin den” [Biography of Mozuya Shunkin]). The English transla-
tion’s title encapsulates the complicity of biography and portrait in their claim
of authentic representation of a person, while also qualifying the complete-
ness of any portrait or biography.
On the ground of the viewer’s putative superiority, the narrator annotates
the image. The narrator, who claims to have seen Shunkin’s only extant por-
trait, does not fault her closed eyes, as we might in everyday photo-taking; they
make her look like the Kannon, he says.6 The impression of spiritual superi-
ority he observes contradicts her selfish and sadistic orientation, which the
narrator’s own account is about to reveal. The incongruity suggests that photo-
graphic representation can be deceptive rather than truthful, as conventional
wisdom holds, and perhaps more importantly that our visual perception is not
neutral but rhetorical. We are so accustomed to visual rhetoric that its stipula-
tion of terms and conditions of the way we interpret images may elude our
attention. In the present case, the physical similarity between Shunkin’s and
the Kannon’s eyes misleads the spectator to believe Shunkin is “an excep-
tionally gentle lady.”7 This passage reveals—or one might say it conceals—
an important message about the relationship between image and text. Even
though he says that “we” (wareware) need to rely on the photograph to “imag-
ine her appearance,” it is in fact not the case. The narrator does not share with
his reader the photograph that he had access to—the photograph is not physi-
cally inserted into the narrative, a fact that the narrator acknowledges with the
hypothetical clause “even if the reader looked at the actual photograph” (“kari
ni jissai no shashin o mirare te mo”).8 While he can “imagine her appearance”
reflection of the potential chiasm between a blind model and a blind cameraman exceeds
the frame of the currently intended investigation.
6 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, “A Portrait of Shunkin,” in Seven Japanese Tales, trans. Howard Hibbett
(New York: Knopf, 1963), 9. Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, “Shunkinshō,” in TJZ 13: 499.
7 Tanizaki, “A Portrait of Shunkin,” 9. Tanizaki, “Shunkinshō,” 499. A less likely interpreta-
tion of “yasashii” (gentle) in the original, modifying “nyonin” (lady), is that it may not be
meant specifically for this lady, Shunkin, but the female kind in general, as in “the fairer
sex.”
8 Tanizaki, “Shunkinshō,” 499. Not in the published English translation.
24 CHAPTER 1
from “only one dim reflection of her” or “the only photograph ever made of
Shunkin,” his reader has only his description of the photographic image from
which to “imagine her appearance.”9 That the narrator possesses more knowl-
edge than the reader is less important in our context than the fact that the
narrator invites the reader to compare the visual image with the textual
one and tentatively concludes, counter-intuitively, that the visual is no more
definitive of an image than the textual. The narrator thus disputes photogra-
phy’s claim to absolute truth.
The narrator further ambiguates visual representation, speculating on
images of Shunkin entertained by her disciple turned lover, Sasuke, who goes
blind later in the very year the photograph was taken. The narrator surmises that
Sasuke’s last sight of Shukin, then, must have been similar to the photographic
image of her, and then wonders if the picture of her in his memory faded as he
grew older, or if he complemented his blurring memory with his imagination,
or if he mentally produced an image independently of the photograph.10 In this
sequence of questions, the narrator compares the image captured by a naked
eye with the photographic image, then memory with photography and finally
memory with imagination. These images are not considered interchangeable
but instead are imagined to be comparable, complementary or completely dif-
ferent. Varied images are being created and revised, keep evolving around each
other and proliferate options for a definitive version instead of authenticat-
ing the printed edition. Photographs are not given the ultimate authority in
visual representation. As Margherita Long maintains, “The photograph is old
and dappled with spots, so the person it purports to reveal remains elusive,
ironically, because of imperfections in the very technology that is supposed
to deliver her for observations.”11 Photography’s documentary function is lim-
ited or compromised. Also, the fact that the blind man retains a remembered
image in his mind and possibly modifies it, or lets it change in his imagination,
suggests that the visual is not necessarily equated with the optical. If a naked
eye is not essential to construction of the visual, then the camera is not either.
Photographs thus do not authenticate visual representation in the final analy-
sis. It may be up to what Marguerite Duras calls “photographie absolue,” or “the
photograph that was never taken but could have been,” which bestows upon
the image “the virtue of representing . . . an absolute.”12
9 Tanizaki, “A Portrait of Shunkin,” 9. Tanizaki, “Shunkinshō,” 499.

10 Tanizaki, “A Portrait of Shunkin,” 9. Tanizaki, “Shunkinshō,” 499–500.
11 Margherita Long, This Perversion Called Love: Reading, Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and
Freud (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 121.
12 Marguerite Duras, The Lover, trans., Barbara Bray (New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1985), 10.
Images That Blur Memory: “Yume no ukihashi”
I believe photographs promote forgetting. That’s how it tends to

work now. The fixed, flat, easily available countenance of a dead person
or an infant in a photograph is only one image as against the million
images that exist in the mind. And the sequence made up by the
million images will never alter. It’s a confirmation of death.
MARGUERITE DURAS13
The episode, recollected by the narrator-protagonist of “Yume no ukihashi”

(1959; trans., “The Bridge of Dreams,” 1963), of himself as a boy looking at his
deceased mother’s photograph with his father, reveals more than photog-
raphy’s incapacity to represent the image to the viewer’s satisfaction. As an
image, the mother’s portrait fails to evoke any sense of intimacy because in
the picture, taken before her marriage, her appearance differs from what the
boy remembers (or thinks he does) and also because the old photo is fading.14
But beyond the issue of whether the portrait’s visual representation of the
mother is truthful or not lies another significant aspect of this photograph: its
thing-ness. As the dissatisfied son asks his father if there is any other portrait
of his mother, the father answers that none exists, as she did not like to have
her photo taken and as the other photos were unsuccessfully retouched.15 (By
tracing history from the end point of the story dated as 1931, the reader can
deduce that the photograph dates from the first decade of the twentieth cen-
tury, which may account for the technological limitations.)16 The singularity
of the mother’s portrait curbs the photographs’ “mechanical reproducibility,”
an aspect emphasized as characteristic of the medium by Walter Benjamin.
Photographs as mechanically reproduced images, Benjamin proclaims, fail
to deliver the “here and now” of the original, and, in their flattening of the
distance between distinct places in time and space and their claiming of
“sameness,” invite the loss of the “aura” that should be felt in experiencing the
authentic presence in its distinct space-time.17 In the story, the professional
13 Marguerite Duras, Practicalities: Marguerite Duras Speaks to Jérôme Beaujour, trans.,
Barbara Bray (New York, NY: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 89.
14 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, “The Bridge of Dreams,” in Seven Japanese Tales, 108. Tanizaki
Jun’ichirō, “Yume no ukihashi,” in TJZ 18: 159.
15 Tanizaki, “The Bridge of Dreams,” 109. Tanizaki, “Yume no ukihashi,” 159.
16 Tanizaki, “The Bridge of Dreams,” 159. Tanizaki, “Yume no ukihashi,” 211.
17 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” in Selected
Writings Vol. 3: 1935–1938, 101–33.
26 CHAPTER 1
photographer’s manual intervention in itself creates an interface of the

mechanical and the artistic that makes his products distinct from one another
and from the model, preventing them from manifesting the “sameness” of
mechanically reproduced images. Then the portraits have been deemed inau-
thentic or been rejected or withdrawn from the viewable world, without pro-
liferating as one might expect with mechanically reproducible photographic
images. Curiously, in its failure to convey resemblance to the model, the photo-
graph acquires uniqueness both in its quality and in its number.18
The rarity of the photograph, however, does not elevate its status to an
authoritative record of the person seen in the frame. Rather, the photograph
falls short of restoring the mother being remembered. This story makes it obvi-
ous that the protagonist remembers his mother in tactile terms rather than
visual, except for the interior of her nostrils, which he frequently observed
while looking upward from her arms. Flat, framed and enshrined in the niche,
the photographic print figuratively and literally makes the viewer lose touch
with the person in the image and fails to convey the recollection of the person
felt and experienced by the viewer.19
The episode of the mother’s portrait in “Yume no ukihashi” renders the
relation between memory and the photograph with further ambiguity. It
remains unclear whether the boy is troubled by the incongruity between the
image represented in the photograph and those in his memory—in his father’s
words, “the way you remember her” (“omae ga oboeteru kao”); in the narra-
tor’s retrospective words, “my vague remembrance” (“watashi no oborogena
18 While this only photograph of the deceased mother, seen not as a visual representation
but as a thing, remains singular and autonomous, another manifestation of reproduc-
ibility gains ground in this household. In the narrative to develop from this point on,
the narrator retells how the boy’s confusion of the biological mother and the step-
mother intensifies, preventing him from establishing a chronology. He is told that the
stepmother looks exactly like his deceased mother, and actually he does think that
the look-alike resembles his memory of his mother from his infancy. The past and
present thus become indistinguishable as the successor recreates the primary mother’s
likeness successfully. Rather than the one and only photograph in the alcove, it is the
body of the stepmother that copies her predecessor. Instead of failing to deliver the “here
and now” as Benjamin regrets photographs do, the human reproduction successfully
fakes the immediacy of the original’s presence. In her act of collapsing the temporal dis-
tance, the reproduction does not lose the “aura” of the original, as Benjamin notes pho-
tographs do in flattening the space-time of the unique being, but recreates authenticity.
19 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, “The Bridge of Dreams,” 108. Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, “Yume no ukihashi,”
159.
kioku” [not represented verbatim in the translation])—or by the photograph’s

failure to restore the lost image of her—“the forgotten image of my mother”
(“wasuresatta haha no sugata”) or “the way she actually looked” (“arishi hi no
haha no eizō”).20 Is the boy struggling to make sense of two discrete images of
the same person, or of the gap between an excess and an absence of image?
Is photography meant to help one forget what the person really looked like,
by foregrounding one image as definitive against others in the viewer’s mind,
as Marguerite Duras suggests in the first quotation above, or does it simply
hit or miss the mark that is more or less verifiable by the use of memory?
The ambiguous phrasing in the first Duras passage suggests that photography
by default confounds the viewer as to the state of his or her remembrance of
the photographed and further erodes the ground on which one establishes a
memory archive.
This episode illustrates the incommensurability of the photographic image
with the remembered (or forgotten and sought-after) appearance of the
deceased, in much the same way as in the famous “Winter Garden Photograph”
(or, to put it precisely, the absence of the said photograph) that Roland Barthes
speaks of in Camera Lucida, as the photograph was taken when the mother
was a young woman, before the viewer (the son) was born. The person whom
one should be most familiar with presents herself as least familiar, as never
having been met, while the image of the irrecoverable past is restored to the
present use. Identity and temporality reveal contradiction in the printed pho-
tograph, which one might conventionally assume is supposed to restore the
archived past straightforwardly. As has been phrased by Barthes, “photogra-
phy [is] never, in essence, a memory, but it actually blocks memory, quickly
becomes a counter-memory.”21
20 Tanizaki, “Yume no ukihashi,” 159. In my own translation.

21 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New
York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1981), 91. More on mothers’ portraits in Barthes, Jacques-Henri
Lartigue, Hervé Guibert, Tanizaki and Kanai Mieko (the subject of Chapter 4), see my
“The Photographs, Lost, Found and Fabricated: The Elusive and Haunting Portrait of the
Mother in and around Narratives of Barthes, Tanizaki, Kanai and Guibert,” in Claude Paul
and Eva Werth, eds., Comparatisme et intermédialité. Comparatism and Intermediality.
Réflexions sur la relativité culturelle de la pratique intermédiale. Reflections on the cultural
relativity of intermedial practice. Saarbrücker Beiträge zur vergleichenden Literatur- und
Kulturwissenschaft, Bd. 69, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 265–82.
28 CHAPTER 1
Identity Lost: “Tomoda to Matsunaga no hanashi”
Photography’s reliability as a scientific technology to enable humans to register

authentic biographical specifics is further challenged in “Tomoda to Matsunaga
no hanashi” (1926; Tale of Tomoda and Matsunaga). As Chang Yongsun informs
us, this story was originally published in a photographic magazine,22 and as a
consequence the boundary between the diegesis and an extradiegetic scope
of vision commanded by the reader was blurred in such a way that the reader
may automatically appreciate the premise of the story, in which the presence
of photographs is taken as both valuable and disturbing.
In this story of a doppelgänger who lives contrastive lives alternately—a
worldly, pleasure-filled European city life and an obligation-bound, tradi-
tional Japanese country life (either phase lasting for a few years each time)—
photography plays an understated and yet crucial role. The wife of Matsunaga,
a man who goes missing from his family home in the countryside every few
years and then comes back again, sends photographs of her husband to the
narrator, a professional writer, whose letter, addressed to a Tomoda, she finds
in her husband’s bag. With the pictures, she asks if the narrator knows any-
thing about Matsunaga. As the narrator is not acquainted with Matsunaga,
the only connection is Tomoda, a friend of the narrator’s and the addressee
of the letter. When the narrator asks Tomoda face to face, he denies any knowl-
edge of Matsunaga, and, to dispel the suspicion that Matsunaga, the owner
of the letter, and Tomoda are one and the same, the addressee of the letter
offers a few photographs of his own, which show him looking completely
different from Matsunaga as he appears in the pictures his wife has enclosed
in her letter to the narrator, and suggests that the narrator send them to her for
confirmation that Tomoda is not Matsunaga. While Tomoda looks plump and
full of life, Matsunaga is gaunt and sickly. As it turns out, however, the visual
discrepancy between the two groups of portraits, one of Tomoda and the other
of Matsunaga, is not definitive of their distinctive identities. Instead, as Kristin
Sivak has discussed, the photographic “truth” that appeared so evident to the
characters is overcome by the power of the narrative that surrounds the photo-
graphs and places them in context. The authenticity of photographic portraits
is fundamentally undermined in favor of the narrative that gives meaning to
22 Chang Yongsun, “Shashin to monogatari: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō ‘Tomoda to Matsunaga no

hanashi’ ron,” Nihongo to Nihon bungaku 51 (August 2010): 41–53.
them.23 Photography is revealed to be not transparent, but quite the opposite:

construed, designed and manipulative.
As has been discussed by Baryon Tensor Posadas, the procedure of crimi-
nological identification of a person by photographs came in vogue around the
time of the publication of this story.24 The blind faith in scientific truth mak-
ing is challenged in the story, where two men who do not look alike at all in
photographs turn out to be identical, as certified by non-visual facts and the
construction of a narrative from them. In this story, the modern technology of
mechanical reproduction is defeated by dogged investigation and reconstruc-
tion of a narrative of a person’s life. Fragments that looked irrelevant to and
incommensurable with each other are assembled—reassembled—to form a
single narrative, which is completed by the final confession of the protagonist
with the split personality. As Sivak rightly maintains, this is a story of the nar-
rative’s triumph over the visual. A statement is made against the visual regime
that was dominant in 1920s and 1930s.
Another group of photographs introduced in “Tomoda to Matsunaga no
hanashi” is of an obscene nature, taken by Tomoda in his epicurean life. A pro-
clivity for taking indecent photographs by making models pose as one wishes
from behind the camera is shared by some of Tanizaki’s fictional characters.
Tomoda in “Tale of Tomoda and Matsunaga,” Jōji in Chijin no ai and the hus-
band in Kagi are examples of voyeuristic, even pornographic photographers
whose activities are kept secret from their families. The voyeuristic orientation
of photography is manifested in some of the stories to be discussed below.
The Voyeur’s Body, the Viewer’s Hand: Chijin no ai
In the Pygmalion narrative of Chijin no ai, against the historical backdrop

of 1918–26,25 the narrator-protagonist Jōji reminisces about the beginning of
his relationship with his wife, Naomi. At two moments in the narrative he
turns to a photo-diary devoted to Naomi, which he has kept and still looks
at in the narrative present. He even bought a camera exclusively for the
23 Kristin Sivak, “Supporting Evidence: Narrative and the Authorization of Photography in
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s ‘The Story of Tomoda and Matsunaga’.” Unpublished paper. 2011.
24 Baryon Tensor Posadas, “Doppelganger: Double Fictions and Double Visions of Japanese
Modernity,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 2010.
25 Anthony H. Chambers, “Introduction,” in Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Naomi: A Novel by Junichirō
Tanizaki, trans. Anthony H. Chambers (New York, NY: North Point Press, 1990), x.
30 CHAPTER 1
purpose of photographing Naomi’s face. The description of this “image–text”

hints at the materiality of photo-taking as well as that of photo-archiving.
Though the timing of the purchase of the camera (soon after they became a
couple) suggests that Jōji was not experienced in photography for its own sake,
he now seems keen on technical and material details of the art. His staging of
the scenes with deliberately diversified lighting and angles, like his manner
of pasting the prints on pages of the diary, is distinctly technical and material.
As we shall see later, he also developed the films. Though the sole subject of his
diary was Naomi, especially her face—which, he notes, increasingly resembled
Mary Pickford’s—the reader of his larger narrative that embeds the diary is
given access to the physical involvement of the photographer, who arranges
the equipment meticulously and keeps prints in order, noting the time he took
each photograph and the complex movements of his body across the space
of the bathroom or other room in their house in search of the best location.26
During this process his body has occupied shared space with Naomi’s—a fact
clearly registered in his consciousness. In a diary entry he describes the skin
of Naomi’s body as fairer than his own and thus revealing a more striking con-
trast than one between the tanned parts and the parts normally hidden under
her swimsuit.27 This comparative description subtly and yet distinctly reminds
us that Jōji’s body existed adjacent to Naomi’s and was neither transparent
nor transcendental. This example serves as a subtle reminder of the body of
the photographer, reminding us in turn of the space beyond the frame, the
“space-off.”
The photo-journal is only described and partially quoted (in a few entries),
without the images referred to being inserted into the pages of the printed text.
Jōji as the intra-diegetic narrator might have glued photographs to the pages
of his diary, but Tanizaki as the author has not followed suit. He might have
designed the images as voids, to the calculated effect of enticing the reader
to imagine Naomi’s body. In our context, however, the alleged “erasure” of the
images helps to keep the reader from a wrong impression, as though photog-
raphy were all about the object (in this case, Naomi) whose images have been
captured within the frame.
The narrative surrounding the diary suspends, until many chapters later,
verbal description of most of the images, while quoting a few diary entries. The
lapse in reference to pictures, however, does not necessarily suggest photogra-
phy’s irrelevance to the text. In the first reference to the photo-diary, the text
without image nonetheless exhibits a visual orientation that seems informed
26 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Naomi, 33–34. Chijin no ai, in TJZ 10: 39.
27 Tanizaki, Naomi, 33. Chijin no ai, 38.
by photography. Jōji’s eye is fortified by the use of the lens of the camera, even
when his hands do not hold the apparatus. The act of diary-keeping—both
quotidian and private, banal and secretive—is itself comparable to photog-
raphy. ‘Up close and personal,’ the diary registers what might escape one’s
consciousness as one lives one’s life—just as the camera can restore what the
naked eye cannot register instantaneously, for use at a later (any) time.28
Elaborating Walter Benjamin’s notion of “unconscious optics,” Marianne
Hirsch tells us (beginning with a quotation from Benjamin):
“The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis

to unconscious impulses.” The camera is like psychoanalysis. There are
optical processes that are invisible to the eye: they can be exposed by
the mechanical processes of photography. The camera can reveal what
we see without realizing that we do, just as psychoanalysis can uncover
what we know without knowing that we do: what is stored in the uncon-
scious. The camera can expose hidden dimensions of making strange
(“its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions
and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions”), just as psychoanal-
ysis can reveal unconscious content through the formal and precise tech-
niques of the therapeutic encounter.29
The camera, like the diary, is an effective weapon of the voyeur and fetish-
ist who fixates upon the detail of the object. Since Jōji has tried out different
lightings and different angles as he photographs Naomi, he becomes closely
acquainted with the texture of her skin—its grain, undulations, contours,
shades, etc. Only a photographer is granted such proximity as this. The photog-
rapher might abuse the right to indulge in voyeurism. He learns how to look—
as if his eye were the camera.
The visual intimacy, however, leads to the ultimate disconnection of the
subject of observation from his object. As Mieke Bal notes:
The fundamental characteristic of photography is that the bond between

subjectivity and vision is broken. This break is primarily temporal, but it
is also visual. It enables one to see not only what was and is no more, but
28 Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” in Liz Wells, ed., The Photography Reader (New
York, NY: Routledge, 2003), 139.
29 Hirsch, Family Frames, 118, with a quotation from Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, NY:
Schocken Books, 1968), 237.
32 CHAPTER 1
also the “coarse grain” that cannot be seen by the naked eye. It casts an
uncanny gloom over what we know to be inescapable reality; the close-
up gaze, like the photograph, separates the subject from the object.30
Jōji as the photographer acquires intimate knowledge of Naomi the object,

and yet his relationship with her, facilitated by the camera, is overwhelm-
ingly visual, turning her into an image and him into a voyeur. Though Jōji and
Naomi consummated their relationship around the time represented in the
excerpted diary entries, their sexual intercourse is hardly described, while
Jōji’s observation of Naomi’s skin proliferates in the narrative beyond the diary
entries. The camera lens as a magnifying glass replaces the naked eye; once
Jōji becomes a photographer, he cannot but observe Naomi with the camera
eye, even when he is not maneuvering the equipment. This photography-
inspired process of transformation anticipates the later scene wherein Naomi,
trying to tantalize Jōji with the imposition of a relationship of “just friends,”
makes Jōji observe the nape of her neck and her underarm up close, with
camera-eye proximity and intensity.31 The photographic as rhetoric is thus
manifest in scenes without references to photography.
Like the camera the photographic prints that Jōji contemplates facilitate his
transformation into a voyeur-fetishist. As the prints are “pasted” into the jour-
nal, it is likely that the pictures have not been enlarged. This is a prototype of
the fetishistic intimacy with the small objects that photographs are, as articu-
lated by Christian Metz:
The photographic lexis, a silent rectangle of paper, is much smaller than

the cinematic lexis. [. . .] In addition, the photographic lexis has no fixed
duration (= temporal size): it depends, rather, on the spectator, who is the
master of the look, whereas the timing of the cinematic lexis is deter-
mined in advance by the filmmaker. [. . .] Thanks to these two features
(smallness, possibility of a lingering look), photography is better fit, or
more likely, to work as a fetish.32
Until the delayed revelation of the reservoir of photographic images, the nar-
rative only states that Naomi’s face was photographed. Its comparison with the
face of Mary Pickford hints that the photographs may have been modeled after
30 Mieke Bal, The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually, trans. Anna-Louise Milne
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 203.
31 Tanizaki, Naomi, 228–29. Chijin no ai, 291–92.
32 Metz, 138.
close-up portraits of film stars’ faces.33—Though Jōji as the narrator confesses

early on in the narrative, “I still leaf through it [the diary] now and then,”34 it
is only after a long pause, as he throws Naomi out in a fit—and thus in her
physical absence from his immediate environs—that he turns to the photo-
diary, where the reader is confronted with images of Naomi’s body parts for the
first time. The lapse of time between photo-taking and photo-viewing is clearly
indicated by Jōji’s admission that he has all but forgotten about the photo-
diary, neglecting it for some time, long enough for the journal to be covered
with dust. Persisting across the temporal distance between photographing
and viewing are distinct traces (“freckles”) of his physical involvement in the
process of film development (the rinsing of the solution). The fact that they
catch Jōji’s attention before Naomi’s images do suggests his acute awareness of
his own body and the environment surrounding Naomi.35
Then Jōji opens the door to his prized possessions for the reader—Naomi’s
nose, then eyes, lips, a finger, arms, shoulder, back, leg, wrist, ankle, elbow,
knee, the sole of her foot—and compares them to archeological fragments
from ancient Greece or Japan.36 As strikingly and unabashedly fetishistic as
the abundance of images of Naomi’s body parts might be, the narrator’s atten-
tion is eventually drawn to his own involvement in the act and the effects of
photographic reproduction. Greg Golley articulates the effects of photographic
reproduction on the photographer’s body in this narrative as follows:
Jōji’s photo montage penetrates Naomi’s physicality in ways that would

have been impossible with the unaided eye. With its close-ups and
surreal juxtapositions, the narrator’s graphic memory book employs
the tricks and accidents of photography together with its ancillary
processes—development, cropping, assembly—in order finally to release
Jōji from the limits of his own body. And this may be the fundamental
irony of the novel’s eroticism. For the very apparatus that emancipates
33 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Chijin no ai, 4. Later, Jōji confirms that Naomi’s body line does not
refute the comparison, either (34). However, it is still her face that remains the focus of
the comparison, as it increasingly resembles the movie actress’s (39). Its comparison with
the face of Mary Pickford hints that the photographs may have been modeled after close-
up portraits of film stars’ faces. We will revisit this subject of the simulation of images
of celebrities’ faces, mass-distributed in the media, in Kanai Mieko’s novel Uwasa no
musume, in Chapter 4.
34 CHAPTER 1
the narrator from his organic senses produces an artifact that [. . .]
becomes itself the object of a deeply sensual experience.37
While Golley rightly emphasizes the extension and eventual “release” of

Jōji’s bodily limits through his engagement in the stages of mechanical and
manual reproduction, his body may well be envisioned as entrapped in
the material and environmental constraints of his activities, emerging out
of the transparency in which he as the observer and narrator has hidden him-
self. For the tasks of photo-taking and subsequent activities of film develop-
ment, editing and arrangement, his body had to occupy specific locations
and assume specific postures, which would have made him a spectacle had
there been a spectator. (We shall contemplate this shift in perspective further
in the next chapter.) Indeed, though without explicitly recalling the laborious
process of photo-shooting, Jōji’s thought rightly turns to his own acts of photo-
graphing and photo-viewing at the end of the passage in question.
“Why on earth had I taken such detailed photographs? Had I felt a premoni-
tion that one day they’d become sorrowful reminders?”38 These two sentences
highlight the conjunction of photographing and photo-viewing, two acts con-
ducted by the same individual, only at different times. The process of transfor-
mation of the producer of images into the consumer of prints is articulated as
not continual but continuing—after a rupture. The narrator’s remorse that he
lacked foresight and failed to predict his later anguish at viewing the pictures
constitutes and yet destabilizes his self-history. The disparity between physical
and mental activities and between past and present effectively questions the
autonomy and integrity of Jōji’s selfhood, which is a focus of his attention that
might appear to be projected solely onto Naomi’s body. “That which was there”
is not limited to the object within the frame of photographs; the photographer
reminds us that he also has been on-site and has left a trace of his presence that
could be recognized after the context of photographing has been dissolved.
Constructing Memory by Photography: “Yoshinokuzu”
The quasi-travelogue of the novella “Yoshinokuzu” (1931; trans., “Arrowroot,”

1982) unfolds the story of a failed attempt at writing a historical fiction. The set-
ting is the district of Yoshino, a topos multiply connoted by historical incidents
37 Greg L. Golley, When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, Science, and Ecology in Japanese
Literary Modernism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008), 114.
of dissidents taking refuge there from the seventh through the fourteenth
centuries. The narrator’s research for his historical narrative is interrupted by
the receipt of a letter from his college friend Tsumura, who, in search of the
origins of his long-deceased mother in Yoshino, enlists the narrator to join
him in his journey there. As the story develops, it turns out that Tsumura also
seeks opportunities to get better acquainted with a woman of his dreams who
resides in the area. The narrator’s interest in the local history, however, is never
completely replaced by his friend’s interest in his family history, and the two
storylines are intertwined throughout the narrative.
While a photographic narrative may seem perfect for the novella’s two nar-
rative strands, entailing, as they do, the search for personal belongings of the
lost mother and trips to historical sites—both eminently photographable—
“Yoshinokuzu” does not ostensibly capitalize on the function of photography.
Indeed, the only photograph mentioned in the story is a portrait of Tsumura’s
mother, which has been kept in her mother’s family house in Yoshino and is
immediately recognized by him as identical to a reproduction that he has kept
in his album. However, this encounter with another print of the same por-
trait, which should be precious to the son—who is evidently attached to his
mother and is in earnest search of any trace of her—does not produce much
excitement in Tsumura. The photograph is mentioned almost in passing, as if it
means little to him. The photograph’s relative lack of impact becomes obvious
especially in comparison with the mental image of the mother, imprinted on
him indelibly, which Tsumura speaks dearly of.
In a narrative that liberally details visits to specific places in Yoshino, many
of which are described as exceptionally scenic and drawing many tourists,
there is no mention of a camera. While the narrator and Tsumura comment on
the touristic experience, they do not seem to carry a camera or register anyone
else’s photographing. When they visit scenic spots that are famous, they merely
talk about gazing at the scenery and not about taking pictures (in marked con-
trast to the Makiokas, whose obsession with photo-taking we shall see in the
next section on Sasameyuki). Neither Tsumura nor the narrator is described as
reproducing images for scientific evidence of the artifacts that they are granted
rare access to, which locals have kept for a long period of time and unveiled
for these inquisitive visitors, objects that would attest to unknown details of
personal or collective history. In other words, occasions that normally call for
the use of a camera do not prompt photograph taking along the two main
characters’ journey.
Given the meager employment of photography in the text, it may not be
surprising that the original publication of “Yoshinokuzu” in the journal Chūō
kōron (January and February, 1931) was devoid of any photograph or visual
36 CHAPTER 1
illustration. The state of the story’s visuals, however, was then drastically ele-
vated in the Tanizaki Jun’ichirō Rokubushū: Yoshinokuzu (Tanizaki Jun’ichirō
Sextet: Arrowroot), the 1937 limited edition (of 370 copies) by the publisher
Sōgensha. In this later edition twenty-five black and white photographs by
Kitao Ryōnosuke (counting a two-page spread of the Imoseyama, a famous
literary landscape of two hills separated by a river, as one picture) are inter-
spersed among the printed text of seventy-two landscape-format pages.39
Those photographs are visual representations of places and objects related
in the text, though, as I shall explain shortly, they are not always mere illus-
trations that confirm textual descriptions of things of relevance. And yet, as
Komori Yōichi tells us, the reader experiences image and text simultaneously
in spatial coordination with each other on the printed pages. Each of the pho-
tographs is presented in proximity to a relevant textual passage, inviting the
reader’s eyes to travel the short distance across the page to visually confirm
what he/she is reading in the text.40
Hirayama Jōji traveled on foot into Yoshino to determine the camera posi-
tion for each of the photographs in the 1937 limited edition of Yoshinokuzu,
but he could not always find the exact standpoint that would enable him to
take a picture from the same angle. Hirayama consulted Kitao’s publications
and found references to the project of producing photographs retroactively for
Tanizaki’s novella, which did not suggest that the author accompanied the pho-
tographer on his trip for photographs for the book in question, unlike the case
of Georges Simenon and his photographer, which we shall see in Chapter 3.
Hirayama also contacted a nephew of the photographer, who was deceased by
the time of Hirayama’s research, with the question of how Kitao managed to
take pictures that seemed impossible to Hirayama. The nephew informed him
39 Kitao Ryōnosuke was the head of the photography department of the Mainichi shim-
bun and authored several photographic books. Of them one that is particularly relevant
to Yoshinokuzu is Sangaku junrei (Mountain Pilgrimage; Tokyo: Umezu shoten, 1919). In
the section entitled “Kiwa sammyaku jūsō” (Along the Kii-Yamato Mountain Range),
Kitao describes his excursion in Yoshino, passing the place “Shimoichi,” observing “hosh-
igaki” (dried persimmons) and tasting “kuzuyu” (hot arrowroot soup), covering common
ground and flora with Yoshinokuzu. See Kitao Ryōnosuke, Sangaku junrei, National Diet
Library’s kindai dejitaru raiburarii (Modern Digital Library), info:ndljp/pid/960878, p. 261.
For more on Kitao, see Richard Torrance, “Literary Accounts of the Decline of Senba,”
Monumenta Nipponica 67, 1 (2012): 29–73, especially 48–50 on his portrayal of Senba in
Osaka (the specific area the Makioka and the Okuhata families in Sasameyuki were from,
incidentally) in Kindai Osaka (Osaka: Sōgensha, 1932).
40 Komori Yōichi, Yukari no monogatari: “Yoshinokuzu” no retorikku (Tokyo: Shintensha,
1992), 110.
that Kitao was an amateur climber and would have been able to reach precipi-
tous places that average persons would not have had access to.41
This raises another question, about whether or not Kitao’s photographic
views represent what Tanizaki witnessed. Readers have wondered how
Tanizaki conducted on-site research into Yoshino for “Yoshinokuzu.” Obviously
we must not confuse the author with the narrator who details, if in an ambigu-
ous manner, his trips to Yoshino that informed his writing for an ultimately
aborted attempt at a historical novel set there. Hanada Kiyoteru, in his
“Yoshinokuzu chū” (Notes on Arrowroot, 1970), investigates Tanizaki’s pro-
cedure in writing this novella, in part by cross-referencing the author’s own
remarks on his trips to Yoshino in two essays, “Setsugoan yawa” (Nightly Chat
at Setsugo-an, 1967) and “Setsuyō zuihitsu” (Essay in Southern Settsu, 1935).
Hanada is inclined to trace Tanizaki’s ideas into literary precedents rather than
his expedition to the locale concerned.42 Though this tendency might simply
be attributable to Hanada’s own reluctance to cover the ground on foot, as
attested to by Ide Magoroku—a writer who then as Hanada’s editor accompa-
nied him to Yoshino and took pictures43—it seems safe to conclude that Kitao
the photographer had access to points from which to view the scenery that
Tanizaki the writer may not have reached.
If Kitao’s photographic vision exceeds what Tanizaki himself saw and
remembered, however, Kitao’s photographs do corroborate the author’s imagi-
native vision. The photographer did not travel with the author but rather after
the author; having read “Yoshinokuzu” in its journal edition, he knew where to
go and what to look for, and must have pondered how to enhance the effects of
the textual descriptions. That is not to say that the photographs simply repro-
duce references made in the text; rather, the photographer came to the task
with points to make in mind. The camera followed the pen. With the various
advantages available to him—of time, of the superior vantage points acces-
sible to him as a climber and of the technology and skills available to the pro-
fessional photographer using a Leica—he could present views that the author,
in some instances, could command only in his imagination.44
41 Hirayama Jōji, Kōshō Yoshinokuzu: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō no kyo to jitsu o motomete (Tokyo:
Kenbun shuppan, 1983), 121–32.
42 Hanada Kiyoteru, “Yoshinokuzu chū,” in Hanada Kiyoteru zenshū (Tokyo: Kōdansha,
1978), vol. 15, 401–17.
43 Ide Magoroku, “En no gyōja,” in Hanada Kiyoteru zenshū geppō 14 (attached to vol. 15),
10–12.
44 Hirayama quotes Kitao’s nephew’s testimony that the photographer was in possession of a
Leica. See Hirayama, 128. Kitao mentions his use of Leica in the aforementioned Kindai Ōsaka.
38 CHAPTER 1
FIGure 1 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Jun’ichirō Rokubushū: Yoshinokuzu (Osaka: Sōgensha, 1937), 25.
Photograph by Kitao Ryōnosuke. Reprinted with the permission of
Sōgensha, Inc., Publishers.
Komori Yōichi argues that the boundary between authenticity and fictiveness
is effectively blurred in the 1937 edition of the novella. Here, the least histori-
cally plausible or identifiable of the artifacts (such as things that belonged to
Tsumura’s mother) appear in the photographs, demonstrating their existence
in reality. Among the objects photographed are a hand drum purportedly once
possessed by Shizuka, the mistress of the late-twelfth-century military hero
Minamoto no Yoshitsune and a courtesan who later fled to Yoshino,45 with its
box and a note of attribution (Fig. 1) on page 25; a pair of Buddhist memorial
tablets in the possession of a local family, the Ōtanis, which the master of the
house speculates might possibly be for Shizuka, despite obvious chronologi-
cal discrepancies (Fig. 2) on page 27; a letter addressed to Tsumura’s mother
45 Yoshitsune, who fell out of favor with his brother and leader of the military clan, Minamoto
no Yoritomo, is associated with Yoshino in a jōruri play, Yoshitsune senbonzakura (1747; trans.
Yoshitsune and the Thousand Cherry Trees, 1993), a text cited in this novella by Tanizaki.
FIGure 2 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Jun’ichirō Rokubushū: Yoshinokuzu (Osaka: Sōgensha, 1937), 27.
from her mother, handwritten on Japanese paper crafted by the grandmother

herself, in two shots (Figs. 3 and 4) on pages 49 and 51; and the koto (a stringed
musical instrument) that belonged to Tsumura’s mother, shown in two pic-
tures (Figs. 5 and 6) on pages 60 and 61. Presented with images of artifacts
whose authenticity is questioned in the narrative, the reader is confounded
as to the trustworthiness of the technology of photography as a transparent
medium of representation.
Of the twenty-five pictures in the Sōgensha edition, these six photographs
of things of ‘dubious’ historical authenticity are numbers 10, 11, 15, 16, 19 and 20.
It appears as if the sequence of the photographs is meant to draw the reader/
viewer into the depth of a mystery that the reader cannot elucidate with other-
wise documented or certified historical facts, after establishing the narrator’s
procedure of historical investigation ( for his planned novel) and before com-
ing back to the world of modern rational consciousness.
These ‘fictive’ photographs also share another characteristic; they are all
printed without rectangular frames. While the other, ‘documentary’ photo-
graphs (of tourist spots, for instance) look conventional in their presentation
40 CHAPTER 1
FIGure 3 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. Jun’ichirō Rokubushū: Yoshinokuzu (Osaka: Sōgensha, 1937), 49.
42 CHAPTER 1
within rectangular frames, in either landscape or portrait orientation, these

photographs of mysterious artifacts are cropped to the outline of the objects
they represent and thus appear as if merged with the type (itself a visual
and material object) that occupies the rest of the space of the applicable
pages. While the conventionally framed photographs are clearly positioned
to fulfill their function within the modern visual and scientific paradigm,
demarcating the account (in the printed text) and its visible evidence (in the
photographs), the cropped photographs defy that logic and suggests the mate-
riality of printed characters, image and vacant space in the physical space of
a given page. In these non-striated pages there is no demarcation or hierarchy
between image and text, and they are all released in the Deleuzean smooth
space of the pages.
The 1937 edition also includes a few more visual accompaniments: kudzu
leaves (on the front cover, two leaves; on the back cover, one leaf); the reproduc-
tion of a couple of pages from Yamato meisho zue (Illustrated Guide to Famous
Places in Yamato, 1791); and Senoo Kentarō’s “Ishizuri kōka” (rubbings) based
on Higuchi Tomimaro’s drawings for the six chapter title pages. The coexis-
tence of photographs that represent modern visual recording technology and
more manual and traditional pictures complicates the state of the visual in yet
another way. The hybrid mode of illustration matches the story’s own multiple
levels of registration; hearsay, memories, personal correspondences, official
documents, songs, theatres and other performances all contribute to Tanizaki’s
narrative.
Another challenge that Tanizaki poses to the modern formation of knowl-
edge involves the modern division of the visual and auditory. The visual might
normatively be held responsible for the legitimation of facts in the modern age,
in contrast with the auditory, which might be commonly characterized as a
less reliable method of communication. Tanizaki, however, shows as well
as tells us about the letter and musical instrument mediated by the visual
medium of photography. By situating these memorabilia on the same ground
as other, more historically anchored monuments such as the tomb of Prince
Kitayama, Tanizaki successfully dissolves the demarcation between scien-
tific and anthropomorphic, modern and premodern, and visual and auditory.
Tanizaki not only contrasts official history with collective or personal memory,
but also lets the measure that is usually instrumental to the former attest to the
authenticity of the latter.
The 1986 Iwanami bunko edition of Yoshinokuzu Ashikari (which includes
both “Yoshinokuzu” and another story, “Ashikari” [trans., “Reed Cutter,” 1982])
has a note by the editorial staff stating that nineteen of the original twenty-five
photographs by Kitao are reproduced from the limited edition of 1937.46 The
nineteen that this paperback edition has are all the scenery photographs of
places mentioned in the narrative. Omitted are all the ‘fictive’ pictures. The
consistency in omission indicates the stance taken by the editor of the Iwanami
bunko, the large-scale paperback series by the established publishing house
designed for the enlightenment of general yet intelligent readers: privileging
photography’s commonly acknowledged complicity with historical authentic-
ity over the medium’s potential for its erosion.
Peace Disturbed: Sasameyuki
The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the con-
ditions of time and space that govern it. [. . .]
Hence the charm of family albums. Those gray or sepia shadows,
phantomlike and almost undecipherable, are no longer traditional family
portraits but rather the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set
moment in their duration, freed from their destiny; not, however, by the
prestige of art, but by the power of an impassive mechanical process: for
photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescu-
ing it simply from its proper corruption.
ANDRÉ BAZIN47
There is no shortage of photography in Sasameyuki (Fine Snowflakes, 1948;

trans., The Makioka Sisters, 1957), a novel about bourgeois family life in 1930s
Japan. In this book the so-called middle-brow art bears the loaded role of
registering, complementing and disrupting the affluent life of the Makiokas,
consisting of four adult sisters. Photographs in this narrative are no longer for
religious or biographical commemoration. Neither are they the result of an
obsessive and voyeuristic curiosity. Characters may still take pictures only on
special occasions, but the camera is more conspicuously in possession and
in use among the well-to-do family or by hired professional photographers
(in studio or on-site). Prints are filed in family albums, sent to friends and
46 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yoshinokuzu Ashikari (Tokyo: Iwanami bunko, 1986), 173. Incidentally,
“Yoshinokuzu” as collected in TJZ 13: 1–54, does not have any photograph included or
mentioned.
47 André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in Alan Trachtenberg, ed., Classic
Essays on Photography (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 242.
44 CHAPTER 1
families in remote places, and framed and displayed in homes for the purposes
of keeping in touch with those in distant space or time, minimizing effects of
changes and maintaining the order as much as possible. As characters interact
with cameras or live with photographs as things, however, unexpected conse-
quences are brought about to the effect of questioning photography’s function
in everyday life and family history.
Teinosuke, the husband of Sachiko, the second sister of the Makiokas, a well-
to-do merchant family in Osaka, has a Leica that he employs at annual cherry
blossom viewings—a prime example of photography as a bourgeois art. The
family ritual in places known for their cherry blossoms also becomes a public
affair as the Makiokas—Sachiko, her little daughter Etsuko and the unmar-
ried adult sisters Yukiko and Taeko—cannot but attract attention from other
cherry blossom enjoyers. The women of the family, fully adorned in expen-
sive kimonos for the special occasion and arranged appropriately by their
rank in the family, become a spectacle worthy of photographs to be taken and
archived not only by Teinosuke but also by strangers who witness “the Makioka
procession.”48 An encounter with a stranger who takes their photographs
respectfully (he even tries to reduce his presence to nil by letting them look
“away from the camera” and absorb themselves in appreciation of the petals on
the water surface) and with permission (so that the women are not taken off
guard) and then mails prints to them as promised at their parting epitomizes
the erosion of the boundary between private and public that the use of the
camera can make happen.49 The narrator distinguishes this type of intrusion
from another: “The polite would carefully ask permission; the rude would sim-
ply snap.”50 The episode illustrates two sides of photography, the quintessen-
tially personal (hence either the need for permission or “snatching”) and the
potentially public (an incidental action performed on strangers in the street).
The act of photographing in the street demands the reconfiguration of space
as previously defined by the boundary between private and public. This aporia
is sorely felt by photographer Kuwabara Kineo, whose philosophy of photogra-
phy shall be examined in the final chapter of this book.
Photography is double-sided in another sense, as the same episode reveals.
While the medium can capture a special moment in the irrevocable flow of
time, it can also help those in the photograph and behind the camera (in this
48 Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters, trans., Edward G. Seidensticker (New York: Knopf, 1957),
89. In the original, the phrase in question is simply “their [the Makioka sisters’] group”
(kanojo tachi no ikkō). Tanizaki, Sasameyuki, TJZ 15: 143.
49 Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters, 87. Sasameyuki, 141.
case Teinosuke) to revisit a space-time archived within the frame—figuratively

as viewers of the print or literally to repeat the photo-taking in the same place
at a different time, as here: “Ever since, they had made it a point to stand under
the same tree and look out over the pond, and have their picture taken.”51 In
this instance, special significance has been added to the site of the photograph
with the memory of the encounter with the incidental photographer and its
results. However, it is not only for that reason that Teinosuke repeats their
photo-taking “at all the usual spots.”52 The family ritual consists of both the
tour of cherry blossom vistas and the photo-taking that takes place there; both
the visit to the settings and the archival action there need to be repeated. The
photographs are (mechanically) reproducible, but the act of photo-taking
(and posing for the camera) is also reproducible and in fact must be repro-
duced. Photography is not just about the end result that lies flat within the
frame but also about the performance behind and in front of the camera. Thus,
Sachiko and Etsuko strike the same pose and have Teinosuke take their picture
just as the passing gentleman did one previous spring. Photography, in this
novel, is appreciated not for any ‘decisive moment’ itself but for its reproduc-
ibility, in print and in act. The medium is not a means to document a ritual;
it establishes an event as a ritual, a ritual this time of visiting a photographic
topos and reenacting the previously documented gesture—in other words, a
ritual of becoming the photographed, of performing the image. The order of
events as well as significance invested in them is reversed, with photographs
setting the standard for humans who reproduce images of the past.
The most conventional use of photographs for familial purposes involves
arguably the least conventional character, Katarina Kirilenko, a member of a
family of Russian refugees in Japan who takes doll-making lessons from Taeko,
the fourth and youngest of the Makioka sisters. Katarina shows photographs of
her ex-husband and daughter, who lives with him in England, kept in a family
album, to Taeko, Sachiko and Teinosuke as they visit her home upon invitation
to dinner. Katarina’s family also frames and hangs formal portraits of Russian
and Japanese emperors and empresses, to pay respect to them, to remember
the family’s past in their original home country and to show appreciation for
their acceptance in their present haven. Having moved to Europe in search of
a new life later in the novel, Katarina sends her mother, who has stayed behind
her in Japan, a photograph of the mansion in which her new husband lives. In
her life, which is anything but stable or mundane by the Makiokas’ standard
(even a relocation of family members to Tokyo horrifies them), photographs

46 CHAPTER 1
help her to keep in touch with physically, temporally or existentially distant

people, including those who have died. It seems that Katarina defies or denies
the incongruity and disconnect in her experience by way of the possession
(and sharing) of these photos as a means to transcend the temporal and spa-
tial distance that disrupts her life. The intent and effect of her use of photog-
raphy may be apprehended in comparison with the case of migrant families
discussed by Marianne Hirsch. Hirsch relates how the portrait of the lost elder
daughter of a husband and wife, who fled Europe and now live in the United
States, presents a rupture within the family between them and another daugh-
ter of theirs, born after the migration.53 Likewise, Katarina’s family pictures
may appear to restore and declare the continuity of her life with her Japanese
guests as witnesses, but the use of photography for this ordinary and predict-
able purpose may produce the opposite effect of reminding her audience (and
readers) just how irrevocable the temporal and spatial gap in her life is.
Just as photographs produce rather than document rituals, as we saw ear-
lier, they can also initiate rather than document family life. “Miai shashin,”
or portraits of eligible males and females in search of spouses, are circulated
through matchmakers at their discretion in this novel, whose main storyline
concerns finding a good husband for Yukiko, who is by the social standards
of 1930s Japan becoming an old maid. Though at the matchmaker’s disposal,
these pictures nonetheless remain the property of those photographed and
could be called in if the prospective spouses keep them beyond an appropriate
time, which would indicate their lack of respect or serious interest. The weight
of the artifact can overwhelm the entrusted viewers of the portraits, if they
are not ready to take the proposition seriously. Even those pictures profession-
ally taken (most likely in studios) and mechanically reproduced and distrib-
uted can be invested with the aura of the portrayed persons and demand due
respect. Thus, photographic portraits devoted to publicity can acquire pres-
ence in people’s emotional lives.
We see in the novel that portraits of deceased persons, typically displayed
on Buddhist altars, also play an important role in the depiction of this middle-
class family and its social life. While the narrator does not make a theoreti-
cal inquiry comparable to the one in “Shunkinshō,” Yukiko is displeased as
Nomura complacently allows her and her sister, brother-in-law and their mari-
tal mediator to see the portraits of his deceased wife and children during their
brief visit to his house;54 she takes Nomura’s lack of embarrassment about
53 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames, 17–40.

this as evidence of inconsiderateness and a revelation of how seamlessly his

current life has incorporated his previous marriage.55 The mediator, in con-
trast, is touched by the respect Nomura continues to pay to deceased family
members and interprets the incident as a proof of his affectionate nature.56
Evidently spectators invest their own meanings in the display of family por-
traits. As Susan Sontag tells us, the issue at stake is not what the contents of
photographs mean but what their use means.57 To Tanizaki too, what one sees
within the frame matters less than how the photographs function in the pho-
tographers’ and viewers’ lives—in other words, how people live with photo-
graphs as things.
As we have seen, Tanizaki not only attends to what lies outside the frame
when the pictures are viewed but also highlights what was in the “space-off”
when the pictures were taken. Again, the body of the photographer becomes
prominent in his narrative. The first appearance of Itakura the photographer,
who later becomes Taeko’s lover, is a spectacular example of the relevance of
a photographer’s body. Taeko is in the makeshift green room, in the upstairs
of the Makiokas’ family house, elaborately made up and costumed in prepa-
ration for her dance performance to come. The physical spaces that Itakura
occupies in this scene are significant. First, he is “standing on a stair, midway
between the ground floor and upper floor,” “with only his head above the
floor of the hallway upstairs,” “peeping into the room,” and then he “kneels
on the threshold” between the hallway and the green room.58 Both posi-
tions are transitory and in between, encapsulating both his physical mobility
and the situation’s social ambiguity. The latter is also evident in the form of
address that Etsuko uses (more on this shortly) for Itakura. Etsuko calls him
“Mr. Cameraman” (“shashin-ya san”), defining him by his trade, the only rea-
son for his admission to the strictly private space of the second floor, which,
though unusually open to non-family, cannot be trod upon by an unauthorized
person. Men are especially to be warded off, as the room is used as a dressing
room for female performers. Itakura overcomes the family and gender barriers
only in his capacity as photographer; reduced to the camera-eye, with his body
rendered transparent, he is virtually absent from the scene. Itakura accepts
the invitation promptly, without even waiting for the conversation between
Taeko and Etsuko to be over, and quickly puts his Leica to use, moving rapidly

57 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York, NY: Picador, 1973), 23.
58 Tanizaki, Sasameyuki, 267. Translation here is mine.
48 CHAPTER 1
and continuously around Taeko to take photos from every angle.59 He is like
a nomad, commanding space perceived as “smooth” rather than “striated.”60
Articulating his itinerary, the narrator observes the photographer’s body and
its movement, far from absent from the “in-frame” pictures. The text thus
restores the “space-off” of the photographs and reconfirms the corporeal pres-
ence of the photographer.
Ironically, while Itakura exploits his professional advantage to access Taeko’s
space, he also transgresses the boundaries of his capacity. Taeko chides Etsuko
for speaking inconsiderately, suggesting that she should instead call him Mr.
Itakura, as a respected individual. (The exact word Etsuko uses, idiomatically,
is “shashin’ya” [purveyor of photographic services] rather than “shashinka”
[master of photography], effectively defining him as a tradesperson rather
than a creative artist.) He thus capitalizes on the rigidity and porosity of the
social barrier alternatingly, to the effect of increasing intimacy with Taeko—in
contrast to Jōji, who exchanges a husband’s physical intimacy with Naomi for
the photographer’s privilege of optical proximity. It is explained that Itakura
has been commissioned to take promotional pictures of the dolls that Taeko
professionally produces and sells through her long-time boyfriend Okuhata,
whose elder brother funded Itakura’s business after his trip to Los Angeles for
an apprenticeship in photography. As we shall soon see, Itakura’s association
with Okuhata is also double-edged, both advancing and delimiting his access
to Taeko.
The narrator explains that Itakura has already visited the Makiokas’ home
and become acquainted with Teinosuke as well as female members of the
household. Itakura tells Teinosuke that the pictures he is taking of Taeko are
“to remember the occasion by” and offered free of charge,61 again ambiguat-
ing the nature of his position vis-à-vis the family: he is not “selling” his ser-
vices on this occasion. As Teinosuke extends Itakura’s offer and suggests that
he take a family portrait, Etsuko regrets Yukiko’s absence. Sachiko suddenly
looks saddened, which only two persons notice: Teinosuke, who often acts as
an attentive observer in the narrative, and Itakura: “Itakura looked up startled.
He was sure that as he turned his range-finder toward them he had seen tears
in Sachiko’s eyes.”62 It is one of the few moments when the narrator represents
59 This sequence of Itakura’s action is represented in Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters, 164.
Sasameyuki, 266–67.
60 Deleuze-Guattari, Chapter X of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
trans., Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 523–51.
61 Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters, 166. Sasameyuki, 272–73.
the interiority of a character other than the members of the Makioka family
and grants him/her subjectivity. This narrative exception captures not only
Itakura’s perceptiveness but, more importantly, the power of the camera that
allows the photographer to see what escapes the naked eye, with the help of
Benjamin’s “unconscious optic” that we recognized earlier in Jōji. In this case,
however, Itakura’s increased perceptiveness reaches subtle reflections of pri-
vate emotions that are inaccessible to others.
This chapter of the book ends in the midst of Taeko’s performance and
does not disclose the fact that Itakura stays behind and takes more pictures
after the recital, a fact that is introduced to the reader a few chapters later,
as Sachiko looks at the four photographs from that day displayed in Taeko’s
room. Sachiko recalls that Itakura not only took many pictures during
Taeko’s performance but also requested after the recital that she reproduce
some specific postures and gestures so that he could take more pictures.
Sachiko was present at the extra shooting and was impressed by Itakura’s
attentiveness to the lighting and other effects. But what surprised her most
was his memory of poses that Taeko took during the performance and his abil-
ity to excerpt specific moments from the dance according to the lyrics cor-
responding to them. Itakura even reenacted postures and gestures himself as
he gave Taeko direction.63 Sachiko’s recollection of the scene behind those
photographs reveals not only that Itakura has been a keen observer of Taeko’s
dance, but also that his own body has been looked at, by Sachiko (and the nar-
rator, who more or less assumes her viewpoint in this passage). The photogra-
pher’s body has become much more prominent than in Chijin no ai, the earlier,
quasi-confessional narrative, as the third-person narrative of Sasameyuki, with
multiple focalizers, manages to let Itakura exude corporeal presence that is
in sync with his photographic object’s body, as his assimilation of her perfor-
mance suggests.
All four framed photographs are from the post-performance reenactments
of scenes, not from the recital itself. The images are, then, multiply staged,
first, because their object was performing a traditional dance in costume, wig
and theatrical makeup; second, because the scenes were reconstructed under
the photographer’s direction; and third, because the pictures were selected by
Taeko, enlarged at her request and framed for display. Taeko not as the model
for but as the client of the photographs chose as the best representations of her
performance the fragmented and reconstructed images rather than “authen-
tic” ones from the complete and uninterrupted performance during the recital.
Photography involves and evolves around a dynamic process, despite the

50 CHAPTER 1
common perception of photographs being static and stagnating. In the process,

the myth of authenticity and transparency in photographic representation is
contested, while artistic perfection in enactment of prototypes is prioritized
and privileged.
The intent and effect of photographs, however, may differ markedly. Despite
the multiple staged-ness, the prints are not for public viewing but end up in
the private space of Taeko’s room, where Sachiko, alone, is absorbed in per-
sonal thoughts as she worries about Taeko’s whereabouts during the flood.
In the private viewing of these pictures, appropriate for fetishism in a bour-
geois household, Sachiko feels as though they had anticipated something
inauspicious—she feels a negative aura is being cast from the images. Then,
shifting her gaze to another, even more innocuous picture taken on that same
day, featuring Taeko with family members, Sachiko frets that Taeko may not
live to wear a wedding kimono again (the one worn for the performance
having been recycled from their eldest sister’s wedding).64 Here the pictures’
commemorative function is projected toward the future, wherein the pres-
ent will be the past. In this prediction of nostalgia, photography’s potential
for complication of temporality is anticipated if not yet fulfilled. The family
portrait that is meant to archive a memorable moment for future viewing
turns out in Sachiko’s interpretation (later proven wrong) to be an inadvertent
prediction of a future tragedy, that is, Taeko’s untimely death. A statement of
Roland Barthes’s—“I observe with horror an anterior future of which death
is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photo-
graph tells me of death in the future”65—can account for the premonition that
assaults Sachiko in this scene. The anticipation of death effectively reverses the
trajectory invested in photographs, from analepsis to prolepsis, which rightly
shifts the locale of photographs from that of their taking (to be flashed back to)
to that of their viewing (to be flashed forward to). The transformation is made
possible as photographs are, as Christian Metz suggests, in the hands of the
viewers who look at the pictures at later times, and taking as much time as they
can afford to, which changes the pictures from the products of instantaneous
operation to a fetish that possesses loaded temporality.66
As it happens, Itakura rescues Taeko from her teacher’s flooded house.
After that he takes even more liberties in exploring the Makiokas’ domestic
space, on his frequent visits to the area to document the aftermath of the flood,
making use of the leisure time created by the temporary decline in requests for
64 Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters, 189. Sasameyuki, 310–11.

65 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96.
66 Metz, 138.
his work.67 In contrast to Itakura’s enhanced presence in the Makioka house-

hold, Okuhata is now even more estranged from the house, even though he
had been unwelcome since his failed attempt to elope with Taeko many years
earlier. In fact Okuhata’s cool reception after the flood ironically involves his
possession of a camera. He surprises Sachiko by visiting her on the day of the
flood to ask after Taeko, and on this occasion Sachiko witnesses him carrying
a camera around. Sachiko speculates that Okuhata must be embarrassed by it
as he hides “a Leica or a Contax” from her eye quickly.68 As observed in 1926,
the devotedly fashionable people of the time would “carry a camera in lieu of
a walking stick.”69 Perhaps not unexpectedly for a son of a jeweler, Okuhata
appears accustomed to sporting it for its aesthetic appeal and to display social
status, a habit that he has neglected to check at this moment of grave concern
with his lover’s safety. The camera, like a fashion article, becomes a part of his
body, rather than the photographer’s eye. Okuhata’s desire to become a spec-
tacle rather than a spectator is fulfilled, albeit in an unexpected and inconve-
nient way. The sole observer of Okuhata’s camera, Sachiko, must share Taeko’s
disapproval, expressed later, of Okuhata’s prioritization of his grooming over
her safety. The lack of urgency and sincerity in the possession and display of
the camera (even though it is inadvertent) disqualifies him as a person to be
trusted. In this sequence of events, the camera is not an eye to fetishize objects
of representation but a fetish in itself.
Itakura on the other hand takes advantage of his possession and use of
the camera to approach the inner circle of the Makiokas. However, Itakura
interposes himself into the family not only spatially and for limited purposes
and periods of time, but also socially and then emotionally. He becomes
involved with Taeko, and the Makiokas can then no longer ignore the presence
of his body in their space. Itakura’s privileges make Okuhata jealous enough
that he forbids Itakura to take Taeko’s pictures, either on a commercial or per-
sonal basis. Despite the order, however, Itakura secretly takes photos of Taeko
on stage at another dance recital, this time in public space. In this scene the
67 The flood described in Sasameyuki is historical (1938) and is documented in many pho-
tographs. See, for example, the archive of the City of Kōbe, “Shōwa 13-nen Hanshin
daisuigai” (The 1938 Great Flood in Hanshin) in “Kōbe no suigai: Shashin kara miru sui-
gai” (Floods in Kobe: Floods Documented in Photographs), on the website, Kōbe saigai
to sensai shiryōkan: Heiwa no tattosa o tsugi no sedai e (Kobe Archive of Disasters and
War Damages: Appealing the Preciousness of Peace to the Next Generation) at: www.city
.kobe.lg.jp/safety/disaster/flood/flood03_01_05.html (accessed June 5, 2015).
69 Ise Kōji, “1920–30 nendai no Nihon no shashin zasshi 1” (Photographic Journals in the
1920s–30s of Japan), Shashin kūkan (Photographic Space) 1 (2008): 177.
52 CHAPTER 1
photographer’s body becomes spectacle yet again; it is no longer reducible to

the eye pressed against the viewfinder. Teinosuke, who is in attendance at the
recital, spots Itakura taking pictures. Itakura’s camera being a Leica, whose
operation is “famously quiet,”70 the noise of the shutter is not the reason for
the discovery. Ironically, the gaudy overcoat he wears to hide his face catches
Teinosuke’s eye. He then witnesses Okuhata confronting Itakura in the lobby,
reprimanding him for taking Taeko’s pictures despite his prohibition, patting
down Itakura’s overcoat in search of the camera, producing it from under-
neath, “pull[ing] at the lens with a trembling hand” and smashing it on the
concrete floor.71
This incident illustrates the corporeality and materiality of photo-taking
relentlessly and consequentially, a dimension on which Yukiko sheds further
light. As Sachiko reports the incident to her later, Yukiko’s immediate reaction
is to ask whether Itakura’s Leica was damaged.72 With “the first thing Yukiko
asked was a question to that effect,”73 the narrator reveals a slight surprise at
her concern not with the fact that the love triangle involving her sister has been
played out in public, but for the state of the camera. Relieved by Yukiko’s calm,
Sachiko replies that the lens must have been damaged at least, in response to
which Yukiko speculates that the film must also have been ruined, which has
been Taeko’s reason for taking out the costume for photographing a few days
after the recital. While Yukiko’s response evidences her taking the whole inci-
dent in stride on the level of the plot, it also reminds the reader of the rarity
of a Leica camera in 1930s Japan, and of the device’s firmly material presence.
It is visible, tangible and susceptible to violence. What this suggests is that the
camera does not remain a transparent medium for photographing objects but
can become a spectacle and an object itself, and that it can be intrusive to the
space of quotidian life.
Accomplices in the Staging of Fetishism: Kagi
Kagi (1956; trans., The Key) is a descendant of Chijin no ai in more ways than
one. While Jōji’s fetishistic fixation on Naomi’s skin and photographic prints is
inherited and expanded by the unnamed husband in the latter narrative, who
70 Alessandro Pasi, Leica: Witness to a Century (New York, NY: Norton, 2003), 26.
71 Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters, 285. Sasameyuki, 467–69. The translator Seidensticker
reads the character’s name as Okubata.
73 Tanizaki, Sasameyuki, 472. Translation is mine.
engineers secret photo-shooting and archives (and/or displays) the photo-

graphs with elaborate care. The physicality of the photographer, barely deduc-
ible in Chijin no ai, is explicitly represented in this later narrative because of
the husband’s sexual dysfunction. Jōji’s photographic diary lasted for a short
while, but Kagi in its entirety consists of entries from two diaries, kept by hus-
band and wife, separately—though unlike Jōji, both of these diarists write with
the expectation that the other will peek into his or her “private” thoughts. In
Kagi, relationships between subject and object in photography (photographer
and model, or photographer and spectator) and in writing (writer and those
written about, or writer and reader) are dialogic rather than unidirectional.
While his wife, Ikuko, is ostensibly drunk or asleep, he takes pictures of her
naked body, which he cannot penetrate because of his impotence, initially to
satisfy his desire to scrutinize it in a way that her sense of decorum would
normally not allow him to. The surface-oriented medium of photography thus
suits his need. In the supposedly non-consensual photographing, he imposes
on her unconscious body unusual contortions, manifesting the voyeuristic
and fetishistic orientation of his engagement in photography. The clandestine
activity in the bedroom then dissolves into a ménage-à-trois as he shares these
nude images with a third man—Kimura, whom the husband asks to develop
the films—with the aim of instigating Kimura’s sexual desire for her. Unlike
Jōji, who keeps to himself treasured prints of Naomi and laments her promis-
cuity, the husband in Kagi takes pleasure in sharing his wife’s images—and
then her body—with the rival designate. The ease with which photographs
may be shared is central to the photographic in Kagi. The husband thus takes
full advantage of the physical distance and visual intimacy that photographic
reproduction allows. The intervention of a third party not only complicates the
marriage but also, and more importantly in our context, helps articulate the
stages involved in photography, highlighting the acts of film development and
printing, mentioned only in passing in Chijin no ai. These maneuvers in the
darkroom shall be further elaborated in works by Abe Kōbō to be discussed in
Chapter 2 and those by Kanai Mieko in the final chapter.
The husband hatches the idea of photographing his wife’s body as Kimura
casually mentions to the husband one February 14 the availability on the mar-
ket of an expensive new camera called a Polaroid, imported from the United
States and, in Japan, exclusively used by photography aficionados. The machine
is equipped with film developing and printing functions and is easy to hold
and use, not requiring any auxiliary tool such as a tripod, Kimura explains,
though it does require a special, imported film that functions as both negative
and printing paper. He offers to rent one from his friend for the husband, who
is intrigued by the idea. Kimura’s motive for imparting the information to the
54 CHAPTER 1
husband remains unclear to him and makes him wonder why Kimura seems
to read his mind and know what has been transpiring between him and his
wife.74 Ikuko speculates in retrospect that he has taken a hint from Toshiko,
the daughter of the couple (more on her role later), that the use of the camera
might fulfill the husband’s voyeuristic potential.
The first instant camera by Polaroid, introduced to American consumers in
1948,75 at the historical moment of the story, occupies an ambiguous space
in the market economy of the time. Not yet a mass-distributed commodity,
it is at this point still a relative rarity possessed only by resourceful devotees
of photography. Kimura’s voluntary mediation to bring the camera from a
friend to the husband thus establishes a secret bond between Kimura and the
husband, verified in material terms through the personal rent of the rare arti-
fact. The camera’s function, however, has much more serious consequences
than those of the loan. It allows the photographer to produce his image prints
readily and automatically, and thus guarantees instantaneous gratification
of the desire to see the object captured photographically, without the usual
delays of developing and printing. Indeed, the husband reports that he has
already used the Polaroid camera twice in a diary entry as early as February 24.
After describing in detail positions he has made Ikuko assume for the cam-
era, manipulating her arms and legs, he lists his motivations for taking such
pictures: to take pleasure in his photographic direction of her as an object; to
enjoy the presentation of the finished products in his diary, which he knows
she will read and find the photographs in; to make her appreciate his passion
for her body; and to challenge the limits of her propriety.76 However, the hus-
band notes that the Polaroid camera fails to fulfill the second and third desires,
for various technical reasons: the lack of a rangefinder, the necessity of using a
flash and the limited availability of the necessary film. The husband is not suf-
ficiently convinced of the aesthetic quality of the end products to paste them
into his journal. The relative convenience touted by Kimura also comes with
other drawbacks. For one, it robs the photographer of the hallucinating plea-
sure that would accompany the processing of film negatives, which the nar-
rator of Hako otoko by Abe and of Tama-ya by Kanai elaborate on, as we shall
see. More importantly for this novel, the instantaneity of the film development
also deprives the photographer/spectator of the deferral between the filming
74 Tanizaki, The Key, trans., Howard Hibbett (New York, NY: Vintage, 1991), 43–44. Tanizaki,
Kagi, TJZ 17: 304.
75 Peter Buse, “The Polaroid Image as Photo-Object,” Journal of Visual Culture 9, no. 2 (2010):
193. I thank Michelle Smith for drawing my attention to this article.
76 Tanizaki, The Key, 52. Kagi, 310–11.
time and the viewing time—the time the husband needs to switch roles from
photographer to spectator, as Jōji does in Chijin no ai, and to experience the
tantalizing pleasure/torture of waiting. If, as Peter Buse discusses, the Polaroid
camera in the days of its vogue was appreciated as a performance, a sort of
magic act, rather than for the images it produced—“It is the spectacular display
of the technology’s workings which is most important; and attracting atten-
tion is the main aim of the operator”77—then it is not the right tool for the
husband, who has no intention of showing off the act of photo-taking and in
fact wishes it kept secret.
With the decision to replace the Polaroid with a Zeiss Ikon, the usual devel-
oping process becomes necessary, including a facility and an agent for the
operation. The couple’s house lacks a space to serve as a darkroom, and in
any case the husband dare not risk the wife’s discovery of his ‘secret’ engage-
ment, so he must seek an outside venue. The room Kimura rents has access to a
bathroom where water is abundant, a material and technical condition of film
developing. This is one of the reasons that the husband chooses Kimura for the
developer, another being he has already seen the wife’s naked body (having
helped her to the bedroom when she was intoxicated). The process of photo-
graphic reproduction then comes to involve a travel of the film out of the hands
of the photographer (the husband) to the developer (Kimura), who is implic-
itly granted an opportunity to reproduce and review the images for a reason
beyond his compliance with the photographer’s request: for his own voyeuris-
tic pleasure. Thus a theatrical space for shared, if temporarily distanced, view-
ing of the object is created, which was absent in the use of the Polaroid camera;
the Polaroid’s mechanical reproduction of images had been too instantaneous
and private to allow any spectatorial participation of a third party. Just as the
husband exposes a key to the locked cabinet to entice the wife to read his diary
‘in private,’ he invites the developer to view the photographic images of the
wife’s naked body ‘in private.’ In Kagi, the fetishistic gaze we acknowledged
in Jōji with the help of Metz is transplanted from the initial photographer/
intentional spectator (the husband) to the commissioned developer/inciden-
tal (or so staged) spectator (the lover). The two accomplices share in the act of
voyeurism, despite the temporal and spatial distances involved, through the
portability and reproducibility of photographic prints.
Kimura then capitalizes on the flatness and smallness of the photographs
to implicitly invite Toshiko, the daughter, into the voyeuristic act, by inserting
prints of Ikuko’s body in a book that the daughter has asked to borrow from
77 Buse, 199.

56 CHAPTER 1
him. He stages a “startling” revelation of the secretive act of photographing—

except that the daughter may have engineered Kimura’s involvement in the
first place. Ikuko suspects that the dazzling fluorescent lighting that the hus-
band has used to scrutinize and later to photograph his wife’s body must have
kept the daughter from sleeping. The sleepless daughter must have slipped
out of her bedroom to take a peek into the couple’s bedroom. The use of the
technical equipment not only facilitates theatrical representation but is also in
itself theatrical and collapses the banal bourgeois life of the characters. The act
of photographing, regardless of its objective, has the potential to interfere with
the wholesome lifestyle of families such as this one, wherein the boundaries
between private and public are articulated and stable.
Conclusion
In Japan’s evolving mass-market economy of the 1900s to the 1950s, the fetish-
istic proclivity of photography encapsulated the private possession of images
in contrast to cinema’s public space. Photographs, with their easier reproduc-
ibility and potential for dissemination—being compact, flat and affordable—
were perfect for household or private use and often employed in intense power
struggles within interpersonal relationships. Photography is most effectively
instrumental to the definition and articulation of human relations in visual,
physical and spatial terms.
Tanizaki, however, shows us that photographs are not the mere reproduc-
tions of reality that we tend to assume they are. Quite contrary to our con-
ventional expectation, they often fail to deliver authentic images or to archive
memories legitimately. Instead, they contest our memory, question the iden-
tity of the person photographed and embellish the portraits with meanings
that vary from one spectator to another. The photographer can manipulate the
camera as an outlet for voyeuristic desire, while the spectator can fondle pho-
tographic prints as fetishes. The relative longevity of photographic film and
the reproducibility of prints allow fetishistic desire to grow, while the complex
physical and material maneuvers of the camera and other equipment needed
for photographing and developing film resist the erasure of the photographer’s
corporeal presence from within the frame of the photograph. The material-
ity of photographs and corporeality of photo-taking and photo-viewing, which
proliferate in Tanizaki’s narratives, effectively destabilize the scheme of repre-
sentation, where object and subject, sight and meaning, body and mind, image
and text, now and then, and here and there are neatly differentiated in binary
oppositions.
CHAPTER 2
Anonymously Yours: Abe Kōbō’s Engagement

with Photography
In visual experience, which pushes objectification further than does tac-

tile experience, we can, at least at first sight, flatter ourselves that we con-
stitute the world, because it presents us with a spectacle spread out
before us at a distance, and gives us the illusion of being immediately
present everywhere and being situated nowhere. Tactile experience, on
the other hand, adheres to the surface of our body; we cannot unfold
it before us, and it never quite becomes an object. Correspondingly, as
the subject of touch, I cannot flatter myself that I am everywhere and
nowhere.
MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY1
…
The silence of the photograph. One of its most precious qualities, unlike
cinema and television, which always have to have silence imposed on
them—though no-one ever succeeds in this. The silence of the image,
which requires (or should require!) no commentary. But the silence, too,
of the object, which it wrests from the deafening hurly-burly of the real
world. Whatever the noise and the violence around them, photographs
return objects to a state of stillness and silence.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD2
1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge,

1962), 316.
2 Jean Baudrillard, “For Illusion Isn’t the Opposite to Reality . . .,” in Jean Baudrillard, Fotografien
Photographies, Photographs 1985–1998 (Graz: Neue Galerie, 1999), 135–36. In French, “Car
l’illusion ne s’oppose pas à la réalité . . .,” 85.

58 CHAPTER 2
Each of the thirty volumes of Abe Kōbō’s newest zenshū (complete works),
published by Shinchōsha from 1997 to 2000, comes with a slipcase designed by
Kondō Kazuya, with a photograph or two (or three, in the case of Volume 27)
gracing its interior (Fig. 7). Printed on the slipcase’s inside surface, the photo-
graphs would seem to be presented so as to frustrate any attempt to view any
one of them wholly in a single look—a presentation that silently challenges
the viewer/reader to somehow reassemble the image. The viewer/reader has
two “windows” through which to peer within. One is obviously the entrance
for the book into the sack, and the other is a small rectangular opening (6.4 cm
wide by 3.2 cm high) on the front side of the case (its front cover, so to speak).
This slit reveals the series title and the applicable volume number (e.g., “Abe
Kōbō zenshū dai 26 kan” [Volume 26 of the Complete Works by Abe Kōbō]),
which are engraved on a silver-colored plate affixed to the front of each book
and visible if the book is fully inserted into the case. When the book is removed,
each opening allows limited visual access to the photograph, printed continu-
ally on all the five sides of the slipcase. Unless one breaks the box and flattens
the cardboard it is made of, one cannot see the picture in its entirety in one
glance.3 Viewers must settle for tantalizingly obscure fragments of an image
glimpsed from different angles.4 In the process of this image reconstruction,
they are bound to find themselves in an awkward position vis-à-vis the box,
being reminded of their own physical presence in the space that they share
with the object. It would be productive to recall Kaja Silverman’s engagement
with Holbein’s The Ambassadors, which requires the viewer to shift position
from the center-front to the left to recognize the image of a skull that is flat-
tened and deceptively placed within the frame. As Silverman teaches us, this
picture reveals the contingency of the neutrality of the viewer’s perspective in
3 At the Abe Kōbō exhibition that took place in commemoration of the author on the tenth
anniversary of his passing, at Setagaya Museum of Literature, Tokyo, from September 27 to
November 3, 2003, the thirty slipcases were disassembled, flattened out, suspended, and
exhibited. See Abe Kōbō ten: Botsugo 10-nen (Abe Kōbō Exhibition: Ten Years after His Passing;
Tokyo: Setagaya bungakukan, 2003), 148–49, which presents a two-page photograph of the
display at the exhibition.
4 This is unless you view the photographs stored in the CD-ROM, a supplement to the last
volume (vol. 30) of zenshū, distributed only to those who have purchased the entire compen-
dium of the thirty volumes. The disk contains the flattened images printed in the interior of
the slipcases, each representing the rectangular slit and other irregularities needed to build a
box out of the paper. The dust jackets for Hako otoko (trans., The Box Man: A Novel, 1974) and
Moetsukita chizu (trans., A Ruined Map, 1970) in the Shinchō bunko paperback edition (2005,
2002), featuring some of Abe’s photographs, were also designed by Kondō Kazuya.
Anonymously Yours: Abe Kōbō ’ s Engagement with Photography 59
FIGure 7 The slipcase of Abe Kōbō, Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 28.
Designed by Kondō Kazuya. Reprinted with the
permission of Abe Neri and Shinchosha
Publishing Co., Ltd.
the Cartesian scheme.5 We can appreciate Kondō’s design along the same lines
as it confirms the presence of spectators’ bodies in three-dimensional space
and makes them recognize the corporeality of the “eye.”
Any reader of Abe’s fiction would associate such slipcases with the card-
board box of Hako otoko (1973; English trans., The Box Man, 1974). The narrator-
protagonist of the novel, the anonymous “box man” of the title, abandons his
home and goes into the street wearing a handmade cardboard box to render
himself anonymous and his face invisible. Significantly, the box man observes
the world outside the box (sometimes photographing it) through a slit he has
5 Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, 163–93.

60 CHAPTER 2
cut in the cardboard. Indeed, in an interview with Takahashi Seori, Kondō him-
self drew this analogy to the box in the novel.6 Though the readers can neither
wear the slipcase nor see the world outside the slipcase through its slit as the
box man would, the structural kinship to the box man’s box is obvious. In that
sense, the whole series can be seen as a vortex whirling around Volume 24, in
which Hako otoko is presented.
The box man in Abe’s novel scribbles his observations and reflections and
pastes negative films of photographs he takes of the outside world on the note-
book he carries inside the box he wears. With the analogy between the box and
the slipcase in mind, we might as well realize that not only does the slipcase’s inte-
rior invite our gaze upon it, but it also casts its own gaze upon us from within the
box. This slipcase design thus complicates the relationship between the subject
and the object of voyeurism, by exhibiting a seductive gesture that operates
both ways. In doing so, it ambiguates the Cartesian divide between the seer
and the seen, which is one of the central concerns for Abe, Hako otoko being
his prime expression of it.
The design also invites the reader/viewer to engage in a haptic encounter
with the author’s relic. The reader/viewer cannot help but take up the slipcase
in his/her hands to grapple with the picture inside the box. Its feel—its tex-
ture, weight and shape—stimulates the tactile sense. At the same time, the
reader/viewer’s perceived neutrality, along with the text’s perceived transpar-
ency, is effectively renounced as the positions of reader/viewer and book are
no longer stable and call for constant and eventually futile spatial adjustment.
This complicates the act of reading/viewing, generally considered an objective
and scientific procedure, by redefining it as a corporeal and multi-sensorial
activity that affects the conductor of the act.
The photographs within the slipcases are not the only images that adorn
the publication: there are also photographs on the inside front and back covers
(the paste-down endpapers) and on the loose endpapers in each volume, pro-
viding a pair of two-page-spread full bleed images in black and white, which
the reader/viewer can easily open and see as two-dimensional presentations
(Fig. 8). However, unlike those photographs printed within the slipcases,
whose provenances are provided, these flatten-able and thus easily visible pic-
tures lack captions or any other handles for interpretation that might establish
plausible links between them and the textual contents of each volume. The
6 Kondō Kazuya and Takahashi Seori, “Abe Kōbō to shashin (taiwa kōsei)” (Abe Kōbō and
Photography [In Dialogue]), in Abe Kōbō: Bōdāresu no shisō [Abe Kōbō: The Ideology of
Borderlessness] Kokubungaku kaishaku to kyōzai no kenkyū 42, no. 9 (August 1997): 128–34.
FIGure 8 The back endpapers of Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 19.

Photograph by Abe Kōbō. Designed by Kondō Kazuya. Reprinted with the
permission of Abe Neri and Shinchosha Publishing Co., Ltd.
reader/viewer is necessarily suspended in wondering why these pictures have

been selected for specific volumes, and how relevant they are to the contents.
In contrast, each volume provides a brief explanation of what the photo-
graph in the slipcase is and when and where it was taken, on the page prior to
the copyright page that also credits the designer. Kondō reveals in the afore-
mentioned interview that he was responsible for the selection of the photo-
graphs for the publication, and that one of the challenges he faced was to date
and arrange them as appropriate for the chronologically edited collection.7
7 Kondō was also behind the wheel for Shinchōsha sōgyō 100 shūnen kinen shuppan Abe Kōbō
zenshū [katarogu] (The catalogue for the Complete Works by Abe Kōbō in the one hundredth
anniversary of the foundation of Shinchōsha; Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1997). Most of the photo-
graphs included in this catalogue were attributed to Abe, though some are not credited and
thus presumably were taken by someone else (many of them featuring Abe). Some of them
look identical to those printed on the endpapers of the volumes in the zenshū.
62 CHAPTER 2
With the exception of Volume 1, whose slipcase is lined with a photograph of

Abe as a two-year-old in Fengtian, Manchuria (presumably taken by his father,
whom Abe recalls on various occasions as an avid amateur photographer),
all the slipcase photographs were taken during or around the time when the
works were originally published.8
Devoid of referents or information about original contexts, the endpaper
images call into question not only how the photographs were staged and why
they had to be staged that way but also what they represent, and thus seduce
the reader/viewer into the abyss of interpretation where no answer is to be
found. There is no answer because Abe, as we shall see later in the case of Hako
otoko, savors the incommensurability of image and text. In other words, the
confounding juxtaposition of texts and images, defying interpretation one way
or another, makes us realize how tightly we are bound to the practice of mean-
ing-searching and also how contingent and ultimately pointless that practice
is.9 Images, to Abe, should be free of meaning and unaccountable by way of
words; rather, they may be accounted for only by the “writing” of light—as is
evident in the name “photo-graphy” (as more than one cultural theorist has
pointed out).10
Though Abe’s zenshū is a posthumous publication, and the author’s
expressed will did not dictate its design, still the intersection of the visual,
tactile and textual properties embodied in the design seems to offer an entry
into Abe’s phenomenological journey.11 The designer Kondō suspects that the
zenshū could quite well be the last of its kind (i.e., a collection of the complete
works of a given author in print rather than in a digital format) and highlights
various material features of the publication (e.g., the metal plate affixed to the
surface of the front cover) in the aforementioned dialogue with Takahashi.
8 The attribution of these photographs to Abe is highly contestable. Most of the pictures
represent Abe and do not look staged, as photos taken by using a remote control likely
would. For example, Volume 28 has Abe seated next to Felix Guattari in a bar, talking to
him while gesturing with both hands.
9 For more on how Abe resists the ubiquity of the desire for interpretation, see my “Scratch
the Surface, Film the Face: Obsession with the Depth and Seduction of the Surface in Abe
Kōbō’s Face of Another,” Japan Forum 17, no. 3 (October 2005): 369–88.
10 Jean Baudrillard, Bernard Faucon, and Jacques Derrida all highlight the etymological ori-
gin of the word “photography” in the context of renouncing the semantic power of words
over images.
11 Different types of paper are used for text-only pages and those pages with photographic
prints (such as Toshi o toru and “Kamera ni yoru sōsaku nōto” [Notes by a Camera for
Fiction] in AKZ 26: 161–92), revealing the extent to which visual effects were taken into
consideration in the book making. I thank Jon Bath for pointing this out to me.
Intriguingly, Kondō also points out that the digital media are suited to Abe
above all other writers, given the author’s proclivity for mechanical repro-
duction, including his well-documented preference for word-processors over
other means of writing.12 Kondō’s comments, though made in passing, bear
profound resonance with the conundrum involving the virtual and the corpo-
real that Abe grapples with in his output in various media. As we shall review
below, Abe tries to account for the interface of the visual and the tactile in his
essays on cameras and photographs, most notably in Toshi o toru (Snatching
the City; 1980–84), a series of short essays accompanying photographic images
of his own production (he not only took the pictures but also developed the
film and printed the images).13 While Abe exploits assets of the “bilingual”
medium of the photo-essay, he is not oblivious to the limitations and prob-
lems of the image–text, which he often addresses metacritically in his writing.
In this chapter I shall examine three of Abe’s major photo-narratives—Hako
otoko, Toshi o toru and Toshi e no kairo (The Circuit to the City, serialized in 1978
and then published as a monograph in 1980). I shall also look at other writ-
ings that articulate his philosophy of photography, such as an interview with
Bernard Faucon, a French photographer praised by Roland Barthes and Hervé
Guibert among others, whose exhibitions and publications in Japan have
been successful; an interview (and its follow-ups) with Alain Robbe-Grillet;
an interview with Nancy S. Hardin that helps us better understand Abe’s use
of captioned photographs in Hako otoko; and essays on other photographers,
including, most importantly, Tōmatsu Shōmei and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
I shall utilize these texts to consider the following issues: how photography
helps to overcome the spectacle/spectator dialectic rather than reinforcing
and succumbing to it; how photography deals with the flux of the visual, tex-
tual, olfactory and tactile; and how framing a scene in photography undoes the
hierarchy of significance (or narrative) that the naked eye establishes.
Abe and Photography
Abe was accomplished not only as a novelist and playwright, but also as
a practitioner and critic of photography, and was a vocal and well-known
12 Abe was among the first to use word-processing machines in Japan. For more on this, see
my “Is the Pen Mightier than the Mouse? Phenomenology of Japanese Word Processing” in
Dennis Washburn and James Dorsey, eds., Reading Material: The Production of Narratives,
Genres, and Literary Identities, PAJLS 7 (October 2007): 85–93.
13 “Geijutsu no kanōsei o kirihiraku” (Opening Arts’ Potentials; January 1, 1980), AKZ 26: 431.
64 CHAPTER 2
presence in the latter capacities as well. He mounted exhibitions of his pho-

tographs and published them in art magazines such as Geijutsu Shinchō
(Art Shinchō).14 He sat on a few committees for photography prizes (includ-
ing the prestigious Kimura Ihei Shō [Kimura Ihei Memorial Prize] for the
best emergent photographer of a given year, conferred annually by the pho-
tography magazine Asahi kamera [Asahi Camera] since 1975). He reviewed
books of photographs, interviewed photographers and contributed cap-
tions, blurbs and other auxiliary writings to photographers’ published works.
He also evaluated newly released cameras for camera magazines. While
many formative theorists on photography, including Walter Benjamin,
Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, have not been accomplished photogra-
phers themselves, Abe was among those who were also proficient in the
use of the camera, joining the ranks of Pierre Bourdieu,15 Jean Baudrillard,16
14 Fifty-five of Abe’s photographs were exhibited at “Kobo Abe as Photographer, with
Illustrations and Set Designs for Kobo Abe’s Works by Machi Abe,” at the Miriam and
Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, in New York City in April 1996 (www.
columbia.edu/cu/record/archives/vol21/vol21_iss22/record2122.12.html, accessed April
29 2015) and then at “Abe Kōbō shashin ten” (Exhibition of Abe Kōbō’s Photographs),
at Wildenstein Tokyo, October 28–November 29, 1996 (www.wildensteintokyo.com/1996-
abe-koubo, accessed April 29, 2015).
15 Bourdieu is not only the author of the oft-cited Photography: A Middle-Brow Art (1965;
trans. by Shaun Whiteside, Polity; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990) but also
an accomplished photographer whose works have been exhibited in places including
Japan (Maison Franco-Japonaise, April 20–May 22, 2004; there was a much earlier exhibi-
tion in the 1950s, too). A notable publication of his photographs is Images d’Algérie: Une
affinité élective (Arles; Actes Sud, 2003), the contents of which seem to overlap with those
shown in the exhibition in Japan.
16 Jean Baudrillard, L’Échange impossible (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1999). An essay in the vol-
ume “La photographie ou l’écriture de la lumière: Littéralité de l’image” is translated as
“Photography, or the Writing of Light” by Francois Debrix (CTHEORY, 2000, www.ctheory.
net/text_file.asp?pick=126 (accessed April 29, 2015). The entire book, including this piece
(under the title of “Photography, or Light-Writing: Literariness/Literalness of the Image,”
139–47), has been translated into English by Chris Turner as Impossible Exchange (London
and New York: Verso, 2001).
Jean Baudrillard’s Photographies: Car l’illusion ne s’oppose pas a la réalité . . . (Paris:
Éditions Descartes et Cie, 1998) consists of a twenty-four-page essay (unpaginated) along
with, but not sharing the same pages with, photographs. The text in this volume has been
translated into Japanese by Umemiya Noriko as “Shōmetsu no Āto,” accompanied with
what looks like a French title, “L’art de la disparition,” in Shōmetsu no Āto (Tokyo: Parco
shuppan, 1997), 5–47. The Japanese translation was published prior to the French text and
under a different title. Between the French and the Japanese editions, images vary slightly
Taki Kōji17 and Kuwabara Kineo,18 to mention a few. Abe won some amateur
photographic competitions while still a boy in Manchuria, having been influ-
enced by his camera-mad father,19 and in an interview from 1973 claimed that
“[p]raise of my photographs makes me happier than praise of my novels.”20
Abe’s activity as a camera critic is equally important in our context as it sug-
gests the professional level of his knowledge of photographic technology and
machinery, accepted at the time as being sufficient for the media and consum-
ers to count upon. He knew photography is not just representation of some-
thing else but is a practice that involves manual handling of a machine that
lets light “speak.” As Jean Baudrillard puts it: “Whatever the set-up, one thing is
always present in photography: light.”21
in selection, order, and other factors (size, positioning in a page; in one case reversed),
possibly stemming from the production of distinct exhibitions or book-making methods.
The text is translated into German and English in Jean Baudrillard, Fotografien
Photographies, Photographs 1985–1998, in which the French version also appears.
A similar line of argument, with some almost identical passages, had been published
in English as The Art of Disappearance, trans., Nicholas Zurbrugg (Brisbane, Queensland:
Institute of Modern Art, 1994), a publication on the occasion of the exhibition “The
Ecstasy of Photography” (March 31–April 30, 1994) and the symposium “The Art of Theory:
Baudrillard in the 90s.”
17 Taki Kōji, Shashinron shūsei (A Compendium of Studies of Photography; Tokyo: Iwanami
gendai bunko, 2003). He published his own photographs in journals such as Provoke.
18 As the editor in chief for photographic journals such as Shashin geijutsu (Art of
Photography), Kuwabara published many essays on photography. The most celebrated
may be Watakushi no shashinshi (My History of Photography; Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 1976),
which I shall cite at some length in the final chapter. His major work (photographs of
Tokyo and the former Manchuria) has been assembled in two-volume book, Shiteki Shōwa
shi: Kuwabara Kineo shashinshū, edited by Itō Shin’ichi and Hirashima Akihiko (Personal
History of Shōwa: A Collection of Photographs by Kuwabara Kineo; Tokyo: Mainichi
shimbunsha, 2013).
19 The darkroom Abe’s father had at home is mentioned in “Toshi e no kairo,” AKZ 26: 214.
See also Abe Neri, Abe Kōbō den (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2011), 30. This biography by Abe’s
only daughter includes many photographs by and of Abe, and offers retrospective com-
ments made by his friends on his cameras and photographs in interviews conducted by
the daughter, originally published in geppō (monthly reports) inserted in each volume
of AKZ.
20 “<Abe Kōbō to no taiwa> [kikite] Nancy S. Hardin (Shields)” (1973), AKZ 24: 468–80. It
is translated as Nancy S. Hardin and Abé Kobo, “An Interview with Abé Kobo.” Contem
porary Literature 15, no. 4 (Autumn, 1974): 439–56. Quotations are from the latter, English
version, 448.
21 Jean Baudrillard, “Photography, or Light-Writing: Literalness of the Image” in Impossible
Exchange, 141.
66 CHAPTER 2
Equally noteworthy is the fact that Abe’s engagement with the art of pho-
tography is not limited to pressing the shutter release button. He states proudly
that he takes care of the developing and enlarging of his films, which puts
him at “an advantage, empowered to restructure explicitly the moment that
the photograph was taken.”22 Abe’s wholesale engagement with photography
reminds us that this art is not just about printed images but also about the
actions of photographing, developing and processing, which involve the move-
ment of various body parts, including but not limited to the eyeballs.
The Author as Actor
Facing the black-glass walls of the city hall, I set up my camera, using the
wide-angle lens, and focused. I meant to take a souvenir photograph of
myself and the street, but everything was too transparent. Not only the
light but the people as well: you could see right through them. Beyond
the transparent people lay a transparent town. Was I transparent, then,
too? I held a hand up to my face—and through it saw buildings. I turned
around, and looked all about me; still everything was transparent.
ABE KŌBŌ23
As we saw earlier, Abe declares that he dictates the photographs he has taken,
precisely through his physical proximity to, and control over, the process of
reproduction. Along the lines of Imahashi Eiko’s caution that we should be
aware that the (re)production of photographic images involves many selective
stages,24 if we seek the authorial intent or design manifested in the sequence
of multiple definitive junctures, then we need to know exactly where the art-
ist lets go of his/her work as completed. Abe is so “hands-on” that he does
not release a picture without ensuring that every dimension of it is to his
satisfaction.
22 “Shingata 4-kishu o shindan: Ōto fōkasu jidai no tōrai!” (Diagnosis of Four New Models:
The Age of Auto-Focus Cameras Is Here! 1980), AKZ 27: 50.
23 Kobo Abe, The Ark Sakura: A Novel (1984; trans. Juliet Winter Carpenter, 1988; New
York, NY: Vintage International, 2009), 335–36. The scene in this passage could be read
as an embodiment of the transparency of the subject and the object as elucidated by
Baudrillard.
24 Imahashi Eiko, Foto riterashī: Hōdō shashin to yomu rinri (Photo Literacy: Journalistic
Photography and the Ethics of Reading; Tokyo: Chūkō shinsho, 2008), 25–32.
This show of confidence in directorial control does not mean complacence

with the perceived omniscience of the observer over the spectacle. One would
expect Abe, the author of Moetsukita chizu (1967; English trans., A Ruined Map,
1969), a metafictional novel in which the detective becomes the missing man
whom he is after, to have been aware of the equivocation and precariousness
of the polarity between subject and object in any dialectic enterprise. Does he
then address the susceptibility of authorial control when it comes to the art of
photography?
A caption attached to one of the photographs inserted in Hako otoko reads:
In seeing there is love, in being seen there is abhorrence. One grins,

trying to bear the pain of being seen. But not just anyone can be some-
one who only looks. If the one who is looked at looks back, then the
person who was looking becomes the one who is looked at.25
As Merleau-Ponty suggests, vision is a part of one’s physical movement, and

the owner of the vision is not only seeing but also being seen.26
Just as the (unsuccessful) viewers of Abe’s photographs in the interiors of
the zenshū slipcases realizes that their perspective is imperfect and that their
presence is not transcendent, however, the photographic author comes to real-
ize that he is on-site neither as the “origin” of the image he produces nor as the
vanishing point in the Cartesian picture, but as something that is fleshed out,
occupying a part of the space wherein photographing takes place and being
seen by others, including those within the frame. The integration of vision and
touch with each other, managed by the eye and the hand, seems to complicate
the aforementioned total control of the process of photographic reproduction.
While the photographer’s control over photographs becomes more extensive,
the photographer grows more vulnerable than authorial in the growing aware-
ness of his/her physicality that cannot be neutralized in his/her capacity as
director or spectator.
25 Abe, The Box Man: A Novel (New York, NY: Vintage, 1991), 81; Hako otoko AKZ 24: 44. In the
Japanese original, “one grins” is “hito wa ha o muku,” which literally means “one reveals
one’s teeth,” suggesting not purported congeniality (as “grin” might) but hostility and
readiness to attack. (This is a minor point of contention, as “ha o muku” is a slightly unidi-
omatic expression; “kiba o muku” [literally “to reveal one’s fangs”] is definitely a hostile
act, while “ha o miseru” [literally “to show one’s teeth”] is a performance of congeniality. It
is unclear which Abe had in mind when he used an expression midway between the two,
as his expression is less idiomatic than those two are.)
26 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception.
68 CHAPTER 2
How does Abe cope with the discomfort (or hallucination) of being cor-
poreal while being in charge of identifying and registering spectacle? How is
the power of vision, often thought to be monolithic and autonomous, com-
promised in Abe’s paradoxical writing that releases the visual being into a web
of senses?
The physical intimacy that Abe suggests he maintains with his photographic
equipment is evident in many essays in which he recounts his activities as a
photographer. When he decides to add a new camera to the bag of equipment
he carries around, one he has reviewed favorably for a camera magazine, he
says he will not mind the extra burden because “I usually carry around with
me two sets of SLRs [single-lens reflex cameras] and six rolls of replacement
films, without minding the weight—well, to be honest, quite minding it.”27
Abe is clearly aware of the photographer’s body that shoulders the weight of
the equipment. Both the pleasure and perseverance of taking photographs
are rooted in the physical labor of managing and maneuvering the cameras.
Just as the camera cannot be reduced to its lens, the photographer cannot be
reduced to his eye.
Abe does not remind us of the conspicuous visibility that he as the pho-
tographer brings to bear precisely because of the equipment he carries—the
pure size of it, bound to attract attention from others in the surroundings.
However, we do know from an earlier passage in Hako otoko that he is aware
of the dynamic and volatile relationship between the seer and the seen. At
the very least, here Abe renounces the idea of the photographer/camera as an
eye, pointing our attention to the presence of the lens as a thing and the body
behind it.28
Susan Sontag elucidates in On Photography the myth that the auto-focus
camera—the kind of camera that Abe favorably reviews in the essay that the
above passage about carrying around equipment comes from—never misses
the mark. Quoting from Kodak’s 1888 advertisement, “You press the button,
we do the rest,” Sontag notes that the new camera, according to its manufac-
turer, “insures veracity and banishes errors, compensates for inexperience and
rewards innocence.”29 Some of the points she makes en route seem relevant
to our concerns with the corporeality of the photographic act, albeit tangen-
tially. While primarily addressing the boundaries between the intentionality
and contingency of photographing, Sontag, not entirely “by inadvertence,”
27 “Shingata 4-kishu o shindan: Ōto fōkasu jidai no tōrai!” in AKZ 27: 50.
28 See statements to similar effect made by Tamura Shigeru and Kuwabara Kineo in the final
chapter.
29 Sontag, 53.
demonstrates the possibility that the prominence of the photographer’s physi-

cal presence itself becomes a spectacle. Her summary of Buster Keaton’s The
Cameraman (1928) articulates the awkward and out-of-place public presence
of the photographer, who has his/her hands full with bulky equipment and can-
not fail to draw attention, especially when things get “out of hand,” figuratively
and literally.30 Photographers are thus always prone to becoming spectacles
themselves, while by default spotting and casting an eye on spectacles other
than themselves. As Merleau-Ponty suggests, “as the subject of touch I cannot
flatter myself that I am everywhere and nowhere.”31 Instead of claiming a neu-
tral and transparent position, the photographer has to be somewhere specific
and thus is limited in his control of space and bodies, his own or others’.
Unlike Abe the novelist, who fixates upon the physical susceptibility of the
photographer to the environment, Abe the photographer tends to suppress his
corporeal presence in the formation of identity. He is unlike David Hockney,
who lets a piece of his own body sneak into the frame, be it the tips of his
shoes, a reflection of himself with a camera in his hands in a mirror, or rolls of
film used or to be used in the same photo shoot, to suggest adjacency of the
space within and outside the photographic frame and the crossing of the pho-
tographer’s body through it. Rather, Abe is anxious to withdraw his body from
the sphere of visibility and retain his anonymity: “My preference is to have
my picture taken as little as possible. I do not want to appear on television. I
do not wish to lose my own anonymity.”32 While some photographers seek a
status of celebrity for themselves, Abe chooses to stay behind the lens rather
than breach the frame to challenge the subject–object dialectic.33 This is obvi-
ously not because he is unaware of the possible transgression of the boundary
between seer and seen, which he persistently addresses in his fiction. It would
make more sense to attribute this reluctance to expose his body to the other’s
gaze to the fear of the potential reversal of positions—alarmed, he clings even
more firmly to his safety zone, so that he will not be drawn into a tug of war
with the seer. It is understandable if he wishes to maintain the stronghold of
30 Ibid., 53. Kanai Mieko, the subject of Chapter 4, has written a review of the Buster Keaton
film, which we shall examine in due course.
31 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 316.
32 Abe, “Tokumeisei to jiyū no genten no hassō” (The Original Conception of Anonymity
and Liberty, 1978), AKZ 26: 269.
33 Common use of pseudonyms among professional photographers (e.g., Brassaï, Man Ray,
or even Ararchy) suggests their simultaneous desire for anonymity and fame, or slippage
of their presence around the registering apparatus; their real names will remain obscure
while the new labels they have chosen to attach to themselves highlight their prominence
in public space.
70 CHAPTER 2
the status as a box man without being replaced by a fake box man, out of acute
awareness of the volatile relation between subject and object of seeing.34
Abe does seem to assume, however, that as a photographer he will not
exploit the properties of invisibility and anonymity to exercise voyeurism and
instead will share them with those across the camera lens. The continuous
opacity and intangibility across this polarity is evident in the following excerpt
from “Inu no me” (Dog Eye), the ninth installment of the series Toshi o toru:
City dwellers’ eyes are like dogs’ eyes. [. . .] Indeed it is difficult to com-
mand the entire landscape in a city. Beyond walls, or even beneath
the ground you walk on, another, unimaginable city is hiding itself.
If the scope of your vision is limited to several meters, then there is noth-
ing to do but, dog-like, walk with your body tilted forward, your nose
brushing the ground. No need to worry if there is a sky. [. . .] The gaze in
the city lowers itself increasingly. Though we see fewer dogs than before,
the crowd of people who became doggish has already become banal
scenery. That’s why I always photograph with my camera lowered.35
What we see here is a parallel between the gaze of the photographer and that
of the people he photographs. Since the latter have been submerged, the for-
mer must be as well. The anonymity of the photographer is not a privilege that
he enjoys exclusively, that sets him apart from the rest; for Abe, the people on
the opposite side of the lens are also anonymous by virtue of living in urban
space, where identity is not given but only contingent.
In the fifth anecdote of the series Toshi o toru, “Damashie” (Trompe-l’œil),
Abe questions the validity of photography as a means of identification of inci-
dental models:
Scenes within photographs give the illusion of being visible, and yet what
they offer is only approximation. This is just as a point [in geometry] is
not an existence but a definition. The person who is registered in a pho-
tograph may have existed, but his/her existence is yet to be verified.36
34 One of the relatively few portraits of Abe, taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson, is the photo-
graph that Kondō Kazuya chose for the front cover of the promotional catalogue for the
zenshū. See Kondō and Takahashi, 130.
35 AKZ 26: 450.
36 AKZ 26: 442.
As is evident in the quotation above, Abe does not believe in the role of pho-
tography as a means of identification. Rather than capturing a unique quality
of an individual, photography suggests that a given subject could be anyone/
anything/anyplace when photographed, and that an image of a person could
belong to anyone. As Jean Baudrillard suggests, the camera should not uncover
the identity behind the mask but instead reveal the mask behind the identity:
“we must reveal the mask or the figure which haunts a person, and withdraw it
from their identity—the masked divinity which inhabits every one of us, even
the most insignificant, for an instant, one day or another.”37
Image–Text Conspiracy and Coercion
Peeping is in short a replacement of voices. Seeing is usually [an act] in

the first person. If you peep, however, it’s no longer in the first person.
Indeed, the act neutralizes voice. Peeping is not exactly in the third per-
son, but it is a quasi-third person act—especially if the one being peeped
at is not aware of being peeped at.
Incidentally, fiction is in essence voyeuristic; the author writes in third
person. It is exactly the voyeur’s position [that he/she assumes], isn’t it?
ABE KŌBŌ38
Abe uses a visual metaphor of “voyeurism” to define the essential orientation

of fiction in the passage above, excerpted from “Toshi e no kairo,” an interview
attached to “Kamera ni yoru sōsaku nōto” (Notes by a Camera for Fiction), a
series of his photographs.39 The “third person” narrative purports to be omni-
scient, objective and transparent, neutralizing the involvement of the narrat-
ing subject in the process of storytelling. The same understanding has been
applied to photography without regard to the photographer’s mediation. (In
Hako otoko, the novel that we shall examine closely later in this chapter, the
37 Jean Baudrillard, “The Art of Disappearance,” 7.

38 Abe, “Toshi e no kairo,” AKZ 26: 216.
39 The selection of photographs vary between the first book edition of Toshi e no kairo and
the edition that is included in AKZ 26. The endnotes of the latter explain that the first edi-
tion reprinted the photographs from earlier publications in two journals—eleven from
“Kamera ni yoru sōsaku nōto,” Umi (April 1978) and one from “Watashi no Amerika” (My
America), Yuriika [Eureka] (March 1976)—while the AKZ 26 edition has an additional
picture from the latter journal. My research has proven that the AKZ 26 version has taken
three pictures from the latter journal. See also n. 109.
72 CHAPTER 2
protagonist, revealing himself as a photographer, defines the role as essentially

that of a voyeur.)40 That is the reason that both prose fiction and photography
have been instrumental to the legitimization of modern scientific truth-
making, which is based in the Cartesian vision. In the modern regime, the
body of the observer is virtually absent while his hypothetical eye measures
and controls the space-time. Abe’s statement above unburies the mechanism
of the conspiracy of fiction and photography with the regime of modern sci-
entific representation and demotes the two media to practices of voyeurism.
This leads us to a couple of questions. How does Abe coordinate photogra-
phy and fiction, both of which he defines as voyeuristic, in photo-texts? How
does recognizing the limitation of the power of vision necessitate a revision
of narrative authority? In light of the prominence of Abe as novelist and play-
wright, and the primacy of textual output for him, one might suspect that he
would control images by verbally providing an interpretation or by reducing
them to illustrations of the story, based on the distinction between the two
media, with one being physical and mute and the other being metaphysi-
cal and expressive. This expectation, however, proves to be furthest from the
author/photographer’s practice. The photographic printed images embedded
in both the Japanese and the English editions of Hako otoko—eight prints with
captions plus a copy of a film strip, textually unaccompanied, that prefaces
the novel (more on this later)—do not serve to illustrate any scene or narra-
tive segment but appear tangential to the story, if relevant at all. On the other
hand, when photographs or negatives are mentioned in the narrative, we do
not see copies of them printed on the pages we read. Given the box man’s pre-
occupation with photography—he discloses that he has been a photographer,
and that he carries around a camera with him as he roams the streets41—the
seeming irrelevance, if not indifference, of the narrative and the photographs
(and their captions) to each other begs further investigation.
An interview of Abe conducted by Nancy Hardin (Shields) reveals some
insights into Abe’s use and disownment of photographs in Hako otoko. As he
is asked to speak of the eight photographs inserted into the book, Abe is reluc-
tant to oblige, first describing the photographs as “a kind of montage” and thus
“rather difficult to explain.”42 Then, pursued to account for the relation of one
of the captions to the image it is attached to (“Here is a town for box men.
40 Abe, The Box Man, 28. Hako otoko, AKZ 24: 32.
41 Abe, The Box Man, 24. Hako otoko, AKZ 24: 29. Incidentally, a camera is not among the box
man’s belongings listed in the chapter “Instructions for Making a Box” (The Box Man, 7;
Hako otoko, AKZ 24: 15).
42 Nancy S. Hardin and Abé Kobo, “An Interview with Abé Kobo,” 448.
Anonymity is the obligation of the inhabitants, and the right to live there is
accorded only to those persons who are no one. All those who are registered
are sentenced by the very fact of being registered”)43—the place wherein the
image and its caption come closest to the plot of the narrative—he replies:
“The captions are not really relevant. These poems only emphasize that I think
the photograph as a whole should be a poem.”44 This short remark reveals
a formative principle of Abe’s coordination of image and text. It is not as if
image and text are parallel and share a meaning; rather, it is their commonal-
ity in aversion to narrativity that brings them together. Text and image are not
accomplices in the production of a narrative but are complicit in the rejec-
tion of a narrative. The two media do not serve the purpose of telling a story
collaboratively but instead defy the system of the signification, exposition
and legitimization of objectively established truth. They are both antithetical
to what they were made to support, and yet they remain indifferent to each
other. (This relation between image and text, an alignment only in their anti-
narrative stance, manifests itself in Kanai Mieko’s 1980 book Kishi no machi,
produced in collaboration with photographer Watanabe Kanendo, which shall
be discussed in Chapter 4.)
If the “poems” and the photographs in Hako otoko are complicit in the
renunciation of meaning, then how do these eight pairings relate to the overall
narrative of the book? In the same interview Abe further dispels the myth of
image–text unison on another level, namely, in terms of the arrangement
of the images, or intra-image relations. When asked by Hardin if there is “any
particular reason for the order of the photographs or that the one of the dis-
carded trucks comes last,” Abe replies: “Whether there is meaning or not,
I have forgotten. Each photograph resembles a poem,” while willingly remi-
niscing about surroundings for some of the picture-taking.45 Abe sounds less
interested in the way images contribute to the narrative of the photo-roman
than in either the autonomy of “each photograph” or the contiguity of printed
45 Ibid., 449. The first edition of Hako otoko (Shinchōsha, 1973; this novel was published in
its entirety at once, never being serialized in a journal as is usually the case with Japanese
book-length fiction), very much like the zenshū edition, groups four photographs together
and then another group of four photographs, obviously to facilitate bookbinding. The
order aside, the coordination is thus very much driven by a material reason. In contrast,
the English translation of the novel The Box Man (hardcover, New York, NY: Knopf, 1974;
paperback, New York, NY: Vintage, 1991) disperses the eight photographs, printing each
separately, with the reverse of each photo-page left blank, for greater visibility of the
image and the caption without competing with text printed on the back.
74 CHAPTER 2
images to the space-times of photographing. Within this simple statement,

Abe denies both the liaison (sequential progression or other) of the photo-
graphs and their complicity with the story. To him, it appears, images are traces
of what was then the “here and now” and thus are indexical rather than icono-
graphic. They are incidental, and neither instrumental to the production of
meaning nor accounted for by text. Neither the text that shares the pages of
Hako otoko nor the words Abe dispenses in conversation with Shields should
complement the images by interpreting them. “I have not talked about these
photographs to anyone,” he comments in an interview. Disclosing that his only
confidant in the matter was his Knopf editor, Harold Strauss, another photog-
raphy aficionado, who was unimpressed by Abe’s work, Abe jokingly suggests
that Shields explain them to him.46 Abe is not inclined to explain photographs
in words. As we shall see shortly per his remark on Cartier-Bresson, it was Abe’s
view that everything that a picture says should be said within the frame, with
no need for words added from without.
Such a stance does not mean, however, that the text does not engage the
visual. It may perhaps be sensible to assume that those photographs with short
narratives are the box man’s creation, attached to the interior of his box. If so,
then that would explain the lack of explicit contact between the overall nar-
rative and the caption-like notes; they are not parts of Abe’s narrative but are
adjacent and complementary to it. The contiguity of narrative spaces, which
have distinct temporal orientations (one sequential, the other intermittent
and fragmentary), complicates the space-time of the photographic narrative
that Hako otoko is.
The novel complicates space-time and image–text in yet another way. In
an early chapter, “A Safety Device . . . Just in Case,” the box man tells us exactly
how he coordinates photographs and texts in physical space: he affixes a nega-
tive film strip to the interior cover of the notebook, in which he scribbles the
narrative we read.47 The ensuing chapter of Hako otoko, which, significantly,
is not accompanied by any printed photograph, diegetically involves a pho-
tograph as an essential detail in the story. The text following the chapter title,
“Two or Three Additions Concerning the Photographic Evidence Attached to
the Inner Cover,” appears to have been written to explain this notably absent
photographic image.48 The only possible candidate for the image, the negative
film clip that is printed on a page prior to the beginning of the text proper (not
just this chapter, which ambiguates its position vis-à-vis any portion of the
narrative), does not clearly represent all the elements in the description.49
The scenes within the frames also vary between editions.50 This means that
while the box man imagines the possibility of someone finding his scribbles
in the notebook with the photograph in question and confirming details in
it with the aid of the text, the reader of Abe’s book is expected to restore the
missing image from the text alone. When we consider the parenthetical note
attached to “Place of shooting,” the box man’s gesture to draw the reader/
viewer’s attention to the specific elements (a shadow of a fence, a mulberry
tree) in the picture that might otherwise elude his or her perception serves
to help the reader/viewer, without the photograph at hand, to configure the
picture mentally.51 In other words, what appears to be a simple, conventional
and predictable verbal “explanation” of an image on the diegetic level becomes
instead a site of translation from the textual to the visual on the discourse level,
in the absence of the image that is supposed to be the source of information.
The two narrative layers, one fabricating the presence of the original and the
other missing the original, allow the reader to reflect on what text can and can-
not perform in the presence or absence of the image. The narrative proliferates
without what it is talking about. The narrative is intransitive.
The Image–Text Conundrum
Abe recounts in “Shōko shashin” (Photographic Evidence), the eighth install-

ment of the series Toshi o toru, that he once agreed to collaborate with Alain
Robbe-Grillet, whose Les Gommes (1953; in English The Erasers, 1966, and
in Japanese Keshigomu, 1959; a new Japanese translation appeared in 2013)
and other works had inspired him, by supplying him with photographs to
which the French writer would add vignettes (Fig. 9).52 As Abe states in a
49 The negative film in the first edition of the novel (Shinchōsha, 1973), which is identical to
the one in AKZ 24, is distinct from the film in the English translation. The former carries in
the margin “Kodak safety film” and the number “38” (10), while the latter has “Neopan SS”
and is numbered “3 3A 3B 4” (2). (The Japanese paperback edition [Tokyo: Shinchō bunko,
2005], has a mirror-reverse image of one in the former, Japanese first edition.)
50 The French translation by Suzanne Rosset, L’homme-boîte: Roman (Paris: Stock, 1979),
does not print the picture of the negative, while including all the eight photographs with
texts.
52 Abe, “Shōko shashin,” Geijutsu Shinchō 31, no. 8 (August 1980): 62–63, AKZ 26: 448–49.
Abe had an interview with Robbe-Grillet in 1979, which under the title “Aregorī o koete”
(Beyond Allegory, 1979) was published in the journal Umi and was collected in AKZ 26:
76 CHAPTER 2
FIGure 9 Abe Kōbō, “Shōko shashin.” Geijutsu Shinchō 31, no. 8 (August 1980): 62–63.
Photograph by Abe Kōbō. Reprinted with the permission of Abe Neri and
Shinchosha Publishing Co., Ltd.
dialogue with photographer Hayashi Tadahiko, Robbe-Grillet had by then

published a few photo-books in collaboration with David Hamilton among
other photographers.53 The proposed project did not materialize, however,
partly because of Abe’s aversion to visually verifying the myth of Kabuki-chō,
a modern pleasure quarter in Tokyo that Robbe-Grillet was preoccupied with
and wished to set the planned photo-roman in. Abe suggests retrospectively
338–50. While they discuss cinema, theatre, fiction and poetry, they do not touch upon
photography per se. The only instance that comes close to it is when Abe says he has read
Robbe-Grillet’s Snapshots many times, to which the French author does not respond. The
talk of photo-roman collaboration must have occurred off the record when they met for
the interview, if not on another occasion during Robbe-Grillet’s stay in Japan.
53 Abe with Hayashi Tadahiko (dialogue), “Warera Kontakkusu nakama” (We the Contax
Comrades, 1979), AKZ 26: 369–72. Robbe-Grillet is known to have worked with other
visual artists to produce image–text books.
in the above-mentioned installment that he thought it would be reductive to

visually render the imagined essence of the area that struck him as “insubstan-
tial” and thus “difficult to make a picture of.”54 Abe attributes miscommunica-
tion to another, more semantic reason regarding the nature of the photographs
to be taken: Robbe-Grillet meant to request “photographic evidence,” a con-
cept that Walter Benjamin has developed out of Eugène Atget’s pictures,55
for a quasi-detective fiction, while Abe took it more generally, missing the
Frenchman’s specific intent on writing crime fiction inspired by photographs
of hypothetical and plausible crime sites.56 Robbe-Grillet’s request is not out
of context, given that he had read novels by Abe; as we shall see later, Abe uses
the term “photographic evidence” in Hako otoko.
On a more methodological level, however, Abe’s procrastination may per-
haps be accounted for by his rejection of the idea that text should complement
image in assertion of a story. He aspires to hold photography as a complete
and autonomous art, not as something that needs to be explained. Of Henri
Cartier-Bresson, the photographer whom Abe says he most ardently resonates
with, he says: “It is impossible to talk about [Cartier-Bresson], as everything
has always already been said within the frame.”57 Abe respects the autonomy
of the photographic register and refrains from offering commentaries as a
putatively objective observer of the image.
The incompatibility of the prose with the photographic image in terms of
the expository representation that the two media are thought to be instru-
mental to, which we observed in Abe’s interview with Shields on Hako otoko, is
reiterated in the postscript he added to Toshi e no kairo when it was reprinted
as a monograph. When he collates text with image, it is not by virtue of the
common reference that the two make, but for the sake of juxtaposition of two
movements, one verbal and the other optical, which would evoke the corpore-
ality of his presence. Abe instructs the reader how to receive the photographs
embedded in his text: “The inserted pictures have no specific bearing on the
content. If the text is a walk of my unmediated voice, then the photograph is
a walk of my gaze. I would appreciate it if you could sense how I let my eyes
54 Abe, “Shōko shashin,” AKZ 26: 448.

55 “It has been said that he photographed them like scenes of crimes. A crime scene, too,
is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence without con-
tamination for criminal investigation. With Atget, photographic records begin to be evi-
dence in the historical trial [Prozess].” In Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproducibility,” 108.
56 “Shōko shashin,” AKZ 26: 448.
57 “Karuteie Buresson no sakuhin ni yosete” (To a Work by Cartier-Bresson, 1989), AKZ 28: 414.
78 CHAPTER 2
move across space in my everyday life.”58 It is noteworthy that Abe uses the
metaphor of a walk for both the narrative voice and the photographic gaze. For
Abe, both writing and photographing are bodily exercises. However, the two
are not meant to complement each other, only to happen alternately within
the same space-time. There is no coordination or causality involved in the co-
existence of text and image; the adjacency of the two in the resultant printed
matter is entirely contingent. As Jean Baudrillard states: “Once again, imma-
nently, become ‘a thing among things’, all strangers one to another, all famil-
iar and enigmatic, rather than a universe of subjects communicating one to
another, all transparent one to another.”59 Image and text are in the same space
as accomplices in the deprivation of semantics, feigning irrelevance and indif-
ference to each other.
As a juror of the Playboy Documentary File Grand Prix for the best photo-
roman of the year in 1983, Abe comments that normally text overwhelms
photography in the genre, an impression, he remarks, that was reversed by the
recipient of the honorary mention, whose work’s strength, in Abe’s judgment,
lay in its photographs. He confesses that he looked at photographs first and
then read the narrative, which he found less compelling.60 Abe is not trying
to establish a hierarchy between image and text (he explicitly denies it) but
rather asserts, as we saw him do in other instances, that the two media should
not collaborate with each other to send a unified message. Instead, their co-
presence in a physical space of publication may be complicated by the practice
of reading/viewing that disturbs the processing order of image and text and
loses track of causality, if any was intended.
Abe’s position vis-à-vis image–text becomes ambiguous when he handles
the camera and pens a text about it. The following passage, excerpted from a
preview of new cameras, certainly sets out to suggest such ambiguity:
The camera for me is nothing but [a means to take] notes for fiction.
[I use the camera] in order to freeze instantaneously and preserve
the momentary image which I cannot find a word for on the spot. The
moment I wish to freeze emerges unpredictably, out of the blue. So I
cannot afford not to have a camera, my instantaneous freezer, at hand
at any moment. Or, to put it precisely, without a camera in my hand
I do not encounter such a moment. It is not as though an inspiring
58 Abe, “Atogaki: Toshi e no kairo” (Afterword to The Circuit to the City, 1980), AKZ 27: 48.
59 Baudrillard, “The Art of Disappearance,” 8.
60 Abe, “Shashinka to shite no seikō o omoeba” (To Think of the Success as a Photographer,
1983), AKZ 27: 134.
moment existed a priori, but it can be discovered because I have a camera

with me.61
While at first glance Abe seems to put photography in a position subordinate

to fiction, as a tool for preserving data for later and ultimately for textual ver-
ification, in fact he configures the relationship between the two arts a little
more ambiguously later in the quotation above. He begins with suggesting
an archival function for the camera, but he reorients himself and focuses on
the contingency rather than the permanence of what Henri Cartier-Bresson
might have termed the “decisive moment,” a moment that, Abe argues, only
the camera can make happen. It is not as if the photographer takes a picture
of something he has noticed because he wants to make it permanent, but
only that a picture, upon perusal later, alerts him to something he did not
initially notice. Naturally, it is there that the pen comes in, by default after
the event. The camera is thus determined not as an instrument subordinate
to the pen, but as the trigger of the entire registering process.62 Photography,
then, is neither instantaneous nor archival. It allows the subject to relive the
moment and expand the experience across the temporal span between in-situ
viewing and reviewing of prints.
Reconfiguring Temporality
The photographic image is instant and irreversible, unlike that of paint-

ing, or of the text, or of any other art foregrounding continuity of expres-
sion, of resemblance or of meaning. [. . .] The photograph retains the
moment of disappearance, whereas in the synthetic image, whatever it is,
the real has already disappeared. This slight displacement gives the
object the magic, the discreet charm of a previous existence.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD63
61 Abe, “Shingata yonkishu o shindan: Ōto fōkasu kamera jidai ga tōrai!” AKZ 27: 49.
62 This formulation of the function of the camera as opposed to the pen is essentially in
conflict with Jeff Wall’s method, in which the camera is used retrospectively, to reinvent
the scene witnessed by the artist’s naked eye or imagined by him according to his knowl-
edge not necessarily visually formed. The two methods, however, share the complica-
tion of temporality in photography, both benefiting from second viewing. See my article,
“Reading the Radial in Yukio Mishima’s Spring Snow after Jeff Wall,” forthcoming in Word
and Image: A Journal of the Verbal/Visual Enquiry.
63 Jean Baudrillard, “The Art of Disappearance,” 4–6.
80 CHAPTER 2
Another myth about photography that Abe renounces is that photography

can cut a moment out of the flow of time and thereby do justice to reality.
In “Damashie” from Toshi o toru, Abe states: “Frozen moments look as though
they were factual. But time by definition cannot freeze—it is time precisely
because it cannot freeze.”64 Instead of defining the merits of photography as
a tool with which to conform to and contribute to the static and linear vision
of temporality, Abe claims that photography in fact reminds us that there is no
way to anatomize time. If it looks as though a specific moment has been made
autonomous of the rest of the moments that collectively constitute the entity
called time, then that is an “illusion,” as Baudrillard would put it.
Curiously, Abe’s preferred mode of photographing is snapshots, convention-
ally thought to be a medium to capture “the decisive moment” that stands out-
side the flow of time:
For me, photography is not such a complicated matter. I am keenly inter-

ested in space as it transforms itself in time, the process of transforma-
tion negligible if you are only in search of its results. My interest remains
the same in literature as well. Photography is very convenient for this
interest. So, what’s most important for me is not so-called art photogra-
phy but the snapshot, the isolation of the moment I was not aware of.65
The seeming contradiction in Abe’s negation of the archival function of

photography and his privileging of the snapshot may be resolved in two ways:
on one hand, by means of Baudrillard’s articulation of photographic instanta-
neity, and on the other, by examination of Abe’s views of temporality manifest
in photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Tōmatsu Shōmei.
Baudrillard writes of photographic instantaneity as distinct from the charac-
teristic of real time that is celebrated in contemporary visual culture as follows:
Resisting noise, words, commotion with the silence of the photograph—

resisting movement, flows, and ever greater speed with the stillness of
the photograph—resisting the flood of communication and information
with the secrecy of the photograph—resisting the moral imperative of
meaning with the silence of signification. Above all, resisting the auto-
matic tide of images, their perpetual succession, in which it is not only
the mark, the poignant detail of the object (the punctum), which is lost,
64 Toshi o toru, AKZ 26: 442.

65 “Toshi e no kairo,” AKZ 26: 215.
but also the moment of the photograph, which is immediately past and
gone . . .66
Baudrillard suggests in the passage above that the instantaneity of photography

does not make it inferior to film, which possesses the property of simultane-
ity, and that being instantaneous, photography is not deprived of temporality.
Instead of letting images emerge and vanish constantly, photography treasures
the moment of disappearance. In place of the eagerness of moving images to
make meaning and tell stories, photography possesses the patience with which
to let the image “become an image” over time. The medium manages to accom-
plish that by “halting” the flow and “stripping” messages off the object. Rather
than the “epiphany of meaning,” he suggests, the “apophany of the object” is
privileged in photography.67
Cartier-Bresson is often, if prematurely, understood as the prime propaga-
tor of the snapshot.68 Of this French master’s photographs, which he admires,
Abe notes:
The framed surface is a window on time rather than on space—a window

of a train running through time. Each and every scene is imbued with an
intense sense of déjà-vu. Furthermore, it somehow evokes personal
memory. I know “that place” well. I stand “there” still, close my eyes tight,
and am disturbed, while I imprint in my memory the meaning of that
unintelligible scene.69
66 Jean Baudrillard, “Photography, or Light-Writing Literalness of the Image,” 140.

67 Ibid., 140.
68 See Imahashi Eiko, <Pari shashin> no seiki (The Century of “Paris Photography”; Tokyo:
Hakusuisha, 2003), 415–26 and her Foto riterashī: Hōdō shashin to yomu rinri, 17–24, for
how the English mistranslation of Cartier-Bresson’s writing has coined a famous catch-
phrase attributed to him, “The decisive moment.” In our present context, Imahashi’s
correction of the interpretation of Images à la sauvette as “kasumetorareta imēji”
(roughly in English, “Images Snatched on the Run”) seems to illustrate the nature of
Cartier-Bresson’s photographs even more distinctly as what we might understand as
snapshots. (Incidentally, Imahashi cites Toshi o toru [Snatching the City] by Abe, dis-
cussed in this chapter, as a means to articulate the concept behind Cartier-Bresson’s
title, which attests to the methodological affinity between the two artists.) To do justice
to Imahashi’s larger context, however, I might as well add quickly that her understand-
ing of Cartier-Bresson’s photography extends beyond the “snatching” of pictures and
into trimming.
69 “Karutie Buresson sakuhin ni yosete,” AKZ 28: 414. First published untitled in Robert
L. Kirschenbaum, Anri Karutie-Bresson ten: Shashin kara kaiga e no kiseki (Henri
82 CHAPTER 2
In this short essay on Cartier-Bresson’s photograph entitled “Santa Clara

(Mexico),” which Abe was commissioned to contribute to an exhibition cata-
logue, he resurrects the image from its conventional characterization as flat
and static and releases it into the realm of optical movement, three-dimen-
sional and dynamic:
For me, [Cartier-Bresson] is not only a great photographer. He is

almost the only artist with whom the trajectory of my eyeballs resonates
unconditionally. Every time I see a photograph of his, I am drawn back to
the exact moment, the exact place that [Cartier-Bresson] depressed the
shutter button.70
For Abe, the merit of photography that is captured by Cartier-Bresson is its

ability to seduce the viewer into two movements: one optical (“the trajectory
of my eyeballs”) and the other existential, a journey to the space-time of the
act of photo-taking. Thus, photographs are imbued with temporality, invit-
ing their viewer to participate in the dynamics between there-and-then and
here-and-now.
In his review of Japanese photographer Tōmatsu Shōmei,71 Abe discloses
that he is particularly drawn to the revelation of space-time that takes place in
Cartier-Bresson Exhibition: A Trajectory from Photography to Paintings; Tokyo: PPS, 1989)

with Cartier-Bresson’s Santa Clara (1984) and exhibited on-site alongside the photograph
for the exhibition in Tokyo (September 7–26) and Osaka (September 29–October 4) in
1989. With the exception of the first picture, L’Isle sur Sorgue, September 1988, obviously
taken shortly before the exhibition, thirty-eight of the thirty-nine photographs by Cartier-
Bresson are printed twice in the catalogue, once independently and then alongside with
dedications, printed in a smaller scale—the exception being Alberto Giacometti, Paris,
1961, a famed portrait of the eponymous artist with his coat over his head, crossing a
road toward the camera, which has collected two texts, one each from Claude Roy and
Sam Szafran. Abe is the only Japanese among the thirty-nine who contributed dedica-
tions, though photographer Hamaya Hiroshi’s essay, “Jinsei no shunkan no tetsugaku”
(Philosophy of a Moment in Life) is included in the volume as a preface. The other con-
tributors include visual artists, critics and creative writers: Robert Delpire (who sepa-
rately also writes of the HCB Award [in Japanese translation]), Eduardo Arroyo, Pierre
Gascar, Bruce Davidson, Milan Kundera, Agnès Varda, Manuel Álvarez-Bravo, Francis
Bacon, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Jim Jarmusch, Anna Fárová, Saul Steinberg, Danièle
Sallenave, Arthur Miller, Jean Baudrillard, Robert Doisneau and Balthus, among others.
70 “Karutie Buresson sakuhin ni yosete,” AKZ 28: 414.
71 “Tōmatsu shōmei,” AKZ 12: 7–10. The essay was first published in Geijutsu Shinchō 11, no.
6 (June 1960): 208–11. Inserted in the article are two photographs from the series entitled
“Senryō” (Occupation, 1960) and two more from the series “Ie” (House, 1960), both by
Tōmatsu’s photographs. In the “superimposition of rocks and landscapes,” he

writes, “rather than spatially, the distance is felt mysteriously as if experienced
across a long time.”72 He also writes: “It is common knowledge that contempo-
rary photography aims at destruction of a system by inadvertent discoveries.
That has become both a potentiality and limitation of photography.”73 For Abe
a photograph is produced by, and also presents, the process of transformation
(including material change or the deterioration of color, for example), and
thus is always not only spatial but also temporal.74 Photography is an embodi-
ment of space-time.
Snapshot versus Art Photography
The opening of the chapter of Hako otoko entitled “Two or Three Additions
Concerning the Photographic Evidence Attached to the Inner Cover” provides
us with another opportunity to consider Abe’s view of temporality in photogra-
phy. As the chapter title suggests, the narrative offers the box man’s notes on a
photograph that he has taken. The itemized specification of the circumstances
of “shooting” in question appropriates a distinctly journalistic style, anchoring
the report in the time and place of the witnessed incident. The date, however,
is not identified in relation to a calendar, which would make it relatable to
any reader’s experience of time outside the narrative context, but in terms
of the distance from the narrative present, highlighting the specific position of
the observer’s “here and now.” The parenthetical note regarding the “Time
of shooting” immediately disclaims the accuracy of the report, ostensibly
Tōmatsu, as well as one snapshot of Abe and Tōmatsu in conversation. This last photo-
graph was supposedly taken by an uncredited editorial staffer of Geijutsu Shinchō, who
accompanied Abe on the visit for this article to the management office of Vivo, an orga-
nization of photographers founded by Tōmatsu and Hosoe Eikoh among others in 1959.
Another look at Tōmatsu’s output can be found in “Tōmatsu Shōmei no kiseki: Shisō to
shite no shashin” (The Miracle of Tōmatsu Shōmei: Photography as Ideology) by Taki
Kōji (1966), collected in his Shashinron shūsei, 224–43. In English, see Leo Rubinfien and
John Junkerman, eds., Chewing Gum and Chocolate: Photographs by Tōmatsu Shōmei (New
York, NY: Aperture, 2014). Two critical essays by Tōmatsu are translated and included in
Ivan Vartanian, Akihito Hatanaka and Yutaka Kambayashi, eds., Setting Sun: Writings by
Japanese Photographers (New York, NY: Aperture, 2006), as “The Man Who Said ‘I Saw It! I
Saw It!’ and Passed It By” (28–29) and “Toward a Chaotic Sea” (30–33).
72 “Tōmatsu Shōmei,” AKZ 12: 10.
73 Ibid., AKZ 12: 10.
74 “Toshi e no kairo,” AKZ 26: 215.
84 CHAPTER 2
renouncing the ability of the box man to keep track of the calendrical flow
of time. The disavowal of scientifically measured time is attributed to the
reporter’s “ailment,” which he may suffer because of his irregular life, unpunc-
tuated by the seven-day cycle. But it may actually suggest the more univer-
sally experienced problem of the “paralysis of time,” which may instead be
accounted for by a sense of the absurdity of time-keeping itself. Rather than
the box man having lost the “proper” sense of time, he reminds us of the con-
tingency of the modern mechanical management of time that we have come
to accept uncritically, as if in “paralysis.” A hint at this critical approach to the
legitimacy of mechanically registered temporality appears under “Place of
shooting,” where the way a shadow is cast is described.75 Instead of the clock-
based specification of time, the elastic registration of time based on the vary-
ing length of daytime and night, as practiced in premodern Japan, corresponds
better to the sense of time developed by and for the box man, who lives out-
side, at the mercy of natural elements and without electric light or heat, which
would neutralize the experience of time and engineer the fixed measurement
of time.
Although the phrase in the chapter title “shōko shashin” or “photographic evi-
dence” may sound as if it echoes Benjamin’s characterization of Eugène Atget’s
photographs as I discussed earlier, a departure from the Benjaminian concept
is evident. While Atget’s “photographic evidence” is compared to a product of
an investigator visiting the crime scene after the incident, Abe’s phrase evi-
dences the criminal act itself, by a witness who shares space-time with the
criminal. The immediacy is such that the witness is also a victim of the criminal
act, who sustains an injury from the bullet the criminal has fired. The witness/
victim relies on the camera to leave the trace of the act beyond what his injury
can attest to, what his eye can register and what he can recount in words later.
The simultaneity of snapshots in Abe’s fiction makes a stark contrast with the
posterity of archival photos of deserted places by Atget, as Benjamin character-
izes them.
Despite the above declaration that his preferred method of photography
is “snapshot” rather than “art photography,” Abe as photography critic seems
to comprehend and resonate with Bernard Faucon’s staged photography
very well. In the interview of Faucon published in Asahi kamera in 1983, Abe
reveals a great deal about his own philosophy of photography.76 The interview
is auxiliary to “Berunāru Fōkon no sekai” (literally, “Bernard Faucon’s World,”
76 “Taidan: Abe Kōbō/Berunāru Fōkon,” Asahi kamera 68, no. 3 (February 1983): 283–85.
Collected in AKZ 27: 102–6, as “Berunāru Fōkon no sekai.” I quote from the latter edition here.
translated in the magazine as “Works of Bernard Faucon”) in the same issue,

featuring fourteen of Faucon’s photographs, presumably from the exhibition
in Japan, to mount which he was visiting there.77 The chief editor of the jour-
nal, Hiroshi Tani, states in the editorial note (original in English) as follows, to
introduce this photographer then relatively unknown in Japan:
Bernard Faucon, born in April in southern France in 1950, was a painter

before he took up photography in 1976. He often uses fire and boy man-
nequins when photographing his subjects. Faucon visited Tokyo recently
to stage an exhibition of his works. During his stay, he was interviewed by
Kobo Abe, Japan’s internationally-known contemporary writer. Abe’s
interview is published on pages 283–85.78
To add to this profile, Faucon is one of the two photographers for whom Roland
Barthes wrote a substantial text each to accompany their photographs printed
in photographic journals.79 Given that the 1978 feature in Zoom with Barthes’s
text brought Faucon into the international spotlight, it seems only appropriate
that a photograph by Faucon, La treizième chambre d’amour (The Thirteenth
Room of Love), graces the dust jacket of the first of the two English translations
of Roland Barthes’s Incidents.80 Faucon’s publication in Japanese, Tobu kami
(Les Papiers qui volent; Flying Papers) was printed with endorsements from
Barthes and Abe (Figs. 10 and 11). Another writer who praised Faucon’s work in
77 Asahi kamera 68, no. 3 (February 1983): 7–22. At that time, the photographer’s surname
“Faucon” was transliterated in Japanese katakana with a long vowel in the first syllable.
78 Asahi kamera 68, no. 3 (February 1983): 6.
79 “Portfolio: Bernard Faucon. Un univers particulièrement personnel où nous introduit
Roland Barthes,” Zoom: Le magazine de l’image, no. 57 (1978): 50–57. (The other pho-
tographer is Daniel Boudinet, whose Polaroid picture of a window famously adorns La
Chambre claire [Camera Lucida] as a frontispiece. For more on this image by Boudinet,
see Chapter 4, 215–16.)
80 Trans. Richard Howard, University of California Press, 1992. The original French edition of
the Barthes book does not have the image on the dust jacket, in keeping with the tradition
of austere presentation in French high-literary publications. The image is excerpted from
Bernard Faucon, Chambres d’amour (Bordeaux: Éditions William Blake and Co., 1986,
1997; trans. Love Chambers, 1987), 29. D.A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 1992) uses another image from the same book by
Faucon, La première chambre d’amour, 11. The design of the dust jacket appropriates that
of Barthes’s Incidents (the University of California Press edition), with the dark framed
square image placed on the austere white dust jacket. For more on the flux of Faucon’s
images across publications, see Part III of John Paul Ricco, The Decision Between Us: Art
and Ethics in the Time of Scenes (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
86 CHAPTER 2
FIGure 10 Bernard Faucon, Les Papiers qui volent (1980).

Photograph by Bernard Faucon. Courtesy of the artist.
writing was Hervé Guibert, a French writer we shall think through more closely
in Chapter 3, whose reviews on the photographer’s work in the media are col-
lected in Guibert’s books81 and excerpted on Faucon’s official website (together
with Barthes’s dedications).82 Guibert also has contributed prefaces to some of
Faucon’s photographic books.83
81 “Bernard Faucon: Les plaisirs et les jeux” (1978), 54, “Bernard Faucon chez Agathe Gaillard:
Les plaisirs de l’enfance” (1979), 116–20, “Entretien avec Bernard Faucon: L’expérience pre-
mière” (1981), 281–83, and “Faucon l’inspiré” (1984), 438–39 in La Photo, inéluctablement :
Recueil d’articles sur la photographie 1977–1985 (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1999).
82 http://www.bernardfaucon.net.
83 Guibert, who also practiced photography, published a portrait he took of Faucon entitled
Bernard (1985) in his book Photographies (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1993).
FIGure 11 The dust jacket of Bernard Faucon, Tobu kami (Tokyo: Parco shuppan, 1986), with
the note on the blurb by Abe Kōbō.
Photograph by Bernard Faucon. Designed by KIMURA Yūji. Reprinted with
the permissions of Bernard Faucon, Abe Neri and Parco.
Abe recognizes that Faucon’s photography excludes “incidentality” (gūzensei);

everything in it, Abe argues, is under control of the artist’s “consciousness”
and “lucidity” (meisekisa). Faucon confirms that his photographic production
requires lengthy and rigorous preparation and yet admits that the “photo-
graphic phenomenon” (shashin genshō) cannot be fully anticipated in advance.
88 CHAPTER 2
He stresses that even a staged, artificial scene is a medium of “graphing” light,

a mysterious operation that lets reality emerge.84 In response, Abe notes that
“the force of chance is inherent in photography [. . .] not only in photography,
but also in fine art and literature. It’s an essential issue of art. For a work of
art to possess the force of an existence beyond meaning or explanation, the
work cannot afford to remain merely a story that must be told (hitsuzen) or
a dramatization.”85 Abe’s stance is clear: he stands by the snapshot and dis-
tances himself from art photography. In an essay from around the same period,
“Sokkuri ningyō” (Dummies of Uncanny Resemblance), he reviews the history
of early photography and the then recent emergence of art photography, and
cautions photographers against leaning toward painting as it would mean the
loss of authenticity and the quality of information for which photography can
assume a position of “overwhelming superiority” to fine art.86
Faucon then discloses that he uses only one Hasselblad and one 50 mm lens.
“What is most important for me,” he notes, “is the square shape.”87 According
to Faucon biographer Emmanuelle Cooper, “Trained first as a painter, Faucon
took up serious photography in 1968. His first camera had a 6 × 6 format, and
his first film was Ektachrome. The format and choice of film have remained
ever since.”88 The persistence of the square format is shared by Watanabe
Kanendo, who won the Kimura Ihei Prize when Abe Kōbō was on the jury.
I shall address Watanabe Kanendo’s similar inclination at some length in
this book’s final chapter, but briefly, the preference for the square over the
rectangular (whether landscape or portrait) frame neutralizes the conven-
tional sphere of vision (framed as rectangular) and by extension exposes
84 Faucon’s comments (on deliberateness and incidentality) reveal his affinity with Jeff Wall.
One of the seven pictures by Faucon published in Zoom with text by Barthes, The Banquet
(1978), graces the dust jacket of Photography and Literature by François Brunet (London:
Reaktion, 2009). Faucon is briefly cited in this book, in the context of the narrative pho-
tographs wherein silence prevails, such as those by Jeff Wall (108). Brunet also cites Hervé
Guibert and David Hockney as new narrative photographers.
85 AKZ 27: 102.
86 “Sokkuri ningyō” (1981), AKZ 27: 80–82.
87 “Berunāru Fōkon no sekai,” AKZ 27: 103.
88 Emmanuel Cooper, “Shadow of an Angel,” Creative Camera: The Magazine for Independent
Photography 6 (1987): 17. The article is about the then touring exhibition Bernard
Faucon—Photographs, and two books of Bernard Faucon photographs: Summer Camp:
Photographs by Bernard Faucon (New York, NY: Xavier Moreau Inc., 1980) and Chambres
d’amour. Technical aspects (camera, film, production) are detailed to an extent in the
article.
photography as non-transparent. Though Abe as photographer does not privi-

lege the square format in his own practice, his high regard for two photogra-
phers who happen to exploit it seems to reveal his celebration of photography
that overcomes visual convention.
As Abe asks if Faucon is interested in theatre, Faucon notes that while his
photography shares a few characteristics with theatre—happening in a closed
space and requiring much practice—unlike a theatrical director he would
not repeat a performance. Once a single moment of photo-taking is over, he
explains, the set design is deconstructed. Instead of preserving through repeti-
tion, his wish is “to preserve one performance eternally,” and that is the reason
he takes photographs.89 In response, Abe seems almost to suggest an apology
for the narrativity of photographic books:
Each of your photographs seems structurally normative and grounded in

itself. However, in combination with several other pictures a very uncer-
tain “image” [imēji] emerges. [. . .] A photograph is just one piece of print,
but time begins to flow by way of the very act of turning the pages of
photographic books.90
The comment reveals that despite Abe’s explicit aversion to the notion of a
series of photographs narrating a story, expressed in the interview we saw ear-
lier, as a viewer of photographs he is more receptive to the possibility of their
constituting a narrative. Faucon, on the other hand, seems unwilling to accept
the role of a storyteller who, by sequencing photographic images, endeavors
to create a flow of time. In a manner somewhat reminiscent of Baudrillard’s
notion of the instantaneity of still images as opposed to the simultaneity
of moving images, Faucon tells Abe: “All that we can catch is the future that
rushes into the past. My photography is a representation of the image of the
present moment that we cannot catch—a kind of allegory.”91
89 “Berunāru Fōkon no sekai,” AKZ 27: 103.

90 Ibid., AKZ 27: 103–4.
91 Ibid., AKZ 27: 104. Faucon notes that “fire” and “dolls,” two of the most prominent sub-
jects in his photography, are “both easy to abstract,” adding a statement that “photography
itself is abstract” (106). The declaration of abstraction rather than representation of some-
thing concrete could have been made by Baudrillard, who says that silence, not voice, is in
photographs. And yet Faucon’s staging of scenes stands completely against Baudrillard’s
disavowal of deliberateness in photographic staging.
90 CHAPTER 2
Photographic Coercion
Let’s revisit the chapter of Hako otoko entitled “Two or Three Additions
Concerning the Photographic Evidence Attached to the Inner Cover,” which
attempts to provide journalistic detail of an instance of shooting in two senses.
The box man has been shot by a passerby with a rifle and in response shoots
three pictures of the culprit.92 Deprioritizing properly attending to the injury,
he sets up his photographic equipment and snaps three pictures. Though
he admits to not having the time to adjust distance for the best focus, still he
demonstrates adroitness in handling the camera in an instant. Though the pun
can only be possible in English, the box man reciprocates “shooting” (a rifle)
with “shooting” (a camera),93 so that this trope illustrates the conventional two
points of analogy between the camera and the gun: both technologies repre-
sent modernity and both are violent.94 The amalgamation of the subject mat-
ter and the method, as well as that of the (figurative) aggressor and (potential)
victim, helps to elaborate the dynamic relationship between the photographer
and the photographed. The incrimination of the photographer as an aggressor
is further intensified by consideration of his role as a voyeur.
The relationship between the aggressor and the victim flips itself around the
two men. The photographer has a body that can urinate (as was demonstrated
immediately before it was shot by the rifle) and that is susceptible to injury. He
is neither transparent nor omniscient, but has a vulnerable physical presence
and limited vision. His corporeality is further confirmed, as a messenger from
the potential healer (later to be revealed as a nurse) recognizes and acts on his
need of medical treatment. The slit cut into the box, which is supposed to act
as an aperture for the insider to look out of, does not remain unidirectional
but instead is exploited by the outsider as an opening into the box. Despite its
pretense at nothingness or invisibility, the box contains a three-dimensional
space into which things—in this case three bills, ostensibly as a gesture for
92 Abe, The Box Man, 23–24. Hako otoko, AKZ 24: 29.
93 A Japanese term for shooting photographs, which is in use here, is “satsuei” (image taking)
and has no implication whatsoever of the gun.
94 Perhaps the most iconic figure to embody this engendering act of shooting was Robert
Capa, who dared to risk his life on the battlefield for chances to take authentic war photo-
graphs. An antithesis to war photography à la Capa might perhaps be found in Jeff Wall’s
Dead Troops Talk (A Vision after an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol near Moqor, Afghanistan,
Winter 1986), a showcase of deliberate staging as a method in art photography, a genre that
Abe for one both contests and comprehends as we see in this chapter. Jean Baudrillard
similarly critiques art photography for its staging, which again brings two critics of pho-
tography closer to each other.
compensation—can be thrown. As fingers “graze” (“kasume” in the original)

and use the hole for the purpose other than that intended, blocking the box
man’s sight and offering him something he can touch and use, tactility prevails
over vision yet again. Taken by surprise, he is not even able to take a picture of
this figure for documentation, a testament to his near complete surrender
of his visual capability.95
The aggressor (the rifle man) is identified with the healer (the doctor) who
attends to the victim’s injury that he has caused. Not only that, the rifle man
turned doctor becomes a second box man, and a suspicion of the narrator is
seeded in the reader’s mind as the uncertainty about the handwriting style and
chronology of notes by the box man is frequently hinted at. Which is the origi-
nal box man and which is the fake? The indeterminacy of the answer to this
question is precisely what is set in motion by the author when he formulated
the two shooters’ interface in the scene above.
Seer Seen
In this story of becoming and un-becoming a box man, of constant reversal

of the man inside the box and outside, the putative recollection (potentially a
fiction) of a street photographer by a box man currently out of box elaborates
the volatility of the status of the observer/observed. The observer’s keen inter-
est in something (in this case the box man), triggered by a discovery of the
incidental capture of the figure in a snapshot, entails not only a chase but also,
and eventually, his transformation into a likeness of the object of his attention
(a box man), though for the pragmatic purpose of making himself unidentifi-
able by wearing a box.96 In this particular instance, there is even another layer
placed on top of this switch between subject and object; the man speaking is
a box man himself, as well as a photographer, and it appears as if he is making
up a story in which he attributes his own transformation to a friend of his. Not
only in the production of image (photography) but also in the production of
story (narration), subject and object are not stable positions filled by distinct
characters but are susceptible to exchange.
95 Abe, The Box Man, 26. Hako otoko, AKZ 24: 31. The image he wanted most, and the image
that would have been most easily offered given the object’s experience as a model for
painters, is not captured here, which effectively encourages the box man to imagine her
nude later.
96 Abe, The Box Man, 28–29. Hako otoko, AKZ 24: 32–33.
92 CHAPTER 2
The said story of the box man chaser becoming another box man is told
to the nurse who attends the injured box man in the hospital. At first the box
man/photographer compares photography to a violent stripping of the other’s
skin or clothing. He sees the act of photo-taking as an assault by a power abuser,
in this case launched from the position of invisibility afforded by the box he
wears. As the confession of his voyeuristic desire progresses, however, his own
presence becomes more visible and tangible. Following his imaginary journey,
we are taken into the darkroom and follow the steps he takes to develop the
film. He depicts the gradual process in which an image of the naked body of
the woman he’s talking to takes shape, line by line. The sensory effects of the
process are described in material terms, with reference to the contact paper
and the liquid developer, which let emerge not only the body on the film on
the level of the story but also the body of the developer on the level of the nar-
rative discourse in the reader’s mind.97 The attentive description of the dark
room procedure should alert us to the fact that the photographic procedure
involves the agent’s hands as well as eyes. As we saw earlier, Abe takes pride
in developing his own films as an extension of his control over the reproduc-
tion process. In our present context, ironically, the observer/creator becomes
corporeal and susceptible to the other’s vision at the very moment that he
declares authority over his image. (We shall see another developer experienc-
ing the hallucinatory effects of the manual and chemical process of film devel-
opment in a novel by Kanai Mieko to be discussed in Chapter 4.)
Abe declares the erosion of the boundary between the seer and seen in the
aforementioned interview by Nancy Hardin, as follows:
On TV or in a movie, there is an actor who is seen. But those of us watch-

ing him recognize that concept “to be seen.” Therefore we understand to
be seen as a kind of stereotype. And as such we don’t allow ourselves
to be seen literally. We wear armor. Conversely, abandoning that stereo-
type, we are able to be seen literally. It is necessary to give up this pre-
tense only once, in order to gain the true position of being seen. All this is
closely related to the idea of space and spiral time.98
The box man often makes a gesture of sharing the photo with the intended
reader of his notes, though Abe does not extend that sharing to the reader of
the novel. The “film” is not presented to the reader of the novel. All we the
readers have are words—words that demonstrate faith in images as proofs:
“Almost everything up until now can be proved by analyzing the film. But
from this point on, nothing at all is backed by objective evidence. I expect that
either you or the finder of these notes will believe my testimony and justify
it on your own.”99 The sharing of space-time between the photographer and
the viewer of photographs further compromises the transparency of the for-
mer as well as the latter, suggesting the specific bodily bearing of each partici-
pant in the reproduction of the photographs.
Framing as Releasing
Abe elaborates in “Toshi e no kairo” an observation made by the box man:

that whereas with a naked eye, one explores the elements of a space selec-
tively, focusing on what one deems important, according to the hierarchy of
value that one consciously or unconsciously applies to it, the presence of a
frame, such as the slit in the box he wears, equalizes all the viewed elements.
A coin found on the road, the box man explains, will draw the unencum-
bered eye, but the eye circumscribed by a frame may just as easily fall upon
and appreciate the rusty nail next to it or the weeds nearby.100 The interviewer
paraphrases the passage and asks for further commentary on the distinc-
tion between unintentional viewing of a landscape and viewing a landscape
through a frame. By applying the frame of the viewfinder, Abe explains, “signs
before signification are exposed”:
Under normal circumstances . . . only already signified images are re-

vealed. However, by framing and thus equalizing scenery, those parts
which one had no need to see for one’s primary purpose, those which
have not been given meaning, are extracted. Then, an impulse to give
names to them, to signify them, is awakened within the viewer. The object
of observation becomes more actual. The term “frame” is often used neg-
atively, but it couldn’t be further from the case.101
Abe further articulates the effects of framing in photography. According to

him, the naked eye is not neutral but discriminatory, as it takes in only what
it is looking for—what it recognizes as meaningful. However, when a frame
101 “Toshi e no kairo,” AKZ 26: 216. Similar observations regarding framing are made by Garry
Winogrand (see n. 17, Chapter 4) and Roland Barthes. See Camera Lucida, 47.
94 CHAPTER 2
is imposed upon a scene, everything that has ended up within the frame
becomes equally significant. All the elements of the newly circumscribed
scene are released from the desire for signification and deciphering, and are
held at equal value within a photographic frame. As the protagonist explains
to the nurse, the first sighting of the box man did not occur within a physical
space as seen by his photographer friend; instead, the photographer noticed
the box man for the first time when his presence was accidentally captured
within the frame of a printed photograph.102 Thus, the frame is an equalizer,
enabling a non-selective vision and revealing the uneven attention afforded by
the naked eye.
Abe reinforces the point in “Chikagai” (The City Underground), an install-
ment in Toshi o toru:
There is a world that only the camera can capture. Not only the moment
that a soap bubble implodes, or the glass cup falls to the ground and
breaks. Not only a movement that is too fast to catch [by the naked eye]
but also places that one averts one’s eyes from psychologically, such as a
corner of an underground path . . . As I press the shutter in an under-
ground town, the film reflects something that was invisible. Out of white
tiles emerges an unexpected human shadow.103
Rather than searching for something that is necessary for a specific purpose,
making sense of it and forming a prescribed narrative about it through the
naked eye, which discriminates as it operates, Abe applies the camera.
The camera instigates an interest in such things as the homeless and society’s
waste and excess—in other words, things that cannot be integrated into a
discourse of normative value: those the naked eye overlooks or averts its
gaze from. Though, as we shall see in Kuwabara Kineo’s disavowal of social
critique as a function of photography in Chapter 4, poverty and inequality
can quite well be addressed as social issues themselves, Abe’s fascination with
these subjects does not weave a narrative of social criticism. Abe comes close
to Baudrillard yet again, who dismisses as “forced signification” photography’s
role in the socially purposeful documentation of “victims as such, the dead as
102 Abe, The Box Man, 28. In the Japanese original, the lack of intent on the part of the pho-
tographer is doubly confirmed, with the phrase “nanika no hazumini” (by happenstance)
and the rupture between the photographer’s technical action “shattā o kittara” (he
pressed the shutter button) and the viewer’s discovery “utsutte ita” ([the box man] was in
the photo). Hako otoko, AKZ 24: 32–33.
103 A KZ 26: 440.
such, the poverty-stricken as such” for “moral, humanitarian” purposes, which

Baudrillard calls “rape of the real.”104
Even in portraits, wherein one might expect that the capturing of an essence
imagined as inherent in the person in front of the camera might be at stake,
Abe denies such a colonizing intent. Portraits, to him, are “nothing but the
point at which two irrelevant data in integral calculus cross paths with each
other incidentally.”105 As per Baudrillard once again, the subject and object of
photographing are not to compete against each other but are accomplices in
the act, feigning irrelevance.
Photographic Prints as Things
The original publication of “Damashie” in Toshi o toru, which was serialized

in Geijutsu Shinchō, is a two-page spread. The installment has the first photo-
graph occupying the entire right page except for the author’s name and the
serialization title and the installment number (Abe Kōbō foto essei Toshi o
toru 5 [Abe Kōbō Photo Essay Snatching the City, 5]) on the bottom of the page,
while the left page is divided equally into the second photograph on top and
the text below (Fig. 12).106 This way, the chef in the first picture is not only fac-
ing the wall within the frame (as he tries to light his cigarette on a windy day—
an important detail of the circumstances witnessed by the cameraman Abe
Kōbō—he likes to recall the context of photo-shooting, as we saw him reveal in
the interview with Hardin earlier—elaborated in the accompanying narrative),
but also facing the gutter of the magazine. Unlike the zenshū arrangement of
the same picture (Fig. 13), which is smaller in size107 and facing the edge of the
left page next to the right page dedicated to the text (in two columns, top and
bottom—the page layout consistent through the zenshū), the original presents
two men (in two different pictures) facing each other across the gutter, intensi-
fying the dynamism. The text is rendered almost secondary to the captivating
104 Jean Baudrillard, “Photography, or Light-Writing,” 144–45.

105 A KZ 26: 442.
106 Abe Kōbō, “Damashie,” Geijutsu Shinchō 31, no. 5 (May 1980): 60–61.
107 In Geijutsu Shinchō, the first photograph (of a smoker) measures 16 cm in width and
20.9 cm in height, and the second (of a man and a female passerby), 16 (width) × 12.2 cm
(height). Both pictures are full-bleed, width-wise. In AKZ 26: 443, the measurements are:
7.0 cm × 9.2 cm, and 7.0 cm × 5.3 cm (the page width is 14.8 cm, leaving considerable
blank space around pictures that are stack on top of each other.) I thank Banu Kaygusuz
for measurement.
96 CHAPTER 2
FIGure 12 Abe Kōbō, “Damashie.” Geijutsu Shinchō vol. 31, no. 5 (May 1980): 60–61.
Photographs by Abe Kōbō. Reprinted with the permissions of Abe Neri and
and perhaps haunting impact of the pictures. The photographs, owing to the
specific placement that creates tension between two scenes that were origi-
nally irrelevant to each other, affect the reader/viewer’s interpretation of the
narrative, which calls our attention to the woman in the second picture whose
figure was not focused on by the camera and probably captured incidentally
and yet grows more important when seen in the picture.
This particular case is typical of the zenshū, which regulates the space of the
printed pages for Toshi o toru. Each installment is represented in one page of
text (in upper and lower columns) and one page for images, together constitut-
ing a two-page spread in print. Images are reproportioned and rearranged to fit
the format. The twenty-four installments with twenty-four sets of photographs
(one to four frames per installment), plus a title page, required the last sheet
(a photo page and the reverse blank) to be glued manually, separate from the
three eightfold sheets of paper constituting forty-eight pages.108
108 I thank Jon Bath for pointing this out.

FIGure 13 Abe Kōbō, “Damashie.” In AKZ 26: 442–43.

Photographs by Abe Kōbō. Reprinted with the permission of Abe Neri and
The arrangement of photographic images in this piece and others was dictated
by material conditions. It appears that concerted effort was made to keep the
number of pages with photographic prints to multiples of four for the conve-
nience of quarter bookbinding. Thus, in the case of “Kamera ni yoru sōsaku
nōto,” there are thirty-one images for thirty-two sheets of paper, for example—
further reducing the significance of narrative control over the images.109
109 As touched upon in n.39, originally, “Toshi e no kairo” was published in Umi (April 1978):
176–214 (which includes a few photographs from stage performances of some of Abe’s
plays), accompanied with “Kamera ni yoru sōsaku nōto,” 215–30. When the essay was
published as a book under the same title, photographs from the latter were incorporated
into the body of the text, with other photographs added from another series of photos
entitled “Watashi no Amerika.” The essay was then collected in AKZ 26: 193–230, following
“Kamera ni yoru sōsaku nōto,” AKZ 26: 161–92, with the text and the photographs sepa-
rated again. The endnotes (“Sakuhin nōto 26” AKZ 26: 3) relates the provenance of the
images and states that “for the sake of book binding convenience” the thirty images in
the first book edition of the following essay “Toshi e no kairo” have been extracted in the
98 CHAPTER 2
FIGure 14 Abe Kōbō, “Han fūkei.” Geijutsu Shinchō 31, no. 7 ( July 1980): 70–71.
The zenshū edition tries to strike a balance between maintaining editorial

consistency among all the collected works and representing them as close to
their original publications. An often-adopted compromise in the case of pho-
tographic insertion (e.g., Hako otoko, Toshi e no kairo) is to group photographs
that were inserted in various places in the pages of the original publications,
so as to simplify the bookbinding procedure and thus to reduce the production
cost. While the zenshū uses distinct paper for photographic prints to ensure
the quality of the printed images, it sacrifices the original merge of image and
text. In the case of Toshi o toru, for example, its original serialization in Geijutsu
Shinchō prints the photo-essay in a much different manner from the zenshū.
zenshū from their respective locations and grouped together, with the addition of one
photograph from “Watashi no Amerika,” a journal article from which a picture has been
extracted for the first book edition of Toshi e no kairo.
FIGure 15 “Toki no nagare ga tomaru mise.” Geijutsu Shinchō 32, no. 10 (October 1981): 72–73.
In some installments text is printed in white and superimposed upon a darker

image, as if to suggest that image and text are both material beings that share
the same space, but at the cost of greater legibility of the text (e.g., No. 7: “Han
fūkei” [Anti-Landscape]; Fig. 14). In others, text is placed in dramatic relation
to image: sandwiched by images that occupy spaces more conspicuous to the
eye of the viewer who leafs through the magazine casually (No. 22: “Toki no
nagare ga tomaru mise” [The Store that Ceases the Flow of Time]; Fig. 15) or
cornered by images (No. 12: “Jiyū jikan” [Free Time]; Fig. 16) to create various
impressions—harmony between image and text, text’s superiority to image,
image’s predominance over text—effects that are obliterated in the regulated
formal coordination of the zenshū.
In addition to the visual “taming” of the printed images and texts, we must
not ignore the loss of other sensual effects: the scent of the ink that the newly
printed journal copies must have emitted, the stickiness of the thin pages that
100 CHAPTER 2
FIGure 16 “Jiyū jikan.” Geijutsu Shinchō 31, no. 12 (December 1980): 46–47.
the reader’s fingers must have had to contend with to turn, the sound of pages
being turned (and possibly wrinkled and torn, which could happen more eas-
ily than with the sturdy paper of the zenshū appropriate for the library-worthy
publication), and the glare of the glossy pages. Even though the material con-
ditions of the editions were not under the author’s control in either case, we
should not be discouraged to think of Abe’s photo-essay in these terms. Indeed,
the author himself says, in “Mono iwanu mono” (Silent Beings), the nineteenth
installment of Toshi o toru, “Image is body odor, sweat and secretion.”110
110 A KZ 26: 470.

Conclusion
The irony of photography is that it has been understood to represent what it

does not: fragmented time, territorialized space, and identified individuals.
Photography has thus been utilized for historical documentation, cartographic
maps, and criminal investigations. For Abe, however, photography defies pre-
cisely what it was thought to be instrumental to; it allows him to verify his
hypothesis that time is fluid, space is amorphous, and the body is anonymous.
Abe renounces interpretation of both narratives and photographic images.
By juxtaposing photographs within his publications, without letting the images
illustrate the narrative, he disintegrates the semantic relationship one might
imagine between image and text, while presenting image and text as printed
matter sharing physical space.
CHAPTER 3
Photography as an Intermediary Art

in Horie Toshiyuki
Neither an object for critical analysis nor reading, let alone something
to possess, a photograph is a field in which one receives the emotion
that the photographer captured in a moment, a medium that, while
accepting the tremble of the photographer’s heart, casts one’s own
dreams and fantasies in unimaginable directions. To engage with photog-
raphy is to acknowledge the way of being in which to reach for and
enter its interior is the only means to penetrate it and reach its exterior
behind it.
HORIE TOSHIYUKI1
…
Reflection on reflection and the infinite mirroring of the mise en abyme
(in the large sense of the term: the metonymic representation of a repre-
sentation), reflections on the phantasms of simulacra or the simulacra of
phantasms (to cite or to sidetrack Plato)—the innumerable, playful ways
in which photography, or else painting, is photographed.
JACQUES DERRIDA2
…
A lens may be perfect as a tool, but with its optical perfection it is still
insufficient to capture reality; [photography] is nothing more than a
trace of an attempt by the person looking into the viewfinder to repre-
sent [something] with the uncontrollable play of light. Prévert’s magic
with which he matches the [grammatical] “imperfect,” signifying an
incomplete action in the past, with the photographic lens, which clips
1 Horie, “Honshitsu o kumidasu izumi” (The Spring to Draw Essence From), in Horie Toshiyuki,
Zō ga funde mo: Kaisō densha IV (Though an Elephant Might Step on It: Trains out of Service
VI: Chūō kōron shinsha, 2011), 231.
2 Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, trans. Jeff Fort, Gerhard
Richter, ed. and intro. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 45.

Photography As An Intermediary Art In Horie Toshiyuki 103
time in a moment! It is true that every photograph by Doisneau is imper-

fect, [representing] “the present in the past.”
HORIE TOSHIYUKI3
⸪
Considering Horie Toshiyuki’s sizable and still growing output of publications
on photography, including volumes of the author’s own photographs, the inti-
macy with which image and text co-exist in his publications may only seem
natural. He has reviewed and continues to review the work of photographers,
provides photographs to accompany his writings and writes stories of pho-
tographers and photographs. His interest in photography is evidently neither
arbitrary nor passing, but essential and sustained. He crosses the threshold to
and fro between spectatorship and authorship and between image and text, in
much the same manner as some of the artists his thoughts keep returning to,
such as Hervé Guibert and Robert Doisneau.
Horie is not only an observer and practitioner of photography.4 He does
not simply write about photography; rather, photography as he sees it shares a
philosophical foundation with the mode of writing he employs. Both photog-
raphy and narrative, in his terms, defy the myth of mechanical reproduction
and distribution as well as the dominance of the sense of sight in the society of
spectacle (if you will) that is the modern era. His narratives, in principle as well
as in subject matter, privilege the participation of the non-visual senses and
means beyond the eye with which to negotiate with others, human or material.
We might say that in the case of Horie Toshiyuki, the hands that handle the
camera pen the text. In a world where text and image are often assumed to be
transparent and immaterial vehicles, Horie works earnestly to restore in our
mind the hands of their creators. Thus it is not only appropriate but also essen-
tial that we step into his work in our exploration of photographic narratives
beyond representation.
3 Horie, “Renzu no hankakokei de: Robēru Doanō—yakusha kaisetsu,” in Robert Doisneau,

Horie Toshiyuki, trans., Fukanzen na renzu de: Kaisō to shōzō (Tokyo: Getsuyōsha, 2010), 316.
Also in Horie Toshiyuki, Aomuke no kotoba (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2015), 89–90.
4 His first book of photography ( following the catalogue of his exhibition at Morioka Shoten in
2009), Mezame te udedokei o miru to (As I Awoke and Looked at My Watch; Tokyo: CULTuART
by BEAMS, 2012), contains 186 black and white photographs and a seven-page essay of the
same title in 208 pages.
104 CHAPTER 3
Someone to Watch over Me—and Touch Me
To suggest the urgency and complexity of Horie’s engagement of photogra-

phy in his writing and to anticipate the critical issues to be discussed in this
chapter, perhaps an appropriate starting point for our discussion of his work
might be the first piece of fiction with which he earned the Japanese literary
establishment’s attention. Not only does this story involve a photographer and
his photographs, but also the book in which it was published effectively blurs
the boundaries between printed text and image, between images in distinct
publications, and between hand and eye.
In 2001 Horie was awarded an Akutagawa Prize, the most prestigious
recognition of an emergent fiction writer in Japan, for “Kuma no shikiishi”
(The Bear’s Paving Stone),5 the first-person narrative of a Japanese freelance
translator who revisits France, where he used to live, and reunites with a
friend named Yann, who is a photographer. As Yann shares his recent photo-
graphs, the narrator-protagonist, known to the reader only as “watashi” or “I,”
describes some of the pictures in great detail. No image is printed on the text’s
pages, however—except on the dust jacket. There, Hervé Guibert’s Belours et
Agneaudoux (Fig. 17),6 a black and white photograph of a teddy bear and a
stuffed lamb embracing in front of the reverse side of a wooden picture frame,
graces the cover of Horie’s novella, in both the hardcover (2001) and paperback
(2004) editions (Figs. 18 and 19).7
Guibert was a contemporary French author/photographer/visual art critic,
some of whose texts Horie has translated into Japanese and critiqued. One
of his works rendered by Horie is a quasi-autobiographical omnibus, L’image
fantôme (1981; in English, Ghost Image, 1996; in Japanese, Maboroshi no imāju,
1995), which is all about photography. We know from a section in the volume
entitled “Inventaire du carton à photos” (Inventory of a Box of Photographs)
that the narrator-protagonist had a stuffed lamb dubbed with a version
of “Agneaudoux”—“Agneaudou.”8 Even though Guibert’s book, like Horie’s,
bears no photograph within the text (more on the reason for this later), the
5 The title comes from Le pavé de l’ours (as the French translation of the novella by Anne
Bayard-Sakai has it), a La Fontaine fable usually called in English “The Bear and the Gardener”
or “The Hermit and the Bear.”
6 The photograph is collected in Guibert’s Photographies, unpaginated.
7 The photograph by Guibert does not appear in the first edition in the literary journal Gunzō
(2000), in the reprint in Bungei shunjū in connection with his receiving of the Akutagawa
Prize in March 2001, or in its French edition by Gallimard, which is in accordance with the
publication practice of those venues.
8 Guibert, L’image fantôme (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1981), 39.
FIGURE 17 Hervé Guibert, Belours et Agneaudoux.

HERVEGUIBERTCOPYRIGHTHERVEGUIBERT. Courtesy of Christine Guibert.
FIGURE 18
The dust jacket of Horie Toshiyuki, Kuma no shikiishi
(Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2001).
Photograph by Hervé Guibert. Design by Horie
Toshiyuki and Isogami Hirohisa. Reprinted with
the permission of Horie Toshiyuki and Kodansha
Ltd.
description corresponds to an image outside the textual boundary, printed in

Guibert’s posthumous collection of photographs. As I have explicated else-
where, Guibert tends to complicate transmediation between image and text,
as well as intertextuality, by deliberately misplacing relevant images in other
contexts.9 While his Japanese translator, Horie, might not be so conniving, his
9 See my ‟The Photographs, Lost, Found and Fabricated,” 273–82 for my analysis of the way in
which Guibert’s images and texts in different publications resonate with each other to let
106 CHAPTER 3
FIGure 19 The dust jacket of Horie Toshiyuki, Kuma no shikiishi

(Tokyo: Kōdansha bunko, 2004).
Photograph by Hervé Guibert. Design by
Horie Toshiyuki and Isogami Hirohisa.
Reprinted with the permission of Horie
Toshiyuki and Kodansha Ltd.
characters are susceptible to the equivocal image–text relationship, as we shall

unveil in the course of this chapter.
While Guibert might have repressed the image of a beloved stuffed animal
of his alter ego, the narrator-protagonist of Ghost Image, only to allow it to pop
out of another publication, why has Horie inserted that picture in his own
the mother’s portrait emerge and dissolve. The theme of the elusive nature of the mother’s
portrait extends into Tanizaki’s work as discussed in Chapter 1 and Kanai’s to be examined in
the next chapter.
book, which makes no reference to Guibert? And why has he not embedded it
among the pages of printed text but placed it in the periphery of the book, on its
dust jacket, at that? Can we deduce any relation between Guibert’s image and
Horie’s text? The picture’s theme of stuffed animals invites us to relate it to a
photograph of a teddy bear described in Horie’s narrative. According to the nar-
rator-protagonist, who observes the photo in question by his friend Yann, the
photographer, that absent picture presents David, Yann’s neighbor Catherine’s
baby, born without eyeballs, with his teddy bear, whose button eyes have been
removed and cross-stitched. Yann explains to “I” that Catherine made those
adjustments to the bear as she learned of her son’s birth defect. The narrator-
protagonist observes that the shared lack of eyeballs between the baby and the
teddy bear equivocates the nature of their relationship as to which of the two
protects the other in his vulnerability.10 The ambiguity, however, seems to rein-
force rather than renounce the status quo of the relationship between a teddy
bear and an infant as they embrace each other, blurring boundaries between
the subject and object of affection, and between protection and ownership.
Yann’s photographs of other subjects—stones in quarries and concentra-
tion camps—that the narrator-protagonist has been shown earlier leave him
feeling like touching something soft. The tenderness of a teddy bear would
have been a perfect compensation for the hardness of stones, an idea that
may come from the source for the title, “The Gardener and the Bear,” in which
the bear accidentally kills the gardener with a large stone while trying to shoo
away the fly that has disturbed his friend’s slumber. Affection and protection
are important here as well, while the connection between stone and the bear
is also in common with Yann’s photographic repertoire.
While speaking of texture and touch, the narrator-protagonist is not touch-
ing the teddy bear; instead he is looking at its photographic representation.
His yearning for the bear’s soft touch seems to translate from the tactile to
the visual. The passage in which the narrator-protagonist observes closely the
photograph of David and his teddy bear evokes the sense of touch, especially
by using the words “soft-looking” (“yawaraka sōna”) and “soft” (“yawarakai”),
as if to compensate for the loss of touch in writing as well as in photography.11
Stuffed animals are to be touched and embraced. When they are presented in
photographs, they are deprived of tactility, and yet the viewer of those pictures
might experience an illusion as if tactility were restored by visual proxy. Image
denies the spectator touch and yet can evoke in him/her tactile sensation.
10 Horie, “Kuma no shikiishi,” in Horie Toshiyuki, Kuma no shikiishi (Tokyo: Kōdansha,
2001), 84.
11 Horie, “Kuma no shikiishi,” 80–81.
108 CHAPTER 3
It is as if the narrator-protagonist has suggested varying potentials of transla-

tion between sight and touch, by noting the tactility that emerges through the
picture and realizing that the blind boy cannot see the softness of light and
texture made visible in it.
Camera and Typewriter
In the essay “Honshitsu o kumidasu izumi” (The Spring to Draw Essence

From), which consists of reflections on books of photographs, Horie maintains
that the presence of the photographer’s body is felt in the pictures s/he takes,
and that the on-site operation in proximity to the object is what distinguishes
photography from writing.12 Horie’s writing in general seeks to compensate for
this erasure of the writer’s body in the text, to restore the lost or obliterated
trace of the writer’s hand, in accord with the practice of photography as he
understands it. While the printed text of modern vernacular literature may
seem neutral, vernacular language is anything but a transparent tool. The false
claim to immateriality on behalf of language can be paralleled with the per-
ceived objectivity of photographic images. Striving to trace the process of writ-
ing, Horie is drawn to photographers who gesture toward viewers rather than
disappearing behind the camera, and to writers who submit to their readers’
attention their writing utensils. His two paralleling interests merge in photo-
graphs of tools employed by authors, most significantly, typewriters, of which
he writes often in his creative fiction as well as essays and book reviews.
In the history of writing, the typewriter occupies an intermediary stage
between the pen and the computer, just as the film camera is midway between
the paintbrush and digital technology in the history of pictures. Handwriting
is largely (despite the existence of penmanship according to established styles)
taken as idiosyncratic, contiguous to the author’s own body and prone to inter-
pretation as an expression of the author’s imagined personality. Computer
word-processing on the other hand is digital, virtual and maximally complicit
with the erasure of traces of the writing experience beyond print culture’s
mandate, ushering in what one might call the “post-human” age. Having
12 This essay was originally included with a few of the photographs he talks about, in
a collaborative volume on photography entitled Shashin to no taiwa (Dialogue with
Photographs; Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai, 2005), edited by Kondō Kōjin and Suga Keijirō
and dedicated to the memory of Susan Sontag, who also contributes a piece. Horie’s piece
appeared there in pages 158–66, before being collected in Zō ga fundemo, 214–32, without
any of the photographs.
evolved between the two phases, typing involves manual labor and works in
coordination with the body of the typist and the space it occupies, which is
not void. Typed script, as material as paper, is susceptible to changes intention-
ally made by the hands of the author, editor and printer, and naturally caused
by time and the environment. Typed pages may be mechanically reproduced
and yet are not immediately reproducible beyond carbon copies; typing is
reproduction to a limited degree. When professionally used, it nonetheless
anticipates further reproduction by a printer and distribution to indefinite
recipients at a later stage. Typewriting thus represents an intermediary stage
in the history of writing.
Horie writes not only of how professional writers live with their beloved
typewriters but also—and importantly in our context—of how their cohabita-
tion is photographed. The essays-cum-stories of the collection Kōgai e (To the
Suburbs, 1995) are sandwiched by two pieces concerning both typewriters and
photographs: “Reminton Pōtaburu” (Remington Portable) at the beginning
and “Suichoku no shi” (Poetry of Verticality) at the end. The first piece opens
with the narrator-protagonist bargaining with a secondhand shop clerk for a
typewriter and drifts into musing about Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961), a writer
whose portraits by Robert Doisneau (1812–94) often featured him at work on
his typewriter.13 The “I” tells the reader that some of Doisneau’s photographs
capture Cendrars with the machine that the single-armed writer employed to
save his remaining hand from overuse. Horie’s text is not accompanied by a
photograph, but Doisneau’s portraits of Cendrars are published and widely cir-
culated, and in some of them the writer’s typewriter is indeed seen. Horie alerts
us that Cendrars’s effective placement of the typewriter was as strategic as the
ways he arranged an ashtray, crafted a lampshade to moderate lighting cast on
the desk and handled a coffee bean mill, among other everyday activities of
the writer (who worked from home), all photographed by Doisneau.14
Typewriting is neither spiritual nor automatic but as physical and time-
consuming as other everyday acts are. The message overflows the frame of the
13 The photographer and the writer collaborated to produce what would become the semi-
nal photo book La Banlieue de Paris (The Suburbs of Paris, 1949). Horie has contributed a
recommendation on the blurb to Hiruma Ken’s Japanese translation of this book by Blaise
Cendrars, as Pari nanzai tōhoku (Paris South, West, East, North; Tokyo: Getsuyōsha, 2011).
The Japanese edition reprints a selection of sixteen photographs by Doisneau from the
original publication, in smaller sizes.
14 Horie, “Reminton pōtaburu,” in Kōgai e (Tokyo: Hakusuisha, 1995), 10–11. For the images,
see Jérôme Camilly, Pour saluer Cendrars. Photographs by Robert Doisneau. (Arles: Actes
Sud, 1987).
110 CHAPTER 3
pictures and metacritically illustrates what photography is about: living with,

sharing space with and doing things with the camera.
Horie also discusses Cendrars’s poem “Lettre” (1924; Letter), a response to
his lover’s entreaty for handwritten (and therefore presumably more sincere,
personal and unmediated) letters during his visit to Brazil. The poet claims
that his Remington Portable enables him to type up a love letter in a unique
style, not only in terms of composition but also in visual/material terms,
enabling him to honor his lover’s request without abandoning the typewriter.
Though the letter is supposed to reconfirm the speaker’s love for the addressee,
indeed the text is more explicit and eloquent in his confession of affection for
his typewriter.15 This episode suggests the writer’s intimacy with his writing
apparatus (which he even travels with while leaving his girlfriend behind) as
well as his advocacy of the typewriter’s ability to convey his personal style,
gently renouncing the notion that typescript’s technological reproducibility
erases any trace of his personal touch.
The last piece collected in Kōgai e, “Suichoku no shi” (Poetry of the Vertical),
revisits Robert Doisneau in commemoration of the photographer, who in the
narrative present has just passed away.16 The text, an epistolary narrative, can
be read as an elegiac dedication to Doisneau, whose work “I” tries to situate in
the history of photography and the Parisian suburbs, the environment in which
he writes the letter to a friend of his whom he is house-sitting for. It is as if the
landscapes around him and in his mind have merged, blurring the boundaries
between exterior and interior, body and mind, and object and subject.
The letter begins with a reference to the typewriter that the narrator-
protagonist is using to write it. In this self-reflexive remark, he apologizes to
the addressee of his letter for the irregular typescript. He writes that this defect
is due to the less than perfect functioning of some keys, “despite a repair”
(a clear signal of the continuity with the earlier story “Reminton Pōtaburu”),
and labels himself as outdated for carrying around a heavy, old-fashioned
typewriter everywhere he goes. Horie’s narrator-protagonist also observes the
15 Blaise Cendrars, Complete Poems, trans. Ron Padgett (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992), 307 and 143, respectively, cited in Amaranth Borsuk, “‘Ma belle machine à
écrire’: Poet and Typewriter in the Work of Blaise Cendrars,” Writing Technologies 2,
no. 1 (2008). www.ntu.ac.uk/writing_technologies/back_issues/Vol.%202.1/Borsuk/63091p
.html (accessed May 13, 2015). Borsuk’s essay explicates several other poems by Cendrars
which convey his admiration for his typewriter.
16 Doisneau passed away on April 1, 1994. Horie’s text was published (under the different
title of “Kureteiyu” [Creteil]) in Furansu 70, no. 3 (March 1995): 39–44.
Hermes typewriter that his friend has left behind, having switched to a Mac
computer. A hint at the history of writing technologies is unmistakable here.
As the narrator describes the surroundings, typing at an open window of a
tenth-floor apartment of a twelve-story residential building in Créteil, a scene
similar to Hervé Guibert’s residence on Rue de Vaugirard might be evoked in
the reader’s mind (more on this, shortly).17 But the photographer who comes
to the mind of Horie’s narrator at this moment is not Guibert but Doisneau. Let
us recall that Guibert’s typewriter was a Royal instead of a Remington Portable,
and that in the earliest piece in the volume, “Reminton Pōtaburu,” the narrator
says that he first registered the typewriter’s presence in his mind via Doisneau’s
portrait of Blaise Cendrars. As a photograph has familiarized the narrator with
a typewriter, a typewriter reminds him of a photographer. In “Suichoku no shi”
the oscillation between typewriter and camera comes full circle with the pic-
ture of mutual associations.
Photographs of (and in many cases also by) the aforementioned Hervé
Guibert also often present a typewriter and a pen, occasionally accompanied
by paper with handwriting on it. The significance of writing tools in Guibert’s
photographs is indeed noted by Hervé Le Goff on the occasion of a retrospec-
tive exhibition of Guibert’s photographic output: “In his photography, he
invents a narrative thread that is more intimate than autobiographical, letting
his Montblanc pen or his old Royal typewriter, which feature as intelligent fig-
ures in several of his photographs, take notes for a possible future diary.”18 The
passage above encapsulates the reciprocal and mutually reflective relationship
between photography and writing, both of which are recognized as material
and physical processes.
According to Guibert scholar Ralph Sarkonak, “Guibert’s first drafts were
done by hand, including the many interviews he did when working for
Le Monde; most of the rest of his writing was done on an old manual type-
writer inherited from one of his uncles.”19 The “old manual typewriter,”
the Royal mentioned in the above quotation, does indeed figure in some of
Guibert’s photographs, such as Rue de Vaugirard (1980) or Villa Medici (1987–
88), together with handwritten pages and a fountain pen, suggesting the adja-
cency of different modes of writing that represent stages in the evolution of
writing technology (Figs. 20 and 21). In the latter and Sans titre (1982) we can
17 Guibert, Rue de Vaugirard 1980, in Photographies, unpaginated.

18 Hervé Le Goff, “Hervé Guibert Photographe,” La Maison Européenne de la Photographie,
www.mep-fr.org/evenement/herve-guibert (accessed May 13, 2015).
19 Ralph Sarkonak, “Traces and Shadows: Fragments of Hervé Guibert,” Yale French Studies
90 (1996): 190, n. 36.
112 CHAPTER 3
FIGure 20 Hervé Guibert, Rue de Vaugirard (1980).

HerveguibertCopyright HERVEGUIBERT. Courtesy of Christine Guibert.
FIGure 21 Hervé Guibert, Villa Medici (1987–88).

HerveguibertCopyright HERVEGUIBERT. Courtesy of Christine Guibert.
FIGure 22 Hervé Guibert, Sans titre (1982).

HerveguibertCopyright HERVEGUIBERT. Courtesy of
Christine Guibert.
see bottles of white correction fluid, another testament to the fact that type-
writing is not automatic but involves both mechanical and manual processes
(Fig. 22). Deletion of undesired portions of typed texts is not instantaneous,
as it is in word processing, and leaves a trace on the page as well as perhaps
in the space around the sheet of paper. Such suggestions of the intermediary
place the typewriter occupies in the history of writing parallels that of the
camera. Indeed, Guibert’s photographs often feature concurrently paintings,
114 CHAPTER 3
reproductions of paintings (most prominently as postcards), photographic

negatives, contact sheets and developed photographic prints, presenting the
spectrum of media for visual representation. The co-presence of “residual
media”20 with more recent technological devices and their products within a
frame of his camera that Guibert seems to persist in is also a preoccupation of
Horie’s, as we shall see in his writings on other artists.
The dual use of pen and typewriter is not a peculiar trait of Guibert; Jean-
Loup Trassard (b. 1933) and Michel Tournier (b. 1924), two other author-pho-
tographers admired by Horie, confess in separate interviews conducted by
Horie that they employ two methods of writing.21 In both cases the procedure
of preparing a manuscript is handwriting first and then typing up the final
draft for the publisher.22 Though these interviews are not represented in ques-
tion-and-answer format but rather are written up by Horie as essays, it may
be surmised that Horie must have asked them how they write, an interest that
Horie must have sustained for years since reading Guibert intensely for the
translation of his work into Japanese.
The typewriter is, however, not only a tool but also an object itself, a thing
to be looked at and visually or textually portrayed, as is the case with Guibert,
Doisneau and Cendrars. An addition we might make to this list is Paul Auster’s
The Story of My Typewriter (2002), which is adorned by many a pictorial illustra-
tion by Sam Messer, and which Horie reviewed in Shibata Motoyuki’s Japanese
translation. In this autobiographical text, Auster relates the destruction of his
former typewriter, an Hermes, during a voyage and his first encounter with
its replacement, an Olympia, which he ended up using for many years. In a
manner comparable to the narrator-protagonist in “Suichoku no shi,” Auster
mocks himself as old-fashioned, left behind by his friends who have long ago
converted to the use of computers. Horie observes that the typewriter has been
referred to as “it” but becomes “he” as the illustrator of the book, Messer, devel-
ops an intimate relationship with the machine by repeatedly portraying “him.”
Thus Auster relates rather self-reflexively his uneasiness with the process of
20 I’m borrowing the term as apt from the aforementioned title, Acland, ed., Residual Media.
21 Two of the interviews Horie conducted of these photographic writers appeared in the
journal Kangaeru hito (The Thinking Man) 26 in Autumn 2008, with plenty of color pho-
tographs, mostly taken by the editorial staff of the magazine who accompanied Horie on
visits to the writers’ respective residences in France.
22 Horie Toshiyuki, “Ōkami to tora no iru tokoro: Jan Rūpu Torassāru” (Where the Wolf and
the Tiger Lie: Jean Loup Trassard), 21, and “Hiza ga katatte kureru koto: Misheru Turunie”
(What My Knees Tell Me: Michel Tournier), 82. In the latter, however, Tournier admits that
he now uses a desktop computer, which Horie writes that he had noticed.
transformation that his typewriter has gone through under Messer’s brush. It
is as if he has recognized the existence of the typewriter beyond its functional-
ity for the first time.23 Whether or not the writer and the manual typewriter
can develop a personal relationship, their contact is undoubtedly material and
corporeal, and precisely for that reason it occupies the middle ground between
penmanship and computer word processing. The Auster/Messer book is full of
illustrations of typewriters, mostly done in oil, demonstrating brush strokes
rather ostentatiously, perhaps thereby alerting the viewer to the tactility of
painting, which corresponds to the tactile intimacy that human hands might
develop with a keyboard and other parts of a typewriter.
In his review of Auster’s book in Japanese translation, Horie describes the
typewriter also as a “musical instrument,” something to which one could listen
to appreciate its sound and rhythm.24 Indeed, we would only need to recall
“The Typewriter” by American composer Leroy Anderson, which uses the
machine as if it were the featured musical instrument playing the solo part
with the orchestra accompanying it, in order to realize that the typewriter
exists beyond its intended function of text reproduction. The relative promi-
nence of the aural effect is also an attribute of a conventional camera—usually
conceived as noise, successfully overcome by Leica as we saw in Sasameyuki by
Tanizaki, discussed in Chapter 1. Both machines create visual, audio and tactile
effects on the person who uses them, maintaining the comprehensive sensual-
ity of the writer’s physical experience. As Irena Hayter argues, citing Jonathan
Crary’s Techniques of the Observer, fragmentation and compartmentalization
of the senses are symptoms of the modern capitalist regime.25 Cameras and
typewriters were technological devices representative of and instrumental to
modern print culture, and here, in Auster/Messer’s book as read by Horie, their
limitations as pre-digital media—being sizable, noisy and cumbersome—are
brought to the surface. However, these characteristics, which may usually be
seen as deficiencies, are also potent reminders of the materiality of tools for
representation and the corporeality of the body of the observer. Living with
cameras and typewriters and looking at, listening to and touching them, rather
than employing them for their intended functionality of registering objects in
23 Paul Auster and Sam Messer, The Story of My Typewriter (New York, NY: D.A.P., 2002),
32–33.
24 Horie, “‘Kare’ to ‘watashi’ no monogatari” (The Story of “He” and “I,” 2006), in Airon to asa no
shijin: Kaisō densha III (Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha, 2007), 198. Borsuk in her essay quoted
above discusses Cendrars’s poem, which compares the sound of typewriting to jazz.
25 Irina Hayter, “Technologies of Estrangement: Dazai Osamu’s ‘Flowers of Buffoonery,’ ”
Poetica: An International Journal of Linguistic-Literary Studies 78 (December 2012): 35.
116 CHAPTER 3
scientific ways, one may restore the wholeness of the corporeal experience of
relationships with things in a space in which one is also present as a body.
The resistance to the myth of transparency in print culture by way of the
revelation of the multi-sensoriality of its tools as things manifests itself in
another example, from Georges Simenon (1903–89), to whose use of a type-
writer Horie makes a passing reference in the above-cited story, “Reminton
Pōtaburu.” When a clerk at the secondhand shop misnames the brand of type-
writer that Simenon used as a Remington Portable, the narrator-protagonist
mentally corrects his error, citing Underwood instead. Indeed, the “I” char-
acter’s alter ego, Horie, is knowledgeable of the subject; he has published a
review of Simenon’s Long cours: Sur les rivières et canaux (Long Course: Over
the Rivers and Canals, 1996), a fruit of the author’s boat trip with his typewriter.
Horie relates Simenon’s attentive and devoted care of his beloved machine,
placed on board during the trip—a voyage documented in photo-essays pub-
lished in weekly magazines in the 1930s.26
Simenon’s book is accompanied by forty-two photographs (including one
of Simenon’s boating license) by Hans Oplatka (1911–92).27 He was commis-
sioned to take photos to illustrate Simenon’s travelogue after Simenon had
completed the trip with his typewriter, when the text’s publication was in
process. Though the circumstances of publication seem similar to those of
Tanizaki’s Yoshinokuzu discussed in Chapter 1—from a journal serial to a book,
with the participation of a photographer in the latter—unlike Kitao, who
took photographs in Tanizaki’s absence to adorn the novella’s limited edition,
Oplatka retraced the course with Simenon, who Horie suspects might have dic-
tated his photo-taking to a degree.28 There are thus a temporal gap and a causal
twist between the text and the images, their unification being manufactured at
26 Those essays are later collected in Georges Simenon, Long cours sur les rivières et canaux
(Long Courses: On the Rivers and Canals; Cognac: Le Temps qu’il fait, 1996). Horie wrote
a review of this publication, “Shimunon tesei no arubamu” (The Album Handmade
by Simenon) in Riterēru henshūbu, ed., Shashinshū o yomu 1: Besuto 338 kanzen gaido
(Reading Photographic Books: A Complete Guide to the Best 338; Tokyo: Metarōgu, 1997),
132–33, with a small reproduced photograph of the dust jacket of the Simenon book.
Horie’s essay was then reprinted in Zō ga funde mo, 192–94, without the photograph.
27 For more on the photographer, see “Hans Ernest Oplatka: Fotografie” at www.oplatka.com
(accessed June 24, 2015).
28 Horie, “Shimunon tesei no arubamu,” in Zō ga funde mo, 193–94. See Chapter 1, 36–37
for Kitao and Tanizaki’s collaboration. For more on complexities about the produc-
tion of photographic travelogue, see my “Joining Forces, Parting Ways: Trajectories of
Photographic Books of Travelogue” (forthcoming).
a later date for the purpose of mass reproduction and distribution in popular
magazines and then a book. Horie tells us that those photographs are found in
a photo-album handmade by Simenon, now stored in the archive of Le Centre
d’études Georges Simenon de l’Université de Liège.29 The file of loose leaves
and pasted photographic prints represents the intermediary stage between
mechanical and mass reproduction, the mode usually associated with photog-
raphy, and craftsmanship devoted to the production of a unique piece of art for
private possession. Simenon’s handmade photo album is a work of art in itself,
like a collage of pieces representative of different visual and material techno-
logical stages. Horie explains that the selection of photos for the publication
was reproduced from the negatives through several stages of technical process-
ing in an arduous attempt at restoring rather damaged films. The devotion to
the labor-intensive production, the acknowledgment of the uniqueness of the
films and the manual procedure all point to something other than mechanical
reproduction, while obviously relying on modern technologies involving the
camera, the scanner and the laboratory. Again, it is obvious that Horie is drawn
to the blurring of the boundaries between manual and mechanical, natural
and artificial.
The parallel between typewriting and photography, as both involve and
stimulate the hand’s sense of touch, lies latent in the essay “Sokubutsusei to
nukumori no yūgō” (The Fusion of Materiality and Warmth [more figuratively,
“Tactile Intimacy”], 1998). Horie relates in this piece that he saw a television
program on a recent Prix Goncourt winner who types his fiction in an attic.
The uncited author in question is identifiable as Jean Rouaud (b. 1952), the win-
ner of the prize in 1990. The interview of November 14, 1990, “Prix-Goncourt:
Portrait Jean Rouaud,” only two minutes and fourteen seconds in length, shows
the prize-winning author (then nominee) typing with his index fingers. The
same hands can be seen leafing through a book of photographs of postcards.
Rouaud confesses to his fascination with black and white photographs, specifi-
cally old landscape postcards from the beginning of the twentieth century.30 It
29 Horie, “Shimunon tesei no arubamu,” 193.

30 Portrait de l’écrivain Jean ROUAUD, candidat au Goncourt avec son premier livre: “Les
champs d’honneur”, paru aux Éditions de Minuit.—PE d’un kiosque à journaux. PM du
vendeur, Jean ROUAUD servant un client.—PM ROUAUD tapant à la machine.—Pages
d’un livre feuilletées par ROUAUD représentant d’anciennes photos de l’époque de la
guerre 14–18, stèles.—PM ROUAUD: “J’ai aussi écrit ce livre sur la résurrection”.—Il feuil-
lète le livre: photos N&B de paysages.—BT anciennes cartes postales N&B du début du
siècle.—PM ROUAUD qui cite NABOKOV et déclare: “Je suis myope, j’écris pour voir.
Quand je décris, je reconstitue. J’ai besoin de parler pour voir. Quand un paysage existe,
118 CHAPTER 3
seems likely that this episode drew Horie’s attention, as some of his stories are
about postcards (e.g., “Rusuban denwa no shijin” [The Poet on the Answering
Machine] and “Uragoe de utae, kaba yo” [Sing in Falsetto, Hippos], 1998).31
Postcards are mass-reproduced and distributed casually, especially to tour-
ists, themselves being similarly indefinite and itinerant beings. The cards are
typically handwritten,32 stamped and sent out without an envelope, exposing
private messages to any bystander along the course of long-distance delivery.
Thus, postcards belong to the transitional class of media, the stage between
manual and mechanical, between intimate and indifferent, and between pri-
vate and public. In the case of Rouaud, the postcards are viewed only in photo-
graphic reproduction, in a book, which tightens the connection between him
and Horie in the appreciation of reproduction of reproduction. It is hard to
imagine that the coexistence of the typewriter and photographs in his attic,
representing comparable stages in the history of technology for the reproduc-
tion of image and text respectively, did not strike Horie as an inspiration.
Horie’s musings on typewriter and photography seem to resonate with
Jacques Derrida’s published conversation with Hubertus von Amelunxen
and Michael Wetzel on photography, Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation
on Photography. In this book, the conversation touches upon the famous
photograph of Nietzsche’s typewriter, which offers an insight into the relation-
ship between the two machines (the typewriter and the camera) in proximity
to human hands and eyes. In reply to Wetzel’s query as to what to make of the
image, Derrida cites Walter Benjamin, employs his term “aura” and observes
that in the said photograph, “an attempt is being made to reconstitute the
aura around something that has or is bound to have the effect of dispelling
the aura.” He goes on to point out the typewriter’s “rarity” as it was “very
archaic [. . .] one of the first” and not widely manufactured, distributed or
applied to composition. That it was Nietzsche’s adds further uniqueness to
c’est que je l’ai écrit.” BT article sur ROUAUD.—PE du livre “Les champs d’honneur”. Ina—
Institut national de l’audiovisuel, “Prix Goncourt: Portrait Jean Rouaud.” www.ina.fr/art-
et-culture/litterature/video/CAB90043728/prix-goncourt-portrait-jean-rouaud.fr.html
(accessed November 7, 2012). I appreciate Joelle Tapas’s help transcribing the interview
for me.
31 “Rusuban denwa no shijin” is included in Horie Toshiyuki, Oparaban (Tokyo: Seidosha,
1998), 49–62. “Uragoe de utae, kaba yo” is collected in Horie Toshiyuki, Kaisō densha
(Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha, 2001), 158–65.
32 Unless the traveler was as fastidious as Franz Kafka, who typed postcards to his lover
Felice Bauer, that is. See Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey
Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999),
222–27.
the artifact, resulting in the photograph’s acquisition of “[t]he cultic value.”

Derrida concludes with the recognition of “the nonreproducibility at the heart
of the reproducible itself in photography.”33 (We may recall the only remaining
photographic portrait of the mother in Tanizaki’s “Yume no ukihashi,” which
we examined in Chapter 1, in terms of the singularity of the print as an out-
come of the technology that supposedly ensures reproducibility.) Derrida’s
remark here, especially if combined with another he makes on the practice of
giving autographed photographic portraits as gifts,34 elaborates the ambigu-
ous standing of photography as well as typewriting in terms of technology’s
relationship with humans. While both processes are considered mechanical
reproduction, they can generate auras as they recall the people whose hands
touched the machines (rather than those whose thoughts are represented by
typed texts or whose appearances are represented by photographic portraits).
Instead of representation via putatively transparent media, Derrida, as well
as Horie, focuses on the relation between the human body and the things it
touches. In this particular instance, photographs and typewriters are not only
parallel with each other but also indexically related, as the speakers discuss a
photograph of a typewriter. Indeed, Horie is attracted to typewriters primar-
ily through their photographic mediation—thus to Cendrars’s Remington
Portable, because it was photographed by Robert Doisneau. Horie is drawn to
things when they appear in photographs, as is evident in the fact that represen-
tation of representation recurs in his writing.
Horie’s essay collection, Mono no hazumi (Things by Happenstance), gathers
installments of a newspaper serial, each featuring a black and white photo-
graph of some collected thing, taken by the author himself (Fig. 23).35 Despite
the appearance of a nonchalant essay, in which the author reveals the process
by which he has come to collect each item and to devote his affection to it,
this book also showcases his philosophy of photography. Which entertains the
author more, the reader may wonder: possessing the things or photographing
them? Placing the objects in strategic positions, determining camera angles
and adjusting the lighting all require touching the objects or the equipment.
The need to contend with material beings in order to photograph them—
to translate or transform them into photographs—speaks to Horie’s stance
vis-à-vis representation as the representation of representation. Perhaps the
33 Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature, 28–29.

34 Ibid., 22–24.
35 The photograph from Horie Toshiyuki, Mono no hazumi (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 2005),
69. The paperback edition (Tokyo: Kadokawa bunko, 2009) has an introduction by the
photographer/novelist Kataoka Yoshio (218–22).
120 CHAPTER 3
FIGure 23 Horie Toshiyuki, Mono no hazumi (Tokyo: Kadokawa shoten, 2005), 69.
Photograph by Horie Toshiyuki. Reprinted with the permission of
Horie Toshiyuki.
pinnacle of this doubling is offered by his photographs of stuffed animals.

We saw Horie’s fascination with Guibert’s stuffed animal picture earlier. Horie
also photographed some stuffed animals and miniature statues of animals in
his book of photography, Mezamete udedokei o miruto. Photographs of stuffed
animals, replicas of real animals, then, are double negatives, double appropria-
tions, as Carol Mavor defines Bernard Faucon’s photographs of mannequins:
“double negative.”36 Or, as Jacques Derrida notes, “The photograph of a fetish
fetishizes in its turn its own abyss, for every photograph is a fetish.”37
36 Carol Mavor, “Love-Love. Ni-Ni: Roland Barthes and Bernard Faucon, A Butterfly Effect,”
Photography and Culture 4, no. 1 (March 2011): 42.
37 Derrida, Athens, Still Remains: The Photographs of Jean-François Bonhomme, trans. Pascale-
Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2010), 41.
Photography as a Ladder between Nature and Culture
In “Ichiban hikui kumo” (For the Lowest Cloud), an essay on the aforementioned
Jean-Loup Trassard’s photographic narratives, with a focus on Archéologie des
feux (Archeology of Fires, 1993), which was eventually collected in Kōgai e,
Horie highlights the fact that the French author-photographer’s focal space is
not primordial wilderness but pastoral landscape. He notes that prominent
features in Trassard’s photographs—ladders and other agricultural tools made
of wood, not entirely straight and yet functionally designed—are both natural
and artificial at the same time.38 When a ladder is leaned against a wall for use,
it reaches the “lowest cloud,” itself becoming a part of the natural landscape,
Horie notes.39 In this light, one might argue that Horie takes ladders and pasto-
ral landscapes not only as subject matter for Trassard but also as metaphors for
photography, seen as a medium that is both natural and cultivated.
The intermediate status of photography between nature and culture is
revealed in the creative procedure undertaken by Boris Zaborov (b. 1935), of
whom Horie writes at length in his introduction (“kaisetsu”) to his Japanese
translation of the novel by Guibert, L’Homme au chapeau rouge (1992; in English,
The Man in the Red Hat, 1993; in Japanese, by Horie, Akai bōshi no otoko, 1993),
in which the artist plays an important role. Horie then expands this piece of
writing into a longer essay, “Kakōsuru inochi no yokan: Eruve Gibēru o meguru
danshō” (Premonition of Life in Decline: Fragments on Hervé Guibert, 2000).40
38 “Une espèce d’arbre, l’échelle. Mais créé par les cultivateurs, ou par les plus habiles d’entre
eux. Dans les fermes se promenaient des échelles de diverses tailles. Les courtes, utiles
pour la retraite ou supposées telles, sont rarement demeurées; les plus longues et plus
lourdes, par contre, peuvent être mesurées. Parfois elles sont accrochées, horizontales et
énigmatiques, derrière un bâtiment, contre le mur extérieur, comme si la ferme s’enfuyait
dans le temps son échelle sur le dos” (Jean-Loup Trassard, Archéologie des feux (Cognac:
Le temps qu’il fait, 1993), unpaginated; quoted in Japanese translation by Horie in “Ichiban
hikui kumo,” in Shigosen o motome te (In Search of the Meridian; Tokyo: Shichōsha, 2000),
47–48.
39 “. . . mais l’ascension des échelles, parce que nous n’avons pas devant les yeux levés le but
de tels voyages, entre dans le plus bas des nuages” (Trassard, Archéologie des feux, n.p.;
quoted in Japanese translation by Horie in “Ichiban hikui kumo,” 48).
40 The working English title is given by Christopher Stephens in his translation of Horie’s
essay, “Between 37.7 and 38.4 Degrees: The Photographs of Hervé Guibert,” in Love’s Body:
Art in the Age of AIDS (Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2010), 174–77.
Five essays on Guibert by Horie published between 1993 and 1996 are assembled and
revised for the inclusion in the 2000 volume of essays, Shigosen o motomete as “Kakōsuru
inochi no yokan.” The subtitle of Horie’s essay faintly echoes “Fragments for H.” by Roland
Barthes on Guibert, cited by Guibert himself in The Man in the Red Hat, trans. James
Kirkup (London: Quartet Books, 1993).
122 CHAPTER 3
The narrator-protagonist of Guibert’s novel, which is about art forgeries, featur-

ing an art dealer, an art journalist and artists, is deeply attracted to Zaborov’s
pictures, the market value of which, in the wake of a retrospective exhibition
of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, has seen a significant rise: “One
might almost think his paintings were old photographs fossilized under a mist
of colour, as if the paint were dusted on, or were under a spider’s web, fixing the
memory of a photograph.”41
Guibert’s narrator-protagonist’s impression of Zaborov’s pictures as “fos-
silized” photographs is not far off the mark, Horie tells us. Consulting essays
in the catalogue of a Zaborov exhibition in the Palais de Tokyo (which Horie
equates with “the Museum of Modern Art” referred to in the above quota-
tion from Guibert), Un certain usage de la photographie (A Certain Usage
of Photography, 1989), Horie confirms that the artist indeed produced pic-
tures from photographs. Descriptions by the authors of two essays in the
catalogue—Danièle Sallenave (“Un homme interdit” [A Forbidden Man]) and
Philippe Bidaine (“Boris Zaborov ou la transfusion des âmes” [Boris Zaborov
or the Transfusion of Souls])—of Zaborov’s procedure reveal that Zaborov’s
art evidences not only the contiguity of photography and painting but also
the fact that photographs are both mechanical and natural. Sallenave explains
how Zaborov’s process of artistic production is rooted in photography by
taking the reader step by step by material description: “stretching a sheet
of paper across a wooden frame of large dimensions,” “cover[ing] it with
thick layers of acrylic paint that he scratches, digs into, and works until he
makes a foundation of rich matter, which blends dull gold, brown, sepia, the
sad yellow of old photographic prints, the dull copper of the engraver’s
plaques” and “drawing in pencil great figures emanating from photographic
representation.”42 According to this description, Zaborov’s method essentially
obfuscates any distinction between science and art, between technology and
craft, and between the natural and the mythical. Rather he works on the bor-
ders of these conventionally contrasted categories.
Bidaine further accounts for Zaborov’s use of Josef Koudelka, Diane Arbus
and Lewis Hein, in which portraits of the unfamiliar strike him in such a way
41 Guibert, The Man in the Red Hat, 22; Horie’s translation in “Kakō suru inochi no yokan,”
in Shigosen o motomete, 233. The passage is the exact quotation from his translation of
Guibert’s novel, Akai bōshi no otoko, 50.
42 Danièle Sallenave, “Un homme interdit,” in Centre National de la photographie, Boris
Zaborov: Un certain usage de la photographie (Arles: Actes Sud, 1989), 6; English transla-
tion by Darcy Gauthier. Horie loosely translates this passage in his “Kakō suru inochi no
yokan,” 235.
that in his mind those with whom he has no personal connection are replaced
by imaginary beings, toppling the chronology and possible hierarchy between
original and copy, source and derivative. The latter becomes more authentic
than the former to the artist:
An encounter with old photographs, anonymous traces of lives no doubt

vanished, carries him along mysterious paths. A silent face-to-face
encounter that becomes the communion of souls. Thus the imaginary
takes hold of the model. A strange phenomenon: the transfusion of
souls.43
Sallenave conceptualizes what Zaborov awakens us to in terms of the orienta-

tion of photography: it is by default as “natural” as it is “artistic”—photography
is “equivocal”:
The thing that speaks to me most vividly in Boris Zaborov’s work is the
idea that photography is the equivalent of nature. The affirmation that
photography is an object of the world, as much as and perhaps more than
it is a work of art, here is what really expresses how much the essence of
photography is equivocal.44
Sallenave concludes with the following remark, which transcends the subject
of this particular artist’s engagement of photography to comment on the gen-
eral orientation of photography:
[Photography is] an intermediary genre, between art and nature, between

the mechanical and freedom. We cannot say that photography has fixed
our history, our world, our past; they are deposited there, like the extinct
species imprinted in fossils, like the years in a tree’s rings.45
Photography as practiced by Zaborov, rather than functioning as a technologi-

cal vehicle for the representation of human space-time, delivers residue of
natural phenomena, giving us a sense of a space-time of the past whose traces
43 Philippe Bidaine, “Boris Zaborov ou la transfusion des âmes,” in Boris Zaborov, 54; English
translation by Darcy Gauthier, with modification.
44 Sallenave, “Un homme interdit,” 6, my emphasis. English translation by Darcy Gauthier.
Horie paraphrases the last sentence in “Kakō suru inochi no yokan,” 237.
45 Sallenave, “Un homme interdit,” 7; English translation by Darcy Gauthier. Horie, “Kakō
suru inochi no yokan,” 237.
124 CHAPTER 3
remain in the present. Photography is an index rather than an icon of the lived
space-time of the body. We do not see an image of something in a photograph;
rather, we are in touch with a trace of something as a photograph.
That Horie quotes at length these key passages in the Zaborov exhibition
catalogue, which he turned to originally for its connection to the Guibert novel
he was translating, seems to indicate the extent to which Zaborov’s procedure
and its philosophical significance have resonated with him. As with Zaborov,
Horie receives photography as intermediary and equivocal, qualities that to
him do not bear negative connotations.
Photography as a Medium in Transition
The in-between-ness of conventional ( film) photography, technologically mid-

way between paintings and digital photography, is translated into a mode of
communication in Horie’s afterword to Zukan shōnen (Picture-Book Boy, 1999;
rev. ed. 2010), a collection of stories by photographer Ōtake Akiko (b. 1950),
each accompanied by a picture by her.46 Horie’s piece, entitled “Tashikana
mono wa nani mo nai” (There Is Nothing Certain)—its title is a quotation
from Ōtake’s text47 that vaguely recalls “Mazu tashikarashisa no sekai o sutero”
(First Renounce the World of Plausibility), a manifesto of new photography
by Provoke led by Taki Kōji (1928–2011), whose work we shall note in the next
chapter—offers a valuable insight into Horie’s own view of photography. In
this piece, Horie compares Ōtake’s twenty-four stories to “24 contact prints,”
representing a stage in reproduction between films and prints:
[Consider] the passage of time between the first printing [in the maga-
zine] and the publication of the [hardcover] book, and then between the
[hardcover] book and the paperback edition. Zukan shōnen is a product
46 A note at the end of the volume says that the image inserted in each of the twenty-four
stories has been selected anew for the paperback edition. (Apparently the images in the
serialized version, published in SWITCH and Photo Konica, were the same as the ones in
the hardcover edition.) Ōtake in turn contributes an essay to the paperback edition of
Horie’s Zeraniumu (Geranium, 2002: Chūkō bunko, 2010): 179–85, entitled, “Mochīfu no
rensa, sono ongakuteki ritsudō” (The Sequence of Motifs, Its Musical Rhythm). She also
coordinated an event of a dialogue with and a reading of Horie, in accompaniment with
the exhibition of his photographs.
47 “It seemed there is nothing certain.” In “Jinkōtō” (Artificial Island), Ōtake Akiko, Zukan
shōnen (1999; Tokyo: Chūkō bunko, 2010), 181.
of the age that was highly loaded with nuances, in which we were not
frustrated with the analogue sensibility—that we could not review the
photographic images on site on the spot.48
The time lag built into the reproduction process of fiction is compared to
that of development and printing in conventional photography before the
advent of digital photography—the delay that we saw in Tanizaki’s The Key.
Ōtake’s stories were originally serialized in the SWITCH and Photo Konica in
1994–95, a period during which “cell phones had been widely distributed, and
yet the web of the Internet had not been fully extended. Thus, the ‘I’ who had
lost the place to belong to [in Ōtake’s stories] could not yet take refuge in the
virtual reality of velocity and no depth.”49 Horie thus places Ōtake’s text in an
intermediary period in technological history that clearly defines the bearing
of a subject. The transportability and spotty functionality of communication
tools across space (such as a cell phone) is contrasted with the virtuality of
cyberspace, in which one may be immersed and networked with indefinite
and anonymized members.
The Desire to See Unclearly
Nietzsche used [his typewriter] because he was losing his sight, whereas
today one uses a typewriter to facilitate legibility, the vision of others.
HUBERTUS VON AMELUNXEN50
…
I felt a wave of nausea. Probably from straining too hard to see the
impossible.
ABE KŌBŌ51
…
48 Horie, “Tashikana mono wa nani mo nai,” in Ōtake, Zukan shōnen, 255.
49 Ibid., 254.
50 Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature, 28–29. Hubertus von Amelunxen is one of the
interviewers.
51 Abe Kōbō, Beyond the Curve, trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter (New York, NY: Kodansha
International, 1991), 228.
126 CHAPTER 3
What is visible is an entirety that becomes visible all at once. The moment
it is visible at once, there is no part. If you pay attention to a certain part
of the entirety, such as the nose, then the rest looks vague. One must cap-
ture the vaguely seen thing correctly. To draw correctly how the vaguely
seen thing is seen—that is to draw something as it appears to you.
YANAIHARA ISAKU52
⸪
Photography is by default a process—something in-between, something that
happens in medias res. Photography is opaque and amorphous. As such, it is a
perfect medium for Horie’s desire to “keep looking without making sense.” He
would neither close his eyes nor strive to see clearly.
Horie does not view blindness as opposite to sightedness. A compelling
analogy of the complicated relationship between the two states, which are
normally contrasted with each other, can be found in a piece from Kōgai e
entitled “Tanjīru kara Tanje e” (From Tangier to Rue de Tanger, 1995). There
Horie discusses two photographic novels, Le Commanditaire (The Sponsor,
1993) by Emmanuel Hocquard (text) and Juliette Valéry (photographs)53 and
Un privé à Tanger (A Detective from Tangier, 1987) by Hocquard. Of the for-
mer, Horie says, “A photograph of a bricked-up window suggests that a view
and confinement are two sides of the same coin.”54 This recognition may help
to explicate the performance of ambiguity involving seeing and non-seeing in
the Guibert picture that we saw earlier of the two stuffed animals embracing.
In that picture, reproduced for the dust jacket of Horie’s first book, the ani-
mals embrace each other literally behind the scene, behind the framed picture
52 Yanaihara Isaku and Usami Eiji, “Taidan: Jyakometti ni tsuite,” in Usami Eiji, Miru hito:
Jakometti to Yanaihara (The Seer: Giacometti and Yanaihara; Tokyo: Misuzu shobō, 1999),
105. Yanaihara is well known as a frequent model for Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures.
53 Another collaboration by Valéry and Hocquard, “Codicil: Upstream on the River,” appears
in The Iowa Review 27, no. 3 (Winter 1997): 31–40. “Notes on Contributors” for the issue
(199–202) introduces Juliette Valéry as “a photographer, writer, and video artist. She lives
in Bordeaux where she is director of Un Bureau sur L’Atlantique. Her photographic work
is a major part of both Le Commanditaire (P.O.L., 1993) and—Allo Freddy? (cipM/Spectres
Familiers, 1996). She collaborated with Emmanuel Hocquard and Alexandre Delay on the
video Voyage à Reykjavik” (202).
54 Horie’s aforementioned book of photography, Mezamete udedokei o miruto, has an image
of a door blocked by a plate.
that has been turned backwards, hinting at the secrecy, intimacy and perhaps
obscenity of their rendezvous. However, they are exposed to the camera while
the picture behind them remains invisible to the viewer of the photograph.
So, which is really hidden: the animals or the picture’s contents? And whose
sighting is denied: the animals’, the framed picture’s model’s (if it is a portrait),
the photographer’s or the photograph viewer’s? Perhaps this photograph’s
composition could be compared to pornography in its ostentatious manifes-
tation of privacy. The way this photograph by Guibert is placed as the façade
of Horie’s book containing a novella, about a photograph of a blind boy and
blinded stuffed bear (described yet absent), further ambiguates any relation-
ship between seeing and unseeing. Just as the boy and his stuffed bear are
denied sighting, are we, the viewers/readers of the book, also denied sighting
of the framed picture as well as the photograph of the blind boy? In that case,
who is “more” blind?
Thus Horie recognizes sightedness and blindness as adjacent to, rather than
exclusive of, each other. Indeed, references across his oeuvre to optical imper-
fections suggest his sense of vision not as a binary between an ability to see and
an inability to see but constitutive of a stratum in which everyone is visually
impaired to a degree. In the interview cited in the section on the typewriter,
the Prix Goncourt-winning writer Rouaud talks of his myopia and of writing
as a means to complement his frail vision. Horie has also commented on his
own near-sightedness and floaters in his eyes that troubled him for many years.
Beyond such autobiographical confessions of compromised vision, Horie
addresses his preference for visual opacity, in support of the resilience with
which to keep gazing at what is opaque, formless and intangible without forc-
ing clarification and interpretation. His principle of looking is then different
from either Walter Benjamin’s “unconscious optics” or the camera-eye that
enables close-ups unavailable to the naked eye—the contrast that we revali-
dated in our examination of Tanizaki’s Chijin no ai in Chapter 1. Horie’s act of
looking remains on a human level, without mechanical precision or probing
ability, but it is not a casual or passing glance, but an intent and sustained
sighting.
Does the fallibility of “an Austrian writer in Paris” (identifiable as Rainer
Maria Rilke) lie not in his inability to see things clearly but in his inability to
see things as being as opaque as they are?—thus wonders Horie’s narrator-
protagonist in Kagan bōjitsu shō (Losing Count of the Days on the River Bank,
2005).55 In a promotional essay on the novel upon its publication, “Fumeiryō na
55 Horie, Kagan bōjitsu shō (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2005), 53. (Tokyo: Shinchō bunko, 2005),
67. This allusion to Rainer Maria Rilke may not be incidental; the hardcover edition of
Oparaban, the first collection of short stories by the author, has a photograph by Minato
128 CHAPTER 3
mama ‘miru’ to iu yume” (The Desire to “See” Things as Indistinct as They Are),
Horie elaborates the narrator-protagonist’s musing: “To keep gazing at some-
thing without forcing a change from how indistinct it is.”56 To Horie, opacity
is not a state of deficiency, inferior to clarity. Vision is not a tool for analyz-
ing or anatomizing an object, but for seeing things as things rather than signs.
Without drawing a binary opposition and a hierarchy between clarity and
indistinctness, Horie cherishes blurry vision in a way that is comparable to
Hélène Cixous’s musing in Veils: she longs for the myopic vision that she has
lost after an ophthalmologic operation.57 Clear vision is not necessarily supe-
rior to blurry vision; it simply enables an alternative way of looking while at
the cost of another. Each type of vision ensures a unique viewing experience
whose totality should be appreciated by the viewer.
Citing Oliver Sacks’s “To See and Not See,” a chapter in this neurologist’s
book An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, which observes a
man with near lifelong blindness who regains sight and yet cannot make sense
of what he sees, Horie questions the automatic equation of vision and mean-
ing in modern times. The man in question, after regaining his sight, could not
verbally describe what he saw with his now functioning eyes, and had to touch
the object in question to be able to do so.58 Optical capability does not auto-
matically mean an ability to observe, describe or define what your eyes see.
For the image projected on the retina to make sense, one has to know the logic
and rhetoric that organize the correlation between things, images and words.
No visual cognition is transparent or instantaneous, as we might expect, not
even the camera-eye’s. Meaning-making is a coded, mediated and coordinated
process, not as mechanical and automatic as the Kodak camera was once
described, as we saw in Chapter 2. Horie thus suggests that we should qualify
our faith in a scientific truth-seeking that values clarity, visibility and decipher-
ability above all else.
“The desire to see indistinctly” arises not only from a devaluation of clear
vision, but also from an appreciation of visible traces of the photographer’s
Chihiro, the artist and photography critic, of a patterned wall of a ruined building that, as
Thomas Schnellbächer pointed out to me, recalls Rilke.
56 Horie, Kagan bōjitsu shō, 84. “Fumeiryō na mama ‘miru’ to iu yume” was originally pub-
lished in i feel (Winter 2006), and has since been collected in Airon to asa no shijin, 216–19.
57 Cixous, “Savoir,” in Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils, trans., Geoffrey Bennington
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 1–16.
58 Horie, “Fumeiryōna mama ‘miru’ to iu yume,” in Airon to asa no shijin, 218–19. The cited
essay by Oliver Sacks appears as “To See and Not to See,” in Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist
on Mars (New York, NY: Knopf, 1995), 108–52.
physical experience. Horie is cautious not to dismiss them as technical

imperfections. “I did not wish to own that photograph, whose clear focus
seemed to conceal the tremble of the photographer’s heart,” the narrator-
protagonist of “Kuma no shikiishi” confesses as his friend Yann offers a recent
print.59 The emotions welling up in the photographer do not sit well with the
precisely focused picture produced by his controlled mind and hands. (We
will see such a photograph described as “uncanny” in the next chapter.) The
“tremble of the photographer’s heart” might translate into trembling hands, a
topic which Horie touches upon in an essay he contributed to the catalogue for
the exhibition Love’s Body, featuring some of Hervé Guibert’s photographs.
Horie excerpted the rumor that Guibert paraphrases in his article about
how the aging André Kertész’s quivering hands could no longer bear the
weight of a camera.60 Instead of lamenting the deterioration of the famed pho-
tographer’s health or skills, however, Horie focuses on how Kertész opted for
another kind of photograph, taken with a Polaroid from his window. No photo-
graph is or should be perfect, precise and transparent, he seems to suggest. Any
photograph is dictated by physical and material conditions, most notably the
photographer’s corporeal presence vis-à-vis the camera and the object. When
all traces of this are completely erased in favor of supposed objectivity, the
photograph loses its point for Horie.
Central characters in Horie’s fiction are drawn to opaque, mediated, frag-
mented and altered photographs rather than transparent, immediate and per-
fect pictures. In Kagan bōjitsu shō, the narrator-protagonist seeks the Mercury
recording of Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartets Nos. 4 and 8, not for the
music but for the photograph on the cover of its jacket. He initially cannot
remember the title of the recording that the owner of a boat he was to rent had
played for him on his first visit, but its jacket photograph was imprinted in his
mind.61 After a search through the bins of a secondhand record dealer, the LP
is found and delivered to him—only with the surface of the jacket marred and
the crucial image scratched.62
59 Horie, “Kuma no shikiishi,” 80.

60 Horie, “37-do 7-bu to 38-do 4-bu no aida de,” in Love’s Body, 138–39. In English transla-
tion, “Between 37.7 and 38.4 Degrees,” 175. Also in Horie Toshiyuki, Aomuke no kotoba, 61.
The cited portion is in Guibert, La Photo, inéluctablement, 223. Guibert also relates conse-
quences of Kertesz’s trembling hands, in “Polaroïd” in L’Image fantôme, 120; “Polaroid” in
Ghost Image, 110; and “Poraroido,” in Maboroshi no imāju, 122.
61 Horie Toshiyuki, Kagan bōjitsu shō, 40, 159–60. The image of the dust jacket for the record,
rather than the music recorded on it, matters more to the character, which seems to sug-
gest Horie’s favoring of indexicality over iconicity, surface over depth.
62 Ibid., 191–92.
130 CHAPTER 3
In his review of an exhibition of photographs by Onodera Yuki (b. 1962) in

2002, Horie reveals his affection for the blurred images Onodera created by
enclosing a marble in her camera in the series entitled Shinju no tsukurikata/
How to Make a Pearl (the original bilingual title).63 Onodera’s experiment
challenges the perceived neutrality and pure instrumentality of the camera,
highlighting its material presence in the environment that it shares with the
photographer and things within the photographic frame and without. While
other photographers might try to protect their cameras from any physical dam-
age that would compromise their technological integrity and the transparency
of the images they produce, Onodera deliberately takes the risk of damaging
the camera to produce coercion between camera and object. (Yann, the pho-
tographer friend of the narrator-protagonist of “Kuma no shikiishi,” is described
as insouciant about possible damage to his camera when it is dropped from a
car seat.)64 The object is no longer apart from the camera, perfectly positioned
in front of and safely at a distance from it, but moves around in its interior.
The aesthetic and scientific distance between the artist’s tool and her object
collapses, and they are both revealed as things. With her printed images she
confuses more than exposes the essence of the object, the marble ball inside
the camera. Onodera’s project tells us that photography is not anatomical
but performative; it is not about exposing its object but about what happens
between all those involved in the process of photographing. Photography is
not just about what the lenses catch and bag but about how various players
and coordinates work together. It is an event in itself, not a means for fact-
recording.
63 Horie, “Gentō to bīdama” (Slide Shows and Marble Balls, 2002), in Ikkai de mo nikai de
mo nai yoru: Kaisō densha II (Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha, 2004), 124–26. One can eas-
ily draw a parallel with one of Japan’s foremost surrealists, Takiguchi Shūzō (1903–79),
whose collection of marble balls Horie lists among his favorite fetishes of Takiguchi. See
“Horie Toshiyuki ga erabu Takiguchi Shūzō no 19 no yume,” Geijutsu Shinchō 56, no. 4
(April 2005): 86–95. (Incidentally, this issue includes two photographs by renowned art-
ists: Takiguchi Shūzō no shosai [Takiguchi Shūzō’s Study] by Ōtsuji Seiji, and Orību no ki no
shita no Takiguchi Shūzō [Takiguchi Shūzō under an Olive Tree], an iconic portrait of the
Japanese surrealist by Takanashi Yutaka.) Hervé Guibert photographed marble balls, too.
Horie himself has written on his collection of marble balls in “Bīdama no heso” (Marble
Balls’ Navels), in Mono no hazumi, 124–27, with his photograph of the items in 125.
64 Horie Toshiyuki, “Kuma no shikiishi,” 23.
Betrayals of Photography
In light of Horie’s preference for photographs in less than mint condition, it

then seems only inevitable for Horie to arrive at Hervé Guibert, who reveals
his fascination with just such photographs. It may perhaps have been the other
way around: Horie’s attraction to imperfect photographs may even have been a
consequence of his exposure to Guibert. As Horie has translated two novels by
Guibert and written several essays on him, ripples from Guibert that no doubt
reached Horie cannot be discounted.
As mentioned above, Horie has translated Guibert’s omnibus L’image
fantôme into Japanese. Though no printed image is embedded in either the
original or the Japanese translation (except the latter’s dust jacket), the book
is all about photographic images (as is the case with Tanizaki’s photographic
narratives, discussed earlier). As a visual art correspondent turned novelist-
cum-photographer, Guibert devoted much thought to the conundrum of the
dynamics between word and image. Printing an image-free book about images
is one way to encapsulate rather than obliterate the constant fascination and
frustration generated at the interface of the two media.
In the book’s first chapter, “L’image fantôme” (“Ghost Image”), which lends
its title to the book, the narrator-protagonist recalls his failed attempt at photo-
graphing his mother at the height of her beauty. As Guibert’s “I” tries to develop
the film, he realizes that nothing has been recorded on it; the prints are blank.
As the preparation has involved so much labor and so many deliberations, the
failure is judged to be fatal and the attempt not worth repeating. The opportu-
nity has been lost for good as the mother’s appearance has since declined ver-
tiginously and irrevocably. The narrator-protagonist concludes the story with a
statement on the absence of images in his book:
So this text will not have any illustrations except for a piece of blank film.
For the text would not have existed if the picture had been taken. The
picture would be in front of me, probably framed, perfect and false, even
more unreal than a photograph from childhood—the proof, the evidence
of an almost diabolical practice. More than a bit of sleight-of-hand or
prestidigitation—a machine to stop time. For this text is the despair of
the image, and worse than a blurred or fogged image—a ghost image . . .65
65 “Ghost Image,” trans. Robert Bononno, Ghost Image (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press,
1996), 16. In the original, “from childhood” is “une photo de jeunesse” (a photo of youth),
which seems to fit the context as a reference is being made to the mother’s picture. Horie’s
132 CHAPTER 3
The text replaces the image that was impossible and is nonexistent. Rather
than having text and image collaborate or coerce each other by sharing the
same space of pages in print, they are exclusive of each other in this novel
by Guibert. That does not mean, however, that text and image are irrelevant
or indifferent to each other. Rather, “this text is the despair of the image”
(“ce texte est le désespoir de l’image”).66 The ensuing chapters of the book are
filled with episodes of failed, estranging, inauthentic portraits that haunt (as a
“ghost” would) the viewers more than those that match their mental images of
the photographed. The absence of photographs in this book is not a deficiency
but a strategy to highlight a frustration with photography that reveals over and
again its unreliability, fragility and incapability as a means of representation
and documentation.
In “Higasa o sashita onna tachi” (Women Holding Parasols over Themselves,
2004), an essay on Jacques Lacarrière’s photographic biography of Alain
Fournier,67 Horie relates how, from the erroneous mental registration of a
detail of one of the book’s photographs, a false story sprang to life within his
mind. In Lacarrière’s book, in which many photographs from Fournier’s home
are embedded, Horie came across a picture of three women with parasols on
a bright sunny day.68 Assuming the women were on their way out for a walk,
he was overtaken by the presentiment that they might not come home alive.
He sensed something inauspicious in the black and white picture, which dis-
tinguishes light and shadow so distinctly and makes all the elements, not only
the women but also the trees on either side of the promenade they are stroll-
ing along, appear motionless. Many years later he was struck by the desire
to view the photograph again. After rummaging through his boxes of old
books, he finally unearthed the picture, only to notice that the women are fac-
ing the camera, that is to say, the house. They are not headed out but rather
have just come home. The realization of the fact effectively collapsed his pre-
monition and the story spun around it. Horie uses this incident as an example
of how photographs can mislead the viewer to construct alternative narratives
that endure in the mind. Instead of helping us retain the exact details of an
Japanese translation has “wakai koro no shashin” (a photo of youth). See L’Image fantôme,
17 and Maboroshi no imāju, 19.
66 Hervé Guibert, “Ghost Image,” 18. L’Image fantôme, 18.
67 Horie’s essay was first published in Tokushū: Shashin wa katarenai, ka? [Special Issue:
Photography Cannot Be Narrated—Or Can It?]. Waseda bungaku 29, no. 5 (2004): 182–80
(reverse order, from the back of the issue, as the text was printed horizontally unlike the
rest of the issue printed vertically), and then collected in Zō ga funde mo, 182–87. The
Book in question here is Jacques Lacarrière, Alain-Fournier: Les demeures du rêve (Saint-
Cyr-sur-Loire: Christian Pirot, 2003).
68 The photograph in question appears in ibid., 58.
occurrence, tethering memory to objective data, a photograph can hatch a

false story, an impossible story, imagined and narrated not autonomously of
the image but tangentially to it. This episode takes issue with the naïve equa-
tion of photographic image and truth. The mental image Horie has preserved
is indeed a trace of the photographic image that he saw with his own eyes and
yet is a twisted, reversed one, which has helped him to cultivate a story that
has haunted him for years. Like Guibert’s failed and non-existent photograph,
Fournier’s picture, which exists and yet is only partially remembered, chal-
lenges the integrity of the image and the existence of an objective truth that
is considered accessible textually, visually or jointly in both media through the
device of the transparent narrative.
Between Color and Black and White
The dust jacket of the paperback edition (2009) of Horie’s Kakareru te (Written
Hands, 2000) features the author’s own photograph of a surface of water, sur-
rounded by and reflecting leafy boughs (Fig. 24). The design replaced that
of the hardcover edition, for which Robert Motherwell’s (1915–91) lithograph
Music for J.S. Bach (1989) was used.69 While not in multicolor, the photograph
by Horie has more hues than black and white—perhaps purple. Similarly,
a collection of essays by Horie, Kanojo no iru sebyōshi (The Book Spine She
Hides Behind) uses for its dust jacket cover a photograph credited to the
author, whose color palette is somewhere between monochrome and sepia.
A similar color scheme dominates the booklet, designed by Hanae Yoshikiyo,
for Horie’s solo photographic exhibition at the Morioka Shoten (bookstore) in
Tokyo, in the summer of 2009, which consists of postcard-size, sepia-colored
photographs in landscape format (Fig. 25).70 The subtle inflection of color in
Horie’s photographic works opens our eyes to the contingency of the binary
classification of photographs into two groups, either color or black and white.
The subtly nuanced color scheme also gently urges us to reconsider the con-
ventional use of black and white photographs for artistic purposes (as they
effectively downplay unsightliness and abstract the essential concept of the
picture) and color photographs for more practical purposes (because they are
more revealing of reality).
69 Walker Art Center, “Music for J.S. Bach,” www.walkerart.org/collections/artworks/music-

for-j-dot-s-bach (accessed June 24, 2015).
70 The same photograph is later printed in Horie’s 2012 book Mezamete udedokei o miru to.
See n. 4.
134 CHAPTER 3
FIGure 24 The dust jacket of Horie Toshiyuki, Kakareru te (Tokyo: Heibonsha Raiburarī,
2009).
Photograph by Horie Toshiyuki. Reprinted with the permissions of
Horie Toshiyuki and Heibonsha Ltd., Publishers.
FIGure 25 Untitled photograph by Horie Toshiyuki, in Horie Toshiyuki shashinten

(Tokyo: Morioka Shoten, 2009).
Photograph by Horie Toshiyuki. Design by Hanae Yoshikiyo. Reprinted
with the permissions by Horie Toshiyuki and Morioka shoten.
Horie contemplates the role of color in photography in the aforementioned

“Suichoku no shi” as he critiques the enlisting of Robert Doisneau in the
DATAR (Délégation à l’aménagement du territoire et à l’action régionale) proj-
ect, a massive mission of the 1980s to document France photographically,
which culminated in a book, Paysages, Photographies, 1984–1988 (Landscapes,
Photographs, 1984–1988; Paris: Éditions Hazan, 1989).71 Horie points out that
some of Doisneau’s earlier pictures originally collected in La Banlieue de
Paris, the volume on which he collaborated with Blaise Cendrars as we saw
above, are excerpted and inserted amongst newly commissioned photographs.
The historical distance between the two groups of pictures is accentuated
by the distinct color schemes—the older pictures in black and white, the newer
ones in multicolor. Horie lists some of the landscapes Doisneau photographed
71 See Andy Stafford, “Image-text: From the ‘Photo-book’ to ‘Photo-essayism,’ ” in Photo-
Textes: Contemporary French Writing on the Photographic Image (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool
University Press, 2010), 29–54, for more on the DATAR project.
136 CHAPTER 3
for the project with references to colors: white and brown in one, reddish
brown in another, a combination of yellow, brown and reddish brown build-
ings beyond something white resembling a gymnasium in another, a combina-
tion of yellow and gray in another, green in another and white in still another.72
Seeing the rupture as irrevocable and even “sardonic,” Horie laments: “Has the
bridge collapsed for good since Doisneau’s passing between the Parisian sub-
urbs in monochrome and those in gaudy colors?”73 It may be that the whole
point of applying the two distinct color schemes was to highlight the passage
of time between two kinds of suburbs, one dear to residents and the other
imposed by the government. Black and white pictures are often used to cre-
ate nostalgia by removing the quotidian layer and making pictures appear as
if representative of the era before color photography. Doisneau’s section in
Paysage in question has photographs in both color schemes appearing out of
chronological order and without any obvious pattern ( for example, alternating
72 Doisneau’s forty-seven color photographs contributed to this project can be viewed on
DATAR’s official website, Raphaële Bertho pour la DATAR + missionphoto.datar.gouv.fr,
Mission photographique DATAR, under the title of “Banlieue d’aujourd’hui, dans les ban-
lieues et les villes nouvelles de la région parisienne” (Suburbs today, in the suburbs and
new towns in the Parisian region): http://missionphoto.datar.gouv.fr/fr/photographe/
7643/series, or in English http://missionphoto.datar.gouv.fr/en/photographe/9473/series
(accessed May 8, 2015). In the sentence prefacing the portfolio, the irony of the “return”
to the suburbs that Doisneau’s camera captured in 1940s is characterized as a “break” in
the photographer’s own practice. Doisneau’s black and white photographs reprinted
in Paysage are not uploaded on DATAR’s website.
73 Horie, “Suichoku no shi,” 171. In “Kyūsuitō e” (To the Water Tower), another essay in Kōgai e
(107–20), Horie is taken by surprise that a photograph in Michel Volkovitch (text) and
Michel Lamoureux (photographs), Le Bout du monde à Neuilly-Plaisance: Voyage dans
la banlieue de Paris (The End of the World in Neuilly-Plaisance: Journey through the
Suburbs of Paris; Paris: Éditions Maurice Nadeau, 1994) captures the same water tower
that appears in “Épicerie-Buvette,” the last photograph in Robert Doisneau and Blaise
Cendrars’s La Banlieue de Paris (1949; 1983). Horie affectionately walks us through the
Volkovitch/Lamoureux book. A series of black and white pictures of suburban landscapes
overviewed and houses focused on in this collaborative book presents no human being
within the frame, but the love for the houses and places photographed is evident in the
leisurely pedestrian’s perspective in the prose, which one might argue is shared by the
photographer, who frames noticeable traces of residents’ attentive care of details of their
abodes. The writer and the photographer make emotional investments in things they pass
and transfer them to the reader/viewer Horie, who further conveys the sense of engage-
ment to his readers. Horie, if not the authors, silently recognizes that those houses were
soon to be engulfed by a wave of conurbation that would replace them with concrete
jungles. Horie anticipates the prospective “death” in the photographic present, much as
Roland Barthes does.
or grouped according to a given scheme). There are four instances in the

sequence in which a black and white picture and a color photo are placed side
by side, effectively demanding the viewer’s comparison between the two. Thus,
for example, La maison d’Erik Satie à Arcueil (1945)74 is on the left of No. 378 in
the series “Banlieue d’aujourd’hui, dans les banlieues et les villes nouvelles de
la région parisienne” (pages 523–24);75 and Les 20 ans de Josette, Gentilly (1948)76
has on its right No. 401 of the same series (pages 526–27).77 The viewer’s eye-
balls are necessarily invited to rotate to take in the space of the two-page spread
in perpendicular motion, and to draw a contrast between the two either by the
color scheme applied or by the historical moment represented.
As in the case with sightedness and blindness, Horie distances himself
from a blatant rupture between monochrome and multicolor photographs.
Nicolas Rouxel-Chaurey, the photographer of another photo-essay book that
Horie reviews, Enquête d’essence (Survey of Fuel), freely traverses the space
on printed pages between color and black and white.78 Photographs of both
schemes are juxtaposed on the same pages. Some of the multicolor ones fea-
ture details of black and white photos. In one pair of facing pages, the reader/
viewer finds on the right, in black and white, an oil pump as viewed through a
window, and on the left the same pump without the layer of the window pane,
in multicolor. The continuum rather than the division between two territories
attracts Horie’s attention in this instance as well.
In his essay “Between 37.7 and 38.4 Degrees: The Photographs of Hervé
Guibert” (2010), written for the catalogue of the multiple-artist exhibition
Love’s Body: Art in the Age of AIDS, Horie attentively discusses Guibert’s arti-
cle on Bill Brandt, “L’Angleterre de Bill Brandt: La lumière de l’ombre” (The
England of Bill Brandt: Light of Shadow, 1977).79 Guibert wittily reverses
74 The image can be viewed on Atelier Doisneau’s official website: www.robert-doisneau
.com/en/portfolios/440,banlieue.htm (accessed May 8, 2015).
75 The image is available for viewing on DATAR’s official website, Raphaële Bertho pour
la DATAR + missionphoto.datar.gouv.fr, Mission photographique DATAR, http://mission
photo.datar.gouv.fr/fr/photographie/8086 (accessed May 8, 2015).
76 www.robert-doisneau.com/en/portfolios/440,banlieue.htm (accessed May 8, 2015).
77 http://missionphoto.datar.gouv.fr/fr/photographie/8109 (accessed May 8, 2015).
78 The book was published at Rodez by Subervie, 1998. The title of the book echoes in Horie’s
article “Honshitsu o kumidasu izumi,” which we discussed earlier. This is the book men-
tioned in “Shigosen o motome te” as one that Jacques Réda (b. 1929) has contributed an
essay to. Indeed Réda’s untitled preface (n.p.) appears in this book.
79 Guibert, La Photo, inéluctablement, 11–14. Bill Brandt’s Shadow of Light: A Collection of
Photographs from 1931 to the Present was first published in 1966; its French translation with
Michel Butor’s introduction was published as Ombre d’une île in 1966. The second English
138 CHAPTER 3
the order of the words in the title of Brandt’s exhibition, “Ombre de lumière”—
French translation of “Shadow of Light”—for the title of his essay.80 “Le
soleil,” writes Guibert, “est singulièrement absent des photos de Brandt: nuits,
brumes, orages, humidités, aubes et crépuscules. Le livre pourrait s’appeler
La Lumière de l’ombre” (The sun is significantly absent from Brand’s photos—
nights, fogs, storms, dampnesses, daybreaks and dusks. The book could be
called Light of Shadow).81 As Brandt finds shadow in light, Guibert finds light
in shadow. Shadow and light are neither antonyms nor mutually exclusive of
each other, according to Horie, but coexist and erode each other’s territory, just
as do sightedness and blindness, or monochrome and multicolor. As Derrida
makes clear, writing by light (“photography”) and writing by shadow (“Platonic
skiagraphia”) are complementary: “The difference in light, the difference of
exposure, if you will, which is not necessarily the difference between day and
night—here we have perhaps the first possibility of the trace, of the archive
and of everything that follows from it: memory, the technics of memory, mne-
motechnics, etc.”82
Photographs of Paintings, Paintings from Photographs
In Horie’s aforementioned novel Kagan bōjitsu shō, the narrator sees at a

store a Polaroid picture of Emile Maurice Vieillard’s (1867–1947) Mother and
Daughter on sale. This episode gives us an entry into reconsideration of the
boundaries drawn between paintings and photographs; the two media may
not be mutually exclusive in historical or methodological terms as they have
edition was published in 1977, followed by the new French edition under the title of
Ombre de lumière in the same year (Sarah Hermanson Meister, Bill Brandt: Shadow & Light
[New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2013], 206). Brandt is known for portraits of writ-
ers and artists including Lawrence Durrell, E.M. Forster, Iris Murdoch and, as mentioned
by Guibert in The Man in the Red Hat, Francis Bacon. Brandt’s philosophy was that por-
traits should not show the persons’ past but predict their future (See Bill Brandt Archive,
The Photography of Bill Brandt, www.billbrandt.com/bill-brandt-how-both-halves-lived
[accessed June 7, 2015]), somewhat reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s presentiment of the
death of people in photographs.
80 Bill Brandt’s Shadow of Light contains pictures of industrial cities, mines of northern
England with miners’ faces smeared with soot and scenes from wartime England (he pre-
ferred blackouts to the Blitz, the introduction suggests).
81 Guibert, La Photo, inéluctablement, 11.
82 Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature, 15–16.
often been assumed to be. Instead, boundaries are crossed from either side, by
photographing paintings as in this case or painting a picture based on a photo-
graph as we saw earlier in the instance of Zaborov.
As Walter Benjamin maintained, “the impact of photographic reproduc-
tion of artworks is of very much greater importance for the function of art
than the greater or lesser artistry of a photography that regards all experience
as fair game for the camera.”83 Postcards of paintings sold at galleries and
museums are photographic reproductions of paintings and as such embody
the two modes of visual representation as they cross paths. In Guibert’s
“L’autoportrait” (trans. “Self-Portrait”), a chapter in L’Image fantôme, the nar-
rator-protagonist says that he collects postcards of various self-portraits by
Rembrandt. First, he identifies five of them as his favorites; then, after three
additional postcards come into his possession, he ends up tearing up the new
acquisitions because of their poor quality.84 He says that he cannot bear see-
ing them in the same row with the original five on a bookshelf. However, Horie
rightly points out that, in Sans titre (Untitled, 1987), a photo by Guibert of
bookcases, at least six postcards of Rembrandt’s self-portraits are displayed in
a row on a shelf (Fig. 26).85 The repetition of the reference to the photographed
paintings in image and text, printed separately, with variation, indicates the
tenacity and complexity of the problem of the photograph—painting relation-
ship in Guibert’s writing, which may have affected Horie as his translator and
critic.
Another entanglement between photography and painting emerges in the
following passage of The Man in the Red Hat. Guibert writes:
I had done no more than putting a few colours on the palette, one hand
suspended over a picture postcard of Watteau’s Gilles that I wanted to
copy. [. . .] To calm myself I had photographed the palette on which the
colors were already drying.86
83 Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley
Shorter, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, pt. 2, 1931–1934 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1999), 520.
84 Guibert, “L’Autoportrait,” in L’Image fantôme, 62–65.
85 Horie, “37-do 7-bu to 38-do 4-bu no aida de,” 140. In its English translation, “Between 37.7
and 38.4 Degrees,” 176.
86 Guibert, The Man in the Red Hat, 40–41; Horie’s translation, 86.
140 CHAPTER 3
FIGure 26 Hervé Guibert, Sans titre (1987).

HervEGuibertCopyrightHERVEGUIBERT. Courtesy of Christine Guibert.
This passage, from a book that is devoid of illustrations, corresponds to the

scene in a photograph taken by Guibert, Peintures (Paintings, 1983), which
captures a palette, a brush and a postcard of Jean-Antoine Watteau’s (1684–
1721) Gilles (1718–19; Fig. 27)87 The image does not illustrate the text in the
same book yet appears elsewhere, out of context. Indeed, the photograph is
not accompanied by any text beyond its title, either, completing the silence
between image and text. But the silence does not mean indifference or
irrelevance. This seemingly incidental repetition is as if to suggest that in lieu of
physically contiguous space-time between description in one publication and
realization in another, the mental image persists for the author-photographer,
awaiting for a moment that the reader/viewer discovers the paralleling effects.
What the photograph or the narrative shows is not a painting but a painting
process (and a halted one at that, conveying that this process is not even an
activity autonomous of other, everyday affairs). The narrator’s hand has not
moved across the canvas when it has been suggested that he should paint a
picture. The same hand, however, moves with a camera to take a picture of
painterly tools, as they have become “things” themselves (Derrida) that can
be seen or touched rather than vehicles for representation. The thing-ness
87 This photograph can be viewed in Hervé Guibert, Photographies, unpaginated.

FIGure 27 Hervé Guibert, Peintures (1983).

HervEGuibertCopyrightHERVEGUIBERT. Courtesy of Christine Guibert.
extends beyond the frame of the photograph. The photograph as well as the
narrative implicitly defines images not as representations of other things but
as things themselves, highlighting the indexical relationship between images
rather than the iconographic ties to their models. Whether a painting is being
photographed or a photograph is being painted, the transition is not icono-
graphic but indexical, as has been shown in the examples of Zaborov we saw
earlier.
The Photographer’s Body and Its Environs
Guibert’s “Sur une manipulation courante (Mémoire d’un dysmorphophobe)”

(About Conventional Manipulation: Memoir of a Dysmorphophobe) begins
with the disfigurement of furniture and of interior and garden designs by a
nobleman who suffered from a deformity.88 Limitations on physical freedom
imposed by amputation, paralysis and other challenges enable the observer
88 In Guibert, Photographies. (Three pages in length, unpaginated.)

142 CHAPTER 3
to reinvent space in order to overcome its material conditions and achieve

more vitality. Thus, compromised immobility can lead to complete conscious-
ness of the contingency of space. As with the conventional contrast between
blindness and sight, immobility and mobility are seen as relative, not mutually
exclusive, human states.
Horie does not necessarily characterize the challenging physical conditions
of the photographer Gochō Shigeo, who suffered from thoracic caries,89 and
the fictional, semi-paralyzed aerial photographer on a plane in “Kassōro e”
(To the Runway), a story collected in Mikenzaka (Slope Yet to Be Seen), as dis-
abilities.90 Rather, Horie’s observations awaken us to the fact that each and
every photographer negotiates with his or her physical and material condi-
tions under which he or she coordinates the art with the space around and
beyond the camera. No photographer operates a camera with unrestrained
control, without impediment. As is the case with the optical faculty, as dis-
cussed earlier, there is no sharp distinction between being disabled and being
non-disabled but instead a spectrum of varied degrees of physical conditions.
In the essay “Sonzai no ‘izari’ ni tsuite” (On the “Crawling” of a Being), Horie
appreciates the way Gochō Shigeo approaches his photographic objects, a
movement for which Horie figuratively uses the term “izaru,” to crawl on one’s
knees toward an aim, a person or a thing. The action is both intimate with
and respectful toward the person or the thing one approaches in a Japanese
tatami-mat room, wherein standing up and walking across the room are not
always considered appropriate. In this mode of moving toward a destination,
one remains highly conscious of one’s own corporeality and bearing in relation
to others in the space. While this movement may be necessitated by curtailed
walking abilities, Horie encourages us to see crawling as more generally inher-
ent in “being.”
That Horie is not talking about Gochō’s physical challenges but focusing
on his manner of navigating the space between him and those to be photo-
graphed becomes evident in the following passage, written on the occasion of
a retrospective exhibition of the artist:
89 Gochō Shigeo’s essay “Photography as Another Reality” appears in Vartanian, Hatanaka
and Kambayashi, Setting Sun, 52–53. The volume also includes biographical notes on him,
“Shigeo Gochō (1946–83), 204–5. For more on Gochō, see Satō Makoto’s documentary film
about him, Self and Other (2000).
90 Horie Toshiyuki, “Kassōro e,” in Mikenzaka (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2008), 7–25. Josef Sudek
is known to have quit bookbinding and switched to professional photography after the
amputation of his right arm—an episode attesting to a greater adaptability of the art of
photography to diverse physical conditions.
What is at stake is whether or not one could “crawl” toward someone else
in communication with the person, without revealing hostility or vulner-
ability, maintaining the tension of the spirit. It is the way of being in
which the photographer’s body unconsciously responds to the other, as
the photographer is willing to face the other by taking a step further than
he would just standing still or being seated.91
Proximity and mutual erosion of bodies in the city, or the image and the pho-
tographer’s body, orient Gochō’s photography. Horie elaborates the evolving
and dynamic circumstances involving the photographer’s body in the follow-
ing two passages:
The city comes into being not from above the head of each one of us,
from the back or from one’s belly, but “from below one’s feet, as if in lap-
ping waves.”92
The existence of Gochō Shigeo does not move across the space
toward the object but “crawls” with his gaze. The world then becomes a
function of the noise of the knees scratching the floor, or the noise of the
shutter being pressed, and vibrates the retina more than the eardrum.93
The full awareness of the photographer’s body and its effects, such as noise,
changes the notion of photography as transparent and neutral. Horie obvi-
ously prefers photographers who are conscious of their own physical place-
ment, functions and effects. While a degree of disability might make the body
more sensitive to the body’s positioning, comportment and motility (as we saw
in the case of Blaise Cendrars, handling his typewriter, lighting and other tools
strategically), the physical impediments to realizing photographic imaginings
are commonly shared by all photographers, regardless of the degree of their
(dis)ability. Indeed, the so-called disabilities could be enabling for them to
realize material conditions of the surroundings.
Another instance of the non-confrontational approach manifests itself
in “Rowashī Ekusupuresu” (Roissy-Express), a piece in Kōgai e, which offers
Horie’s reading of Les passagers du Roissy-Express (1990; trans., Roissy-Express:
91 Horie, “Sonzai no ‘izari’ nit suite” (2004), in Airon to asa no shijin, 51. The essay’s original
publication followed the retrospective exhibition of Gochō’s work held at Tokyo kindai
bijutsukan (Museum of Modern Art Tokyo), from May 24 to July 21, 2003.
92 Ibid., 51.
93 Ibid., 52.
144 CHAPTER 3
A Journey through the Paris Suburbs, 1996), a book consisting of text by François
Maspero and photographs by Anaïk Frantz. The book’s two creators ride the
eponymous railway that connects various points in the Parisian suburbs—
places untraveled by passengers arriving by air and headed directly for the city
center. The setting and composition of this book’s image–text place it in the
genealogy of the best (photographic) books on a comparable subject matter.
“They were grateful for literary references: nostalgic souls talked of Cendrars,
Doisneau, Prévert, Queneau; others mentioned Céline’s Journey to the End of
the Night.”94
Horie, however, finds a distinction in Maspero and Frantz’s book: it is a
third-person narrative of a journey taken by “François” and “Anaïk,” who are
“they” rather than “we,” facing another “they,” the photographic objects. The
writer and the photographer do not stay behind their pen or camera, behind
pages of printed text or images, but appear as characters who engage people
they meet and are seen exploring the space they observe. In Maspero’s words
on Frantz’s photographs, perhaps echoing Baudrillard’s:
They never took people by surprise, were never muggings. Her pictures
were not rush jobs or photographic rape. Nothing was for show either.
The faces did not spring from nowhere only to melt back into anonymity;
each one had a name, each one was linked to memories, confidences,
meals, some shared human warmth, or hours spent together. The stories
they told were always to be continued. For these reasons, François used to
say that they had something in common with Arab tales or an African
palaver. They were photos that took their time.95
Horie notes that Frantz’s photographs, including those that were taken before
this book project, tend to feature people whose liminal existence may be seen
as disturbing to the urbanites confined within walls. Rather than framing
them as fodder for social criticism, Frantz becomes one of them before taking
pictures of them. Horie contrasts her style with Diane Arbus’s, which he sees
as exploiting eccentricities to repellant effect:
94 Maspero and Frantz, Roissy-Express: A Journey through the Paris Suburbs, trans., Paul
Jones (London: Verso, 1994), 15.
95 Ibid., 11. I appreciate Neil Ten Kortenaar’s guidance on “palaver” as “pidgin for ‘talk’
( from the Portuguese palabra for word)” and its reference to “the African habit of mak-
ing everything an excuse for conversation. Commercial and other transactions always
involve discussion. People do not rush to get to the business at hand but talk first.” Neil
Ten Kortenaar, e-mail to author, Apr. 28, 2010.
Rather, there is unassuming intimacy randomly extracted from a family

album, as if each object were an acquaintance. Her skill of letting some-
one she has just met generate the air of familiarity imprints in those pho-
tographs a common memory that could not possibly exist. Anaïk’s
flexibility in communication with others must have been a great weapon
for Maspero.96
Horie describes Doisneau’s method of photographing similarly. His Japanese

translation of Robert Doisneau’s memoir, À l’imparfait de l’objectif: Souvenirs
et portraits (With the Imperfect Lens: Memories and Portraits, 1995), came out
as Fukanzen na renzu de: Kaisō to shōzō with the translator’s afterword in 2010.
The book’s title and epigraph are excerpted from Jacques Prévert’s preface to
Doisneau’s book of photographs, Rue Jacques Prévert (Jacques Prévert Street,
1992). The epigraph reads, “C’est toujours à l’imparfait de l’objectif que tu con-
jugues le verbe photographier” or “It is always through the imperfect lens that
you conjugate the verb ‘to photograph’”—a word play with the “imparfait”
(imperfect) as both a grammatical term and a significant adjective. A part of
Prévert’s implication is that the camera has its physical limitations. A portrait
of Doisneau entitled “Les imparfaits de l’objectif” features the photogra-
pher with an idle camera in his hands, smiling at Prévert, who has his back
to the camera, with his contour revealed just enough to show the cigarette in
his mouth.97 The photographer’s work “begins with a conversation with the
object,” says Horie.98 In other words, the photographer must place him/herself
face to face with the photographed and spend some time there to become able
to take the photograph. In this respect, Horie suggests that “photography is
not like hunting but rather like fishing.”99 Indeed, the photographer needs to
wait until the object becomes ready to give itself over to being photographed.
Photography is not an instantaneous action like shooting a gun, an act that
96 Horie, “Rowashī ekusupuresu,” in Horie Toshiyuki, Kōgai e, 86.

97 Robert Doisneau, Rue Jacques Prévert (Paris: Éditions Hoëbeke, 1992), 11. This photograph,
uncredited on the page, is attributed to André Pozner, a friend of Prévert, in an article
by Christian Desmeules, “Doisneau, bon pied, bon oeil,” Le Devoir: Libre de penser, May
8, 2015. The photograph in question appears within the article somewhat cropped. www
.ledevoir.com/culture/livres/365764/doisneau-bon-pied-bon-oeil (accessed May 8, 2015).
Pozner has published a book on Doisneau, Robert Doisneau, comme un barbare (Montreal:
Lux, 2012), with this photograph on the jacket. In fact there are a number of portraits of
Doisneau with a camera in hand, in which he acknowledges the other camera directed at
him with a smile.
98 Horie, “Renzu no hankakokei de,” 318.
99 Ibid., 324.
146 CHAPTER 3
camerawork is often figuratively associated with (most famously by Robert

Capa as we saw in Chapter 2), but one requiring patience like waiting for a fish
to take the bait.
Another possible analogy for photography is to games that involve throw-
ing, hitting or passing (a ball), activities Horie likes to address in his writing
(pétanque, ping pong, tennis, soccer). Unlike shooting (a bullet), sports such
as ping pong or tennis involve releasing the ball in anticipation of a response
from the intended receiver, and not for the purpose of annihilating him/her.
Though the movement of the ball involves competition, defeat arises from
missing the ball rather than being hit by it. Though the ball that is hit may or
may not be returned by the other in such a way that one can receive it again,
the game is a dialogic act, not a unilateral one in which one side attempts to
silence the other.
Horie also spins the analogy of the sports ball in another way. The ball com-
plicates our sense of boundaries, with its free motion and its being occupied
by a particular person while all the others watch.100 He declares: “As an appa-
ratus with which to jump into elsewhere, into a photograph, nothing is more
appropriate than a ball kicked off.”101 Then he elaborates the way in which a
ball governs the space around it:
The ball in the middle of the world, however, does not impose its central-
ity on every human being in the pitch. The space in which soccer is played
is exactly the same as the space in a photograph. Many more are com-
pletely separated from the movement of the ball than those who touch it.
All the players become spectators while observing the destination of
the ball that brushes off the goalkeeper’s hand as he throws his body
sideways. They are there, at the site of the actual play and yet they are not
really there. At the moment the shutter button is pressed, they are
excluded from the center of the world—and the exclusion is more beau-
tiful than anything else.102
100 Galerie du Château d’Eau, ed., Un ballon dans la photo (Nantes: Éditions En Vues, 1998),
54–55. The picture in question, Madrid by Ramón Masats (1957), can be viewed at Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia’s home page, at: www.museoreinasofia.es/en/
collection/artwork/madrid-0 (accessed June 24, 2015). I thank Katie Fry for alerting me
to this web page.
101 Horie, “Honshitsu o kumidasu izumi,” in Zō ga funde mo, 228.
102 Ibid., 228–29.
Being spatially and temporally present and yet existentially excluded from what
is happening then and there is the way of being for the photographer and the
viewer of photographs. And yet, Horie maintains, they are irrevocably shaken
by the experience of sharing the photographic moment, reaching elsewhere,
and no longer able to return to the everyday. Thus Horie argues that soccer as
represented in photographs captures the modus operandi of photography.
Conclusion
Horie’s narratives remind us of the elusiveness of photographs as things, the

imperfection of images and the unreliability of images as authentic represen-
tations. The mechanical reproduction and distribution attributed to photog-
raphy do not always guarantee the sameness and availability of the printed
images, and instead photographs endure forces of nature as material beings
over time, and can be valued by those who possess them as special objects.
As a technology midway between painting and digital photography, conven-
tional film photography is comparable to typewriting and occupies the stage
between creation of a unique work of art and mass reproduction of an infinite
number of copies.
Photographs are not simply images of things or people but are things them-
selves. Photographs are not always products of perfect vision but instead
can be blurred or blurring in the intersection of light and shadow, which are
not mutually exclusive conditions. Photography occupies a space between
nature and art, between hand and eye, between the bodies of all involved, and
between past, present and future.
Horie’s narratives are informed by the intermediary nature of photography.
Regardless of the circumstances of each text—be it an exhibition catalogue,
a review of a photographic book, a text to accompany a photograph or a story
of a photographer—photography for him is not a mere subject matter but a
manifesto of his aesthetic and existential stance.
CHAPTER 4
Photography by Hands in Kanai Mieko’s Narratives
Kanai Mieko (b. 1947), who began her literary career in her late teens as a poet
and a short story writer and received awards or award nominations in both
forms, in time completely withdrew from poetry. She has accounted for the
shift as a renunciation of the metaphorical (or icon) in favor of the metonymi-
cal (or index). Such keen awareness of the rhetoric of media is evident in her
critical engagement with contemporary conceptual art, film and photography.
Not only has she published many essays on these topics, but her novels—for
which she has also garnered critical acclaim, several literary awards and a
degree of commercial success—are generously and formatively loaded with
the visual. The visual orientation of her texts is not limited to references to
actual works of visual art but manifests itself more significantly in the nar-
rative mode, wherein she effectively employs plastic-artistic, photographic or
cinematic registers of space, time and subjectivity.
Kanai has been more vocal as a film critic than as a photography critic (with
two collections of film essays to her credit as well as many reviews of films,
pre-screening lectures and interviews of international directors). Her novels
are also cinematically inspired, alluding liberally to films by Jean Renoir,
Fritz Lang, Luis Buñuel, Robert Bresson, Naruse Mikio, Victor Erice and Eric
Rohmer, among many others. Her sister Kumiko is a famed visual artist who
frequently contributes to Kanai’s publications as a designer. A perhaps lesser-
known yet equally formative exposure to photography emerges not only in
reviews of photographic exhibitions and a substantial essay on photography
entitled “Han imēji ron” (On Anti-Image, 1992–93) that was serialized in the
photographic journal Asahi kamera (Asahi Camera, an established periodi-
cal on the subject, to which Abe earlier contributed, as we saw in Chapter 2),1
but also in her engagement with photography in her fiction, ranging from
short stories in her early days as a writer to the full-length novels that she
mostly concentrates on of late. Her attention to photography reveals the rel-
evance of some concerns of influential critics of the medium, including Susan
Sontag, Roland Barthes, Mary Ann Doane and Victor Burgin. Kanai’s writerly
engagement with photography thus is inescapably conceptual. Despite Kanai’s
1 This essay was then collected in Kanai Mieko, Hon o kaku hito yomanu hito tokaku kono yowa
mamanaranu (What on Earth to Do with Writers Who Don’t Read?) Part II (Tokyo: Nihon
Bungeisha, 1993), 317–71, and then in Kanai Mieko essei korekushon (Kanai Mieko Essay
Collection), vol. 1: Yoru ni natte mo asobi tsudukero (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2013), 259–313.

Photography by Hands in Kanai Mieko ’ s Narratives 149
visual orientation, however, it has not been her practice to engage directly
with visual art other than as a critic. Kishi no machi (The Cities of Déjà-Vu,
1980), co-produced with photographer Watanabe Kanendo (b. 1947), remains
to date her only photo-roman. Despite her formative debt to the cinema, she
has yet to pen a script for film. The challenge she prefers is to offer textual
counterparts to visual—that is, translating the visual into the verbal register.
In this chapter I shall first examine the photographer’s body in spatial
and physical relation to the camera and the object of photographing, elabo-
rated in an early short story by Kanai, “Mado” (1979; trans., “Windows,”
2009) and her essays on photography. I shall then discuss her only pho-
tographic book, Kishi no machi, which features an anonymous and amor-
phous narrator-protagonist, whose flânerie expressed through the text is
comparable to that of the photographer providing the book’s embedded
images. Next, the body of the developer of films and that of the connois-
seur of art photographs in the novel Tama-ya (Tama, My Darling, 1987; trans.
Oh, Tama! 2014) will be reflected on in terms of the sensations they experi-
ence when in contact with photographs as material beings. Then the body of
the reader of photographic books, which emerges in Indian samā (1988; trans.,
Indian Summer, 2012), will be the focus of my analysis. After that I shall con-
sider Kanai’s characters in Karui memai (Vague Vertigoes, 1997), who, while
viewing old family photographs, are surprised to find themselves experienc-
ing not nostalgia but estrangement from their past. Lastly, Uwasa no musume
(The Girl in the Rumor, 2002) will give us an opportunity to recall Tanizaki’s
assessment of photographic portraits as confusing the viewer’s memory and
disturbing middle-class family life, whose order and harmony the medium
is supposed to help ensure and preserve, while questioning the ubiquity of
mass-produced photographic media in consumers’ everyday lives.
The Face in the Shadow of the Camera
The photographer realizes that s/he is confined to her/his limited “vision,”

and that it is only partial, and yet, precisely because of that, s/he aspires
to encapsulate the whole. It is also an attempt at overcoming vision itself.
TAKI KŌJI2
…
2 Taki Kōji, “Me to me narazarumono” (“The Eye and That Which Is Not,� 1970), in Shashinron
shūsei, 32.
150 CHAPTER 4
We stand between the two impulses: to entirely become an “eye,” and to

become “that which is not an eye.”
TAKI KŌJI3
⸪
In the opening scene of Edward Sedgwick’s silent film The Cameraman (1928),
the protagonist, played by Buster Keaton, then a tintype photographer who
takes portraits for passersby, proves to be physically susceptible to the dynamic
flux of masses of people as they participate in and witness ongoing events on
the street. As a means of approaching the woman of his dreams, Keaton’s char-
acter replaces his tintype camera, capable only of representing static images
of posing models, with a more up-to-date newsreel camera. With this new
equipment he ends up capturing two events of documentary value—a street
fight and a boating accident—in long and dramatic sequences, fully capturing
the actions of entire bodies engaged in a struggle for survival. In the process he
garners both professional success and personal happiness (the latter because
his film inadvertently proves he has saved his sweetheart’s life). The subtext is
a celebration of motion pictures, as opposed to comparably inert and lifeless
photographs.
As we saw in Chapter 2, Susan Sontag cites this film in her book On Photog
raphy in the context of discussing the myth that the camera never misses
the mark.4 The Cameraman—the way Sontag frames it—confirms the prom-
inence of the photographer’s own physical presence. The awkwardness and
“out-of-place-ness” of being there with the object of photographing “here
and now” is acutely felt as the photographer’s body too is made into a spectacle.
As Roland Barthes puts it: “The Photographer’s ‘second sight’ does not consist
in ‘seeing’ but in being there.”5 Photographers can be highly visible in public, in
their act of taking pictures, which may fall well outside the bounds of normal
everyday behavior; with their conspicuous equipment and unique movements,
they become spectacles themselves—as is the case with Itakura in Tanizaki’s
Sasameyuki, as we saw in Chapter 1. Some of the points Sontag makes in this
passage resonate with Kanai’s concerns with the contrast between the inten-
tionality and contingency of the act of photographing, and the coordination
(or lack thereof) between the body and the machine during this act.
3 Ibid., 49.
4 See Chapter 2, 93–94.
5 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 47.
First, I shall take into account references made to photography by Kanai and
discourses by her and others on one of the most celebrated Japanese photog-
raphers (himself a photo critic), Kuwabara Kineo (1913–2007),6 whose work
Kanai has reviewed and even quoted in her fiction, as we shall see later in this
chapter. Both Kanai and Kuwabara commonly reveal sensibilities that lean
toward corporeal and spatial projections into the immaterial, neutral plane of
images, as photographs are conventionally characterized—sensibilities simi-
lar to those of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Walter Benjamin, whom they even
occasionally cite.
As both Kanai and Kuwabara have mostly published their works first in
journals and then in books, their premise of image/text production and con-
sumption is bound by the terms of print culture, wherein image and text are
literally and figuratively flattened; they appear on two-dimensional pages, and
their material presence is reduced to negligible. Both creators, however, have
effectively challenged the common modern perception of prose and photogra-
phy as transparent media of representation. One of their strategies to achieve
the goal is to foreground the creator’s body (rather than mind) and to urge the
reader/spectator to become aware of traces of the body’s active presence in
the process of production. This awareness reactivates the archive of informa-
tion as the space-time of performance. Released from the imagined commu-
nity of consumer culture, readers/spectators are expected to find themselves
in the here and now of the author/photographer’s engagement with partici-
pants in their art, which is more physical than metaphysical.
Why Photography? Between Painting and Cinema
In her essay “Fotogurafu oboegaki: Ugoku mono to ugokanai mono no kyori”

(Notes on Photography: The Distance between the Mobile and the Immobile,
2001), Kanai proposes to place painting, photography and cinema as consti-
tutive of a continuous spectrum of technologies of visuality. Having touched
upon gestures of inter-genre rivalry involving the painter, photographer and
film directors notable in their use of terms that should be specific to the earlier
art—“e” (picture) for photograph, “shashin” (photograph) for cinema—Kanai
cites Gustave Flaubert’s satirical work Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues (1913;
English trans., Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, 1954; Japanese trans., Monkirigata
jiten, 1966), in which photography (or “daguerreotype”) is defined as “painting
6 Kuwabara was resurrected from obscurity as a photographer in postwar Japan after he had
transitioned to the role of photographic journal editor. His work was featured in Creatis 15
(1981): 12–18.
152 CHAPTER 4
on glass: The secret of the art is lost” and imagined as a medium that would
“replace painting” or “make painting obsolete.”7 This sense of mutual exclusiv-
ity and competition is what Kanai sets out to dispel in this essay. She argues
that the use of lens (perhaps having in mind the camera obscura employed by
Johannes Vermeer), plate (e.g., silver), paper (light-sensitive or not) and film
(for photography or cinema) is shared across these three evolutionary stages
in the history of pictures that we might usually recognize as mutually exclusive
and even progressively displacing each other. Instead, we can recognize resi-
dues of the earlier media in later ones, or anticipations of the latter in the for-
mer, which considered together reveal the three visual media as a continuum
rather than territories sharply divided. (We have seen in Horie’s writings in
Chapter 3 similar recognition of the co-presence of media whose geneses are
historically distant.)
Even more important to Kanai than the porousness of boundaries between
visual media is the movement that is inherent in photography, despite its com-
mon characterization as “still” pictures in contrast to the moving or “motion”
pictures of cinema. Kanai catalogues photo-taking scenes in Claude Simon’s
(1913–2005) Le vent (1957; in English, The Wind, 1959; in Japanese, Kaze, 1977) and
in juvenile literature writer and translator Ishii Momoko’s (1907–2008) Osana
monogatari (Tales from My Childhood, 1981), trying to remember what Simon’s
photographs she had seen elsewhere were like, with a degree of imaginative
liberty, as none of them were printed in the particular Simon book in question.
Kanai embraces blurry pictures that trace movement that light has failed to
“graph” (as in “photo-graph”), the failure making such pictures more memorable
than those in which light did manage to “graph” movement taking place within
the humanly negligible span of time defined by the shutter speed. Her prob-
lematization of the division between stillness and movement in the visual media
of photography and cinema seems akin to Mary Ann Doane’s engagement of
Étienne-Jules Marey’s (1830–1904) famous attempts at photographing moving
figures (running horses, falling cats). As with Doane, such photographs’ inciden-
tal yet inevitable inclusion of traces of passing time is of particular interest to
Kanai for what it suggests about the formation of the perception of temporality
7 Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, trans. Jacques Barzun (New York, NY: New Directions, 1968),
65, 28 and 71, respectively. Hasumi Shigehiko’s Monogatari hihan josetsu (Introduction
to Narrative Criticism; Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1985) cites these passages as illustration of
Flaubert’s take on photography.
through photography.8 Both Doane and Kanai conceptualize photography’s

negotiations with movement that the medium is normally considered unable
to render. By way of commentaries on cinematic representations of photogra-
phers, in which photography necessarily becomes corporeal, Kanai success-
fully draws our attention to the photographic process rather than images as
photography’s final product. Kanai considers, for instance, the body of the
photographer in Jean-Luc Godard’s (b. 1930) film Masculin, féminin: 15 faits
précis (1966; distributed in Britain and the United States as Masculin, féminin;
released in Japan as Dansei. Josei in 1968), the body in this case being sacrificed
for the very act of photographing:
It should be indecent to indicate the release of the shutter by stop motion.

There are many methods to show the photographs taken by characters in
films. For example, in Godard’s Masculin, féminin, Jean-Pierre Léaud,
positioning the camera to take a picture of his girlfriend on a rooftop,
walks backward to capture her within the frame of the viewfinder as he
sees fit, with the result that he falls from the rooftop of the building along
with the camera.9
It is appropriate that Kanai cites the actor Jean-Pierre Léaud rather than the
character, Paul, to suggest his corporeality in a fashion that is as physical and
unmediated as possible—except that the Godard film, at least in its currently
distributed DVD format, lacks this scene as she describes it; the accident is
recounted by witnesses afterward, without visual representation on screen.
The imaginative excess of Kanai’s account of the film may be attributed to
her keen interest in the involvement of the body that manipulates the (photo-
graphic) camera behind the (cinematic) scene.
Kanai and Kuwabara are among those who challenge the purported trans-
parency and neutrality of photography, and aspire to restore the photogra-
pher’s corporeal presence in the medium. In so doing, they do not proclaim the
authorial intent of the photographer but call our attention to his/her physical
grappling with technology and the environment.
8 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
9 Kanai Mieko, “Fotogurafu oboegaki: Ugoku mono to ugokanai mo no kyori,” Gendai shisō 29,
no. 1 (September 2001): 130.
154 CHAPTER 4
The Photographer without Voice
Kanai, in her 1981 review of the above-cited film The Cameraman for the lit-
erary journal Bungei, points to the fact that “the spectators [of films] tend
to forget the cameraman’s existence” and that “the camera and cameraman
are the only things that the camera cannot capture.”10 She may, then, have in
mind this film, or Sontag’s commentary on it, when she refers to Kuwabara
as “a cameraman” (“kyameraman”) and Araki Nobuyoshi (b. 1940) as a “jour-
nalist” (“jānarisuto”) in her review of the two photographers’ collaborative
exhibition Love You Tokyo! The Photography of Kineo Kuwabara and Nobuyoshi
Araki.11 In this review she speaks favorably of the lack of authorial intention in
Kuwabara’s photographs, and of the corporeal coordination of eye and finger
that renders his work “ethical.”12
As has been theorized by Martha Rosler among others, the documentary
photograph is neither exclusively controlled by the photographer nor con-
sented to by the photographed.13 It may include things that were not focused
upon or people who did not realize that they were being photographed.
Barthes writes:
10 Kanai Mieko, “Kozaru no yōna kameraman no shōzō: Kīton no kameraman” (A Portrait of
a Photographer like a Baby Monkey: Keaton as The Cameraman) in Eiga yawarakai hada
(Cinema: La peau douce/The Soft Skin; Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1983), 66 and 73,
respectively. The essay has since been collected in Kanai Mieko essei korekushon (Essay
Collection) Vol. 4: Eiga, Yawarakai hada. Eiga ni sawaru (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2014), 30–38.
11 The exhibition reviewed in the former essay took place at Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo,
July 17 to September 5, 1993. For its English-language review, see Dana Friis-Hansen,
“Kineo Kuwabara and Nobuyoshi Araki at the Setagaya Art Museum—Photography—
Tokyo, Japan—Review of Exhibitions,” Art in America 82, no. 1 (January 1994): 114.
12 Kanai, “Kussetsu to rinri” (Inflection and Ethics), déjà-vu: a photographic quarterly 14
(Autumn 1993): 139. This essay is then integrated into Kanai’s novel, Karui memai (Vague
Vertigoes, 1997), pp. 148–60, as the protagonist reads it, followed in pp. 160–67 by another
essay by Kanai on Kuwabara, “Hikari no ima,” originally published as “Hikari no ima: Ushi
to mishi yo” (The Light of the Present: The Life I Thought Was Unbearable), in Tokyo
Sutēshon gyararī, ed., Kuwabara Kineo shashinten: Tokyo Shōwa modan (Tokyo: Higashi
Nihon tetsudō bunka zaidan, 1995), 156–57. More on Kanai’s engagement of Kuwabara–
Araki contrasts later.
13 See, for example, Martha Rosler, “In, Around and Afterthought (On Documentary
Photography)” (1981), collected in R. Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories
of Photography (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), 303–42.
[T]he detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly, inten-

tional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photo-
graphed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful;
it does not necessarily attest to the photographer’s art; it says only
that the photographer was there, or else, still more simply, that he
could not not photograph the partial object at the same time as the total
object [. . .]14
Kanai’s mediation of Kuwabara resembles that of French-literature scholar

Okamura Tamio, who articulates the way Kuwabara’s body moves among the
people whom he photographs, rather than the way his mind works to incorpo-
rate and organize them in a preordained vision. Okamura begins his essay with
another film–photography comparison, lamenting the price film pays in order
to narrate stories—the loss of the gaze of the flâneur, a “treasure” that Okamura
recognizes in Baudelaire, the Lumière brothers and the Impressionists which
subsequently went missing. Okamura names Kuwabara and Robert Frank (b.
1924) as advocates of the “passerby’s gaze” until its restoration by New Wave
cineastes. Highlighting the two photographers’ preference of “figures tempo-
rarily on the street ( just as the two of them are)” who respond to signs and
things in the city, registering “incidental structures on the street”—“encounters
and partings,” “formation and dissolution.” While thus fully acknowledging the
dynamism of their street photographs, Okamura proclaims the lack of story in
those pictures: “In such photographs it is not even ‘a decisive moment’ that is
captured but ‘that moment’ that cannot form a theme, which only the camera
could foreground.” For Kuwabara and Frank, “street” is not only their work-
site but also a photographic principle.15 Okamura is in sync with Kanai in his
assessment of the non-narrative orientation of Kuwabara’s photography. While
Kanai contrasts Kuwabara with Araki, an eager storyteller (more on what their
lenses captured later), Okamura obviously draws a contrast with Henri Cartier-
Bresson, for whom capturing a moment with a “decisive” meaning was an ulti-
mate goal.16
14 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 47. Italics in the original.

15 Okamura Tamio, “Kuwabara Kineo to Robāto Furanku: Tsūkasha tachi,” in Shashin/
Bodi sukōpu: Hikari, rogosu, kioku (Photography/Bodyscope: Light, Logos, Memory),
Kokubungaku kaishaku to kyōzai no kenkyū 44, no. 10 (August 1999): 116.
16 As we learned from Imahashi Eiko in the previous chapter, the concept of the “decisive
moment” originates from a mistranslation into English, rather than Cartier-Bresson’s own
words. His stress on the fugitive nature of photo-taking, which Imahashi reveals, may well
parallel Kuwabara’s attitude to be elaborated later in this chapter. See Chapter 2, n. 61.
156 CHAPTER 4
Another implicit comparison drawn by Okamura is Eugène Atget, for whom,

as we shall see shortly, streets were first and foremost the “worksite,” while for
Kuwabara the street allows him to share with passersby the contingency of the
physical exploration of space. In Kuwabara’s photography urban space, much
more than a referent or a metaphor, is formative and definitive.17 Within it
materializes a conundrum that involves conventionally contradictory qualities,
such as anonymity versus celebrity, or obscurity versus visibility, of the pho-
tographed and the photographer. Okamura suggests, “Kuwabara is conscious
of the coercive nature of photography and yet is immune to melancholy”18—
melancholy, in Kanai’s terminology, coming from narrativity, a quality absent
in Kuwabara’s photography.
The photographic rejection of the narrative—or of the commentary on
image—is ultimately the reason that Frank, whom Okamura finds analogous
to Kuwabara, left photography for film. Kuwabara contrasts himself with Frank
on this point in an autobiographical essay:
I would spend a certain amount of time photographing those poverty-

stricken streets without thinking of them as such. [. . .] They say that Robert
Frank quit photography and turned to film, stating, “I cannot afford to be
a lonely observer who would look away from his subject right after releas-
ing the shutter,” but I shamelessly continued to photograph as a solitary
observer, or to put it precisely, a mere passerby.19
Kuwabara, here as a writer in the retrospective mood, has gained a perspec-

tive from which to define the environment he used to photograph as “poverty-
stricken,” though he did not consider it thus while taking the pictures. Just
17 Kuwabara Kineo’s expressed preference for the Benjaminian “flâneur” who has “not
formed a self-consciousness as a photographer” and for Garry Winogrand’s view that
“I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed” (“Understanding
Still Photographs,” 1974; quoted in Sontag, On Photography [197], which, translated into
Japanese in 1977, made the statement famous in Japan) suggests the lack of a preordained
scheme in his photographs. See Kuwabara, “Hashigaki” (Preface), in Tokyo 1934–1993
(Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1995), 3–5, a collection of his works cited in Kanai’s Karui memai to
be discussed later.
18 Okamura, “Kuwabara Kineo to Robāto Furanku,” 119.
19 Kuwabara, “Shashin o toru mono no fukō” (The Misfortune of a Photographer), Shashin
hihyō no. 2 (1973): 95–6. Italics mine. Kuwabara wrote on Robert Frank in another article,
“Bīto sedai no shinwa: Robāto Furanku” (The Myth of the Beat Generation: Robert Frank),
Eiga hyōron 30, no. 12 (December 1973): 26–30.
as we saw in Abe’s renunciation of the mission of social critique and of the

purposeful search for images that would fit a prescribed narrative, Kuwabara
had not formed a narrative to account for the series of images prior to the
release of the shutter.20 Being a self-admitted flâneur, Kuwabara refuses to
give any meaning to the visual, while Frank could not bear such disconnect
between the photographer and photographed and converted to film to become
a concerned story-teller. Instead of becoming an omniscient narrator, or an
embodiment of the bird’s-eye view, who claims entitlement to tell a story of
those whom s/he observes, Kuwabara remained “a mere passerby,” whose
involvement with the subject is by default transient and conditioned by physi-
cal limitations.
The contrast drawn between Frank and Kuwabara seems to parallel the one
between Eugene Smith (1918–78) and William Klein (b. 1928), submitted by
Taki Kōji, who among others “rescued” Kuwabara from obscurity as a photog-
rapher.21 To Taki, Klein’s gaze is not “from outside or above”:
New York is the world he interacts with skin to skin, the world that
comes to touch him and at the same time is soaked by his sensibilities.
We can sense a “gazing eye” in Eugene Smith, while there is a conscious-
ness of “being within” in Klein. New York exists as something not only to
look at but also to be looked at by, as something infinitely ambiguous,
impossible to form a complete picture of and actively variable. [. . .] He
found the inspiration for his method in the fluctuating and amorphous
structure encompassing a subject and its environs.22
To borrow from Taki’s polarization of Smith and Klein, Kuwabara is some-

one whose “consciousness of being within” comes through in his work, as he
does not see urban landscape either “from outside or above.” His streets are
“ambiguous, impossible to form a complete picture of and actively variable.”
Thus, unlike Cartier-Bresson’s or Atget’s pictures, Kuwabara’s photographs
reveal the “fluctuating and amorphous structure encompassing a subject and
its environs.”
20 See Chapter 2, 127.

21 Taki Kōji, “Kodokuna ningen no ushiro sugata” (The Back of a Loner, 1973), in Kuwabara
Kineo, Tōkyō Shōwa 11nen (Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 1974), 223–6.
22 Taki Kōji, “Me to me narazarumono,” 38.
158 CHAPTER 4
Photography as Corporeal Art
In Kanai’s short story “Mado,” the narrator-protagonist in the embedded nar-

rative relates his early practice of photography, in which his awareness of the
physicality of his presence surfaces:
My father taught me how to operate that small lens-shutter apparatus.

Though [he told me] I could take a photograph of whatever I may like, I
still had no idea whatsoever of the way my gaze, body, camera and the
image imprinted in the film would be related to each other, so I was satis-
fied simply by looking into the finder, without loading the camera with a
film. The landscape and things, snipped out in the shape of the small
window, look imbued with a special light. In reality, it was dim and hard
to look at anything in the finder, and the muscle on the left side of the
face that was unnaturally flexed to keep one eye closed suffered from a
little twitch and fixation. Still, the world would increase the amount of
light within the static finder, exposing its contour explicitly.23
It is evident that the narrator-protagonist is conscious that his own body limits
the “inexhaustible” possibilities that are often imagined in photo-taking—the
liberty, or automatism, that was praised in the Kodak advertisement quoted
by Sontag as we saw in Chapter 2,24 and the ease of camera use that in effect
caused the relegation of photography to a second-class status below fine art.
The face that concerns “I” here is not that of a spectacle but a part of the pho-
tographer’s body. Though his own face is fixed to the lens and thus remains
invisible to him, its physical presence is painfully felt in coordination with
other parts of his body. The face is not flat but three-dimensional, composed
of not only skin (which in itself by no means immaterial) but also flesh and
muscles that arouse tactile sensations.
Kanai’s narrator-protagonist then addresses the unmanageability of the
(physical) act of photographing, further invalidating the purported ease with
which the camera should be maneuvered—the lure of the machine that
caught Sontag’s attention:
23 Kanai, “Mado,” in Kanai Mieko, Tangoshū (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1979), 37–38. In
my translation. This passage can be found in Paul McCarthy’s English translation,
“Windows,” in The Word Book (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009), 17.
24 “You press the button, we do the rest.” See Chapter 2, 93.
My father said I should take a picture of anything I like. Not understand-

ing what should be photographed, however, I was overwhelmed by the
weight I imagined of such a simple action as releasing a shutter so that
the object may be exposed in the film. Pressing down by a mere few mil-
limeters a cylindrical metal piece of the color of oxidized silver and the
size of an adzuki bean would mean exfoliating a flake of light from
the world of matter and time.25
The narrator expresses further frustration with the lack of continuum between
the image his eyes see and the one the camera lens can frame, as well as
between the landscape he has seen with his own eyes and the one imprinted
in the picture:
Eventually I chose for my first photograph that ruined arsenal, which

turned out to be too big to fit the viewfinder of my child’s camera. In
order to encapsulate the whole, I would have to stand way back, which
would not allow me to photograph it in the intended perspective, so I
could only take a picture of as much as could be framed within the small
window. The landscape developed and printed on the contact paper was
not recognizable as the real landscape, or rather, as the landscape I had
seen. What had had a sure presence and clear contour in my gaze was
completely lost in the picture and transformed into a gray lump, vague,
bleak and disintegrated.26
While this photographer complies with the limited physical conditions

and thus avoids the sort of catastrophe depicted in Godard’s film discussed
above, he must endure dissatisfaction with the outcome of the compromise.
The above passage effectively undoes the myth of the automatism of camera
work, first by identifying the obstacles lying in the process of photographic
(re)production and then by revealing the disjuncture between the picture
registered by his eye, the camera’s telescopic vision and the resulting photo-
graphic print. What emerges from this unsuccessful procedure is the rheto-
ricity of photography, which the photographer fails to transcend. Neither can
he translate the image captured by the eye into the language of photography.
Photography does not transparently represent what one sees but rather adapts
25 Kanai, “Mado,” 39, in my translation. McCarthy’s translation of the same passage is in
“Windows,” 18.
26 Kanai, “Mado,” 41–42, my translation. In McCarthy, 19.
160 CHAPTER 4
it within the delimiting, if equally enabling, technological and material frame-

work that the medium requires.
Taki expounds on the crucial involvement of the specific physical condi-
tions, beyond the optical faculty, that help to form images:
As I stopped the car and posed the camera, I realized that the sensation
stirred in my body while driving was no more. [. . .] My eyes in motion
could constitute the world, but as soon as they stopped moving, I felt
as though the world I saw had retreated and hidden itself beyond my
power to organize it. I was incorporated within the world while I was
on the move—incorporated and at the same time able to incorporate the
world.27
Taki encapsulates what one might call the world-immersion of the photog-
rapher’s entire body, in a reciprocally formative relationship with the world.
While the eye—along with the mind, of which the eye is often considered a
window—has long been taken for granted as neutral and intangible, recog-
nized only for its function of surveying and registering things it sees, the body
is itself a part of the world and thus occupies a certain amount of space, moves
around and can be looked at and touched. And it is the body, rather than
the eye, that produces the image. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty declares in “Eye
and Mind”:
[W]e cannot imagine how a MIND could paint. It is by lending his body
to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To under-
stand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual
body. [. . .] [I]t is just as true that vision is attached to movement. We see
only what we look at. What would vision be without eye movement?28
How, then, does Kuwabara position himself vis-à-vis other persons or

things that he photographs? The photo critic Nishii Kazuo’s colophon to
one of Kuwabara’s books, Tokyo 1934–1993 (1995), approximates to Kanai
where he articulates Kuwabara’s stance with regard to the people whom he
photographs.29 Nishii stresses Kuwabara’s seeming distance from the subject
27 Taki, “Me to me narazaru mono,” 50.

28 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” trans. Carleton Dallery, in Harold Osborne, ed.,
Aesthetics (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 57–8.
29 Nishii is mocked by Kanai in Karui memai (Vague Vertigoes) for his unabashed and
uncritical outpouring of nostalgia, as Nishii concludes the text with the proclamation
that Kuwabara’s photographs remind him of a Tokyo now vanished.
as opposed to Atget’s strategic approach to photography, manifest in his

method of painting out a map of Paris block by block to check the area that
he has photographed.30 In this light Atget’s photography is not a product of
flânerie, a purposeless walk of an indifferent observer, but a cartographic enter-
prise, which accords perfectly with his self-definition as “author-producer”
(auteur-éditeur).31 In contrast, Kuwabara’s photographs manifest no authorial
intent according to Kanai, as we saw above.
The Photographer in Relation to the Photographed
Nishii further illustrates Kuwabara’s positioning of his own body as follows.

Kuwabara tends to take photos of people from behind as he is passing by,
especially if the person is a woman with long hair. Whether this practice
deserves the name of voyeurism or courtesy—“shyness or considerateness”—
he chooses to “stand in silence beside or behind the object.”32 While Araki,
who has photographed women while having sexual intercourse with them, can-
not help but strike up a “conversation” with the object face to face, Kuwabara
stands slightly apart from his objects, which permits him to look at them with-
out issuing a word. As the critic Suzuki Shiroyasu puts it, Kuwabara does not
“assault” the people he photographs but “flees” from them.33 This tendency
might account for Kuwabara’s preference for photographing children, who nei-
ther oblige nor ignore the camera, as well as mannequins and visual mediations
of human faces in posters or on television screens. It is as though he deliber-
ately avoids interaction with people who might react to the fact they are being
photographed, as Barthes says he does:
[O]nce I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute

myself in the process of posing, I instantaneously make another body for
myself, I transform myself in advance into an image. This transformation
30 Nishii Kazuo, “Yosoyososhiku tatazumu: Yume no machi no shashinka” (Lingering On,
As Though Indifferent: The Photographer in a Dream Town), in Kuwabara Kineo, Tokyo
1934–1993, 553.
31 John Szarkowski, “Eugène Atget,” on Encyclopædia Britannica, www.britannica.com/
EBchecked/topic/40537/Eugene-Atget (accessed June 1, 2015).
32 Nishii, “Yosoyososhiku tatazumu,” 552.
33 Suzuki Shiroyasu, “Nichijōsei no gyakusetsu: Kuwabara Kineo ron” (Paradox of Everyday-
ness: On Kuwabara Kineo), in Kuwabara Kineo, Tōkyō chōjitsu, vol. 15 of Sonorama shashin
sensho (Tokyo: Asahi Sonorama, 1978), n.p.
162 CHAPTER 4
is an active one: I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it,
according to its caprice.34
Children look back at the cameraman inquisitively or do not notice him/her,

engrossed in their own activities. Adults, on the other hand, tend either to pose
for a camera or pretend not to notice it. They make an implicit effort to define
a relationship with a photographer either as an accomplice or as an unwit-
ting victim of voyeurism, in which the photographer remains anonymous and
ostensibly inconspicuous.
Kuwabara illustrates the awkward relationship between the photographer
and the photographic object, reflecting on his own uncomfortable encounter
with a woman who complained loudly as soon as he had taken a snapshot of
her without permission. From this incident he concludes: “The relationship
between the subject and object of photographing has its own conflicts and con-
tradictions for each, which generates photographs. To me, taking photographs
continues to involve nothing but embarrassment and hesitation.”35 Kuwabara
is painfully aware of the conundrum of the seer–seen relationship, and yet he
capitalizes on the tension and contradiction to produce photographs, at the
cost of complicating his interpersonal relationships.
While Kuwabara naturally experiences embarrassment, hesitation or displea-
sure from behind the camera, Kanai theorizes the response from those in front of
the camera, employing as a point of reference the work of another photographer,
Tamura Shigeru (also called Tamura Akihide, 1947–).36 The specific photograph
Kanai explicates is called “Yume no hoteru de no Beigun Betonamu kikyū hei”
(An American Soldier on Furlough from Vietnam, at a Dream Hotel).37 When the
picture and several others first appeared in Asahi kamera in 1970, the photogra-
pher related the circumstances under which the photographs were taken:
The way that jet planes blurred in the shimmering heat haze was more
delightful to look at through the keyhole than to produce a photograph
out of it. Since it was impossible to hold the one-meter-length telephoto
34 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 10–11.

35 Kuwabara Kineo, “Torarekata no rekishi: Shashin no hansekai” (History of How to Be
Photographed: The Half-World of Photography), in Watakushi no shashinshi (My History
of Photography; Tokyo: Shōbunsha, 1976), 149.
36 Tamura is perhaps best known to the Western audience through a book of portraits of
Kurosawa Akira, Kurosawa Akira (Tokyo: NTT, 1991).
37 Tamura Shigeru, “Shiroi fensu no mukou: Beigun kichi” (Beyond the White Fence: An
American Military Base), no. 9 of “Shashin kiroku 1970” (Photo Documentaries 1970),
Asahi kamera 55, no. 9 (September 1970): 119–20.
lens myself while photographing, I had my friend shoulder the equip-

ment so that I could take pictures.38
Tamura succinctly recounts the physical experience of viewing the objects and
maneuvering the photographic equipment. His awareness of the distinction
between the images captured by his naked eyes and his camera parallels that
of Kanai’s narrator-protagonist in “Mado.” Kanai then cuts into the scene by
addressing the question that haunted Kuwabara—how the objects reacted to
his camera:
What was the gaze of the soldier and the girl, turned toward the photog-
rapher who hid half of his face with the camera, which had become the
gaze of his body? They look as though nothing had been on their minds.
One cannot be sure whether their apparent stare is just a glance as they
twist their necks, or entertaining some ineradicable prejudice or menace
toward the photographer. The gaze of the person who looks at the camera
always concerns me. At that moment, the photographer moves via the
camera-eye while being looked at (what they are looking at is none other
than the unique body of the photographer who is engaged in the move-
ment of photographing) and does not see anything except through the
act of photographing. Miyakawa Atsushi has pointed out that the man
who turns his back to the audience in Brueghel’s paintings is the painter
himself. Photography, a genre that is most objective and represents
unmediated truth, does not require the author’s figure showing the back:
instead, the rectangular frame itself manages to materialize the gaze of
the photographer.39
Kanai suggests above that the frame of a photograph as a material requirement

confirms the presence of the photographer’s body outside the frame. Instead
of the sight of the back of the “author,” to be caught by the spectator, Kanai
imagines the sight of the photographer from the front, reflected in the eyes of
the object being photographed—the face in the shadow of the camera, with
one eye fixed to the lens, with the other side of the face being squeezed so that
one eye may be kept closed while photographing, as experienced (though not
portrayed as seen by anyone in front of the lens) in “Mado.” Tamura’s body also
38 Tamura, “Shiroi fensu no mukou,” 150.

39 Kanai Mieko, “Mirumono no nikutai wa doko de chokuritsu suruka: Aruiwa shashin ni
mukatte ippo zenshin niho kōtai” (Where Does the Seer’s Body Stand Upright? Or One
Step Forward toward Photography, Two Steps Backward) Kikan shashin eizō 6 (Autumn
1970): 179.
164 CHAPTER 4
takes on an unusual posture, maneuvering the camera placed on his friend’s

shoulder. Indeed, it is a “unique body” which is engaged in a very visible and
notable and perhaps awkward and unsightly action—and this engagement
in the specific action prevents him from seeing things other than through
the lens. In other words, the photographer exposes his unique body to the
others who exist for him only as spectacles, even while reducing himself to the
eye and subordinating the other faculties to the vision that they support. (As
in Abe’s Hako otoko, as we saw in Chapter 2, where the photographer’s body,
even if hidden in a box, is exposed to the reactions of others.) The seen/pho-
tographed must have turned their faces to the photographer, with curiosity at
least, to return what Victor Burgin calls “the fourth look,” or “the look the actor
might direct to the camera.”40
The interface between those designated by the photographer as spectacles
(who nonetheless look back at him and turn him into a spectacle) and the
photographer (who is accustomed to taking little note of his body beyond
the eye) must inform the process of photographing, including the production
of the final print. Perhaps what transpires from the process is the generation of
the aura, as Walter Benjamin argues:
Inherent in the gaze, however, is the expectation that it will be returned

by that on which it is bestowed. Where this expectation is met [. . .], there
is an experience [Erfahrung] of the aura in all its fullness. [. . .] The person
we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To expe-
rience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability
to look back at us.41
Whether the photographer’s body is within the picture or outside it, beside the
object or behind the camera, facing the object or avoiding eye contact with it,
the photographer’s physical presence disturbs and dictates the scene at the
same time. As we saw in Chapter 2, this paradox—not only between seer and
seen but also between the transcendental authority and the surrender to the
space occupied—is acutely felt by Abe, who elaborates the conundrum involv-
ing the spectator’s eye and body. In the constant struggle to overcome inciden-
tals, the photographer photographs while being seen as no less corporeal than
the photographed.
40 Burgin, “Looking at Photographs,” 148.

41 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 338.
The Cities of Déjà-Vu or the (In)commensurable Text/Image
We must first acknowledge the discrepancy between photography and

language, and then try not to articulate the distinction—try not to distin-
guish the two from each other as though they were irrelevant.
TAKI KŌJI42
…
The text does not “gloss” the images, which do not “illustrate” the
text. [. . .] Text and image, interlacing, seek to ensure the circulation
and exchange of these signifiers: body, face, writing; and in them to read
the retreat of signs.
ROLAND BARTHES43
…
The photographic gaze neither probes nor analyses a ‘reality’; it settles
‘literally’ on the surface of things and illustrates their emergence in the
form of fragments, for a very short spell of time—to be followed immedi-
ately by the moment of their disappearance.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD44
⸪
Within one hundred and fifty pages, the 1980 publication of Kanai Mieko and
Watanabe Kanendo, Kishi no machi (The Cities of Déjà-Vu), presents images
(fifty-one black and white photographs) and text that gesture indifference and
perhaps irrelevance to each other. The images bear no caption, while the script
makes no reference to the images—an approach that was, according to Kanai,
the two artists’ intention. In an essay in Nami, the promotional periodical pub-
lished by the book’s press, Shinchōsha, she critiques the “institutional” mode
of photo-stories or photo-essays, which uncritically assumes translatability
42 Taki, Shashinron shūsei, 253.

43 An epigraph of Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York, NY: Hill and Wang,
1982), unpaginated.
44 Baudrillard, “Photography, or Light-Writing,” 141.
166 CHAPTER 4
between the two media, if not blatantly orchestrating semantic interrelation.

She then articulates the motives to produce Kishi no machi as follows:
This book originated in our interest in the chemical proliferation, if you

will, caused by two distinct modes of representation. [. . .] We decided to
let photography and the novel develop autonomously of each other,
avoiding first and foremost letting them explain each other or end in a
mere interaction of imagery.45
The postscript to the book (which Kanai calls “something excessive” [kajō na
nanika]46 presumably because interpretation—of the photo-roman, in this
case—is not only uncalled for but also contradictory to their attempt at defy-
ing interpretation) further explicates the process of co-production, stressing
the disintegration rather than union of the two media:
Neither letting photographs explicate words nor words fabricate a

story for photographs, we began our collaboration by thinking about the
opposition between the photographic and the verbal. Thereafter, we
decided to dare to ignore each other. By forming a book out of two dis-
tinctly oriented desires, we did not intend to establish a fiction of their
fortunate unification into one world. Rather, our starting point was to
accentuate the difference of the desires, or not to let the difference
compromise without resistance.47
Kanai—as well as Watanabe, whom Kanai also represents in the postscript48—

does not neglect the rhetorical rupture between the two apparatuses, photog-
raphy and the narrative, which others have converged by assuming that they
can send similar messages. Conventional photo-essays and photo-stories rely
on the belief that image and text are united with each other by the sharing
45 Kanai, “Musō no egaku toshi no chizu: Kishi no machi ni tsuite,” Nami 129 (September
1980): 16.
46 Kanai, “Atogaki” (Postscript), in Kanai Mieko and Watanabe Kanendo, Kishi no machi
(Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1980), 147.
47 Kanai, “Atogaki,” Kishi no machi, 148.
48 She identifies the reason for her writing on behalf of both as her being a writer (and
by implication Watanabe is not), a reason that she calls “trivial” and “silly.” This passing
remark is relevant to our context; Kanai is resisting the conventional idea that words
account for image as a superior or the ultimate medium of representation and thus sub-
mit the definitive interpretation.
of the meaning that they bear, the meaning that the audience should then
decipher. Kanai and Watanabe defy such authentication of the interpre-
tive mechanism that identifies content as the essence of art and form as the
instrument.
While Kishi no machi resists the negligence of the rhetorical discrepancy
between photography and the narrative, it does not yield itself to the binary
opposition between the two media, either. The publication contends with both
their commonality and autonomy. Instead of dwelling on the dualism involv-
ing the textual and the visual, the book incites in the reader/viewer a third
sense—the tactility of the book as a material presence. The glossy surface of
the book’s pages, more conventional and suitable for photographic prints than
for scripts, intensifies the reader’s awareness of the fingers’ contact with the
paper. The reader’s corporeal presence and experience of the printed matter
effectively blur the boundaries between an artifact and its surroundings, and
help to dismiss any residual claim of autonomy on the part of the work of art.
The book lures the reader’s body into it in yet another way. The book’s title
page is graced by an image of a planetarium projector (Fig. 28). There is a hole for
a star, which evokes an image of the photographer’s eye, upside down, peeping
into the viewfinder from the opposite end of the lens. Rather than reducing the
photographer’s body to an eye, the picture creates an illusion as though
the photographer is surrendering his eye as a physical object to the reader’s
gaze. The overall effect of this apparatus is to confirm the physical co-presence
of the producer (the photographer), the artifact (the book) and the observer
(the reader), eroding the division between them. The ambivalence, or the
“chemical proliferation” as Kanai puts it, not only involves image and text
across pages, but also extends to the producer, the book and the reader as three
entities across the three-dimensional space in between. As we shall see below,
Kanai and Watanabe defy the autonomy of artworks in the textual and the
visual registers, which have been firmly predicated upon the subject–object
binary. The two media become accomplices not in signification/interpreta-
tion, but in resistance to the politics of representation that has plagued the
modern arts, most significantly the prose narrative and photography, because
of their perceived/purported transparency. We shall see in what follows how
Kanai’s narrative and Watanabe’s photographs coordinate threats to artistic
conventions, while contending each other. Photographs and the narrative chal-
lenge each other by offering what cannot be narrated or what cannot be pho-
tographed and by provoking the impossible response from each other. While
doing so, however, they share the mission of usurping the authority bestowed
upon the agency of observation so as to purport the transparency of vernacu-
lar representation.
168 CHAPTER 4
FIGure 28 The frontispiece of Kanai Mieko and Watanabe Kanendo, Kishi no machi
(Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1980).
Photograph by Watanabe Kanendo. Design by Sakurai Shōji. Reprinted with
the permissions by Watanabe Kanendo and Shinchosha Publishing Co., Ltd.
I shall quickly review the trajectory along which Watanabe arrived at the
project of exploring the possibilities of the coercive co-presence of image
and text (which can spill over into adjacent arenas of sensibilities). By 1980
he had mounted several of his own photo exhibitions. While the exhibitions
were usually given loaded titles, he generally did not entitle individual pho-
tographs. Rather than suggesting his indifference to text, these untitled pic-
tures are products of his ambivalence toward and tension with textuality.
Sequences or exhibitions of his photographs are invested with unmistakable
literariness. One of his exhibitions is named L’Atalante (The Atalante, 1992),
after Jean Vigo’s acclaimed film of the same title (1934), and yet does not trace
its story line; photographs grouped under the title seem irrelevant to the cin-
ematic narrative, featuring instead Gustav Flaubert’s (1821–80) bedchamber
and his famous stuffed parrots that resonate with Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s
Parrot (1984; Japanese trans. 1989), the novel about a quest to authenticate the
stuffed bird that the eponymous French author gazed upon for inspiration.49
49 The only thematic connection one could draw easily is by reference to Rouen, Flaubert’s
hometown and a place that one of the foundational photographers, William Henry Fox
Talbot, (1800–77) made famous through his pictures from a boat trip along the Seine in 1843;
a boat on the Seine provides the main setting for Vigo’s film. On Talbot’s travel in France
Another exhibition by Watanabe is called Shinpi no ie aruiwa Erubenon no

kyōki (The House of Mystery or the Madness of Elbehnon, 1974), partly echoing
Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem Igitur, ou La folie d’Elbehnon (1925; Japanese trans.
1970; 2010).50 In this instance, however, Watanabe’s work neither simply traces
the story nor reproduces scenes from the text. The connection between image
and text is more latent and inventive than one might expect in adaptations,
hardly recognizable on the plane of referentiality but implicit in the rhetoric,
whose translation involves radical and yet subtle transformation from the ver-
bal apparatus of representation to the photographic.
In March 1981, the year following that of the publication of the book Kishi no
machi, Watanabe Kanendo gave an exhibition of photographs under the same
title at Ginza Nikon Salon in Tokyo. The exhibition won the Seventh Kimura
Ihei Prize, an annual award for an emergent photographer, founded in com-
memoration of the eponymous celebrated photographer and administered by
the Asahi shinbunsha (Asahi Newspaper), a press that publishes the photogra-
phy journal Asahi kamera. The journal then published nineteen pictures from
the exhibition as the prize-winning body, under the title of “Kishi no machi,”
with the English words “Once Again” added. Thirteen of these photographs
can be found in the book version of Kishi no machi, which features the total
of fifty-one pictures by Watanabe, though in a different order and at times in
different sizes (five of the thirteen are of the same size of 6 × 6 inches). Six of
the nineteen in the journal issue are absent from the book. The overlap and
overflow of images onto either side—the exhibition or the book—suggest the
contingency of the profile of a work of art, and the intertextual and potentially
infinite extension of artistic cross-references between images and texts.
The Kimura Ihei Prize selection process involves two stages: a call for nomi-
nations sent to photography industry insiders and the final deliberations of the
jury. To judge from the jurors’ comments published with the award announce-
ment in Asahi kamera, Abe Kōbō, who joined the jury in 1981,51 seems to have
held Watanabe’s work in high esteem not only in itself but in its “durability”
and connection to Rouen, see Anne McCauley, “Talbot’s Rouen Window: Romanticism,
Naturphilosophie and the Invention of Photography,” History of Photography 26, no. 2
(Summer 2002): 124–31.
50 Watanabe Kanendo published a group of eight photographs under the same title of
“Shinpi no ie aruiwa Erubenon no kyōki,” in Shashin hihyō: The Photo Review 7 (Summer
1974): 5–12. One of the eight images was then used for the slipcase of Kishi no machi (1980).
51 The commemorative special issue on Asahi kamera’s Kimura Ihei Prize 36 fotogurafāzu:
Kimura Ihei Shō no 30 nen (Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha, 2005) lists the jurors for each of
the thirty years (x–xiii). It is evident from it, as well as noted by Shinoyama Kishin, the
renowned photographer and a panelist of the roundtable discussion, that novelists used
170 CHAPTER 4
against repeated and recontextualized viewing, clearly revealing that Abe had
also looked at Watanabe’s images in book form. While the prize was given spe-
cifically to the exhibition, Abe mentions the book in the jurors’ comments:
As Kanai Mieko is gifted with the ability to evoke images, the collabora-
tion could have compromised both image and text. However, it turned
out that they enhanced each other’s effects. [The book is] neither a novel
with photographs nor photographs with text, but manages to be a rare
case in which [photographs and the narrative] work like two wheels in a
bicycle. That is because the word and photography persist in their respec-
tive imageries.52
Abe’s observation relates back to Kanai’s postscript and promotional text vis-
ited earlier, in terms of the lack of compromise and codependence between
the two media. He further praises Watanabe’s photographs as they “maintain
the sensibility toward the quotidian, while capturing ruptures and holes from
which the anti-quotidian oozes,”53 suggesting the adjacency of the quotidian
and the anti-quotidian, or the familiar and the unfamiliar, which relates to
‘having-seen-ness,’ a quality that I shall elaborate later as ubiquitous in and
definitive of Watanabe’s pictures.
Translating Rhetorics of Image and Text
Kishi no machi is a prime showcase of Kanai’s propensity for the visual, not
only in its original version with Watanabe’s photographs, but also in its two
later versions. These editions are in Volume 2 of Kanai Mieko zen tanpen (The
Complete Short Stories by Kanai Mieko, 1992) and the paperback short story
collection edited by Horie Toshiyuki, Pikunikku, sono ta no tanpen (Picnic, and
Other Short Stories, 1998), both of which lack the visual and tactile embel-
lishments of the original: these books’ pages are of standard paper on which
only text is printed. Still, the story features a tense and ambiguous relationship
to be invited to sit on the committee, which suggests photography’s self-deprecating atti-

tude toward literature (ibid., 140).
52 Abe, “Kimyō ni kajūden sareta kōkei” (A Scene Strangely Over-Electrified), Asahi kamera
67, no. 3 (March 1982): 75. This piece is also collected in AKZ 27: 98. Quotation from the
former.
53 Ibid.
between image and text, which gels especially around the theme of maps,
with questions of interpretation of the cartographic representation of space,
the body’s movement in space and multiple sensations in physical space con-
trasted with a putatively neutral image of space as a map.
The novel’s narrator-protagonist is a man who is institutionalized for a
medical condition explicitly described as unspecifiable and unaccountable—
as opposed to being left unspecified or unaccounted for (an inquiry into the
name of the illness and its cause is made to no avail)—a fact that he accepts
as unextraordinary. The man remains unnamed throughout the narrative
and may perhaps not even be a single specific and autonomous individual.
Constituting the earlier part of the story are the narrator’s conversations
with other characters and a letter he receives from a woman whose attempts
at visiting him in the ward have fallen through, partly because the floor
map of the hospital is unintelligible. Later discharged from the hospital-cum-
nursery, the narrator gives up the plan to visit his mother, once again because
of the unintelligibility of a map, in this case one his mother has sent him.
(We shall return to and theorize the issue of the cartographic myth later.) He
instead revisits familiar spaces, reunites with familiar faces and recognizes
changes that have occurred during his absence. Meanwhile he reminisces
about his childhood mission to visit his father—possibly on more than one
occasion—who lives apart from his family and with his extramarital lover
(a mission recurrent in Kanai’s fiction). The narrator also recalls his own sexual
affairs that may or may not be with one specific partner, mainly recalling the
woman’s/women’s smell, texture, body temperature and voice.
As the story progresses, it produces more questions than answers and refuses
to allow the gelling of the essential parameters of the normative narrative struc-
ture: when, where, who, what and why. The story lacks a clearly defined plot
or sustained narrative authority, and defies our expectation of the prose nar-
rative that it will describe and explain something that the narrator knows
has happened. Instead, Kishi no machi tirelessly raises elaborate questions
about temporality (chronological order, frequency, pace), spatiality (location,
route) and subjectivity (identity, relationship) without providing any defini-
tive answers. Rather than authoritatively recounting (confirming or purport-
ing) what has happened, the narrator reflects on what may or may not have
happened in the past, what may or may not happen in the future and whether
or not something is happening in the present, has happened in the past or is
expected to happen in the future. (It should be noted that the ambiguity in the
story does not stem from any neglect or inability to describe details in the nar-
rative discourse, but from the design to articulate the unknown/unknowable
as such.)
172 CHAPTER 4
Whereas the narrator cannot measure distance or locate a spot on a map, he

seems keen on and alert to topographic elements (e.g., the steepness of a slope,
a vista affected by the tortuousness of roads or the density of surrounding
buildings) that complicate the horizontal dimension of the ground. He feels
that his body is disintegrated into multiple parts, as he feels organs correspond
with one another rather than reporting back to his brain or allowing them-
selves to be controlled by it. He cannot tell one person from another, though he
is able to elaborate how their bodies move, feel or smell. As his memory does
not serve him well, he loses track of his life and is even left unsure whether he
has a cohesive self. The autonomy and identity of an individual, foundational
to the modern notion of the self, are radically destabilized here.
As the French literature scholar and surrealist art critic Iwaya Kunio rightly
suggests in his review of Kishi no machi, the narrator/subject may not be any
particular human being, but “an illness” that could spread from one person
to another, which is why he is referred to not by any name but as “I” or “he.”54
Iwaya’s hypothesis of anonymity may be verified by the epigraph, a quotation
from François Jacob’s La logique du vivant (1970; trans., The Logic of Life, 1973):
“A bacterium, an amoeba, a fern—what destiny can they dream of other than
forming two bacteria, two amoebae or several more ferns?”55 Iwaya refers to
the epigraph in relation to the beginning of the narrative, wherein the subject
is about to be awakened and remains unaware of who or what he/she/it is.56
The reproducibility and multiplicity of the subject in this rhetorical question
corroborate Kanai’s anti-novelistic objective for this narrative, in which the
narrative authority dissolves into the infinite or the void. The proliferation of
subjectivity as well as repetition of reproductive acts (such as reflection on the
water or glass, as we shall discuss later) seems to effectively challenge the mod-
ern subjectivity that is predicated upon faith in the autonomy and originality
of each individual.
The epigraph’s effect becomes even more obvious if we compare the
original edition of Kishi no machi with the novel’s two later, image-less edi-
tions, which both omit the epigraph. The paratextual elements (including,
54 Iwaya Kunio, “Watanabe Kanendo/Kanai Mieko: Shashin no haitta shōsetsu—Kishi no

machi,” in Fūin sareta hoshi: Takiguchi Shūzō to Nihon no âtisuto tachi (Tokyo: Heibonsha.
2004), 218.
55 François Jacob, Seimei no ronri, Shimabara Takeshi and Matsui Yoshizō, trans. (Tokyo:
Misuzu shobō, 1977), 4. Here quoted from the English translation by Betty E. Spillmann,
The Logic of Life; A History of Heredity; The Possible and the Actual (London: Penguin,
1989), 4.
56 Iwaya, 216.
most importantly, photographs) are deleted in them, perhaps for the sake
of conformity to the austere design format that is standard in the paper-
back library or because of the complexity of copyright negotiations to honor
the ownership of intellectual property and within the usual cost–benefit
analysis—all for the normative operation of print culture in late capitalist
society. As a consequence, the reader is compelled to read Kanai’s own text
linearly and monolithically, to altered effect. Thus, the later, text-only editions
of Kishi no machi have compromised its potential to defy the narrative con-
vention in print culture by way of inclusion of the contentious liaison with
photographs in the first edition.
Watanabe’s photographs in Kishi no machi respond to the narrative’s pro-
pensity for anti-anthropomorphism with scenes without humans, by captur-
ing no human figure, if we discount a few skeleton models in a glass showcase
in a laboratory and the eye looking into the finder that we noted earlier. The
absence of humanistic sentimentality is characteristic of Watanabe’s photog-
raphy, which has been described by an anonymized reader as “divesting the
spectator of hopes and dreams”—a comment that Kanai dismisses, insinuat-
ing criticism in her observation that “the gaze of the viewer tends to decipher
the images as the cameraman’s emotive landscape.”57 She further counters the
German literature translator and art critic Tanemura Suehiro’s definition of
Watanabe’s art as a sort of “martial law of desire” and modifies the definition:
“it is not desire but the [three-dimensional] perspective in urban landscape
that is being ruled by martial law.”58 Kanai with Watanabe rejects “the eye’s
desire for aestheticizing visualization of nostalgia, ideology or urbanology,” in
other words, “the visual desire for ‘the narrative, meaning, or logic.’ ”59
Kanai praises Watanabe for his achievement: “[T]he photograph that is sup-
posed to have seized something that was there manages instead to exfoliate a
certain moment as something ambiguous, like a specter of space and time.”60
The two artists, one of words and the other of images, renounce the penchant
for depth derived from the hunt for, capture of and possession of meaning. The
concept of “exfoliation” is a key to understanding Kanai’s philosophy of anti-
representation, as we shall see later as we revisit Kuwabara Kineo. Countering
the criticism of photography as superficial and flat, Kanai appreciates photog-
raphy for its “violent sensitivity” that allows the photographic artist to “desire
57 Kanai, “Musō no egaku toshi no chizu,” 17.

58 Kanai, “Atogaki,” 148. She cites Tanemura Suehiro, “Yokubō no kaigenrei,” in Tanemura
Suehiro, Danpen kara no sekai: Bijutsu kō shūsei (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2005), 344–45.
59 Kanai, “Atogaki,” 147–48.
174 CHAPTER 4
only the surface and exfoliate the [object’s] thin skin with the camera,” a
potential that Watanabe for one brings to full fruition.61
Kanai’s renunciation of the three-dimensionality and interiority conven-
tionally projected in image and text is addressed to Sontag’s critique of photog-
raphy as opposed to video, the former seen as being unlike the latter in offering
a mere “slice of life.” “[W]hat does it mean,” Kanai asks, “to own real experi-
ence in its entirety, in the present tense? Isn’t it also the case that the written
word does not own the present in its entirety, either, and is quite superficial?”62
Photography and the narrative may be “different modes of representation” and
yet can participate in the resistance to Cartesian control of space, interpreta-
tion and ownership as allies.
In many of Watanabe’s photographs we see a vast expanse of open space
between the camera and some architectural structure in the distance. The
blank space, or terrain vague—as opposed to what would otherwise consti-
tute points of interest, invested with positivistic meaning—is foregrounded,
given greater dominion and uncannily focused on by the camera. This ambigu-
ates the location of emphasis in the picture and confounds the spectator in
terms of the point that the photographer wishes to make. By distributing dis-
parate values to items within the frame, Watanabe shows us how artistic con-
ventions compel us to interpret landscape and do so in a specific way. In his
photographs he reverses the conventional order of value that is invested in
items under our gaze. Instead of centering on things of human significance,
Watanabe privileges things that normally evade human attention. Thus he qui-
etly defies anthropomorphism and the politics of representation. Watanabe’s
toppling of the hierarchy of value may remind the reader of Abe’s comments
referred to in Chapter 2, on photography’s ability to frame a scene in which
one might come to notice things that would normally evade the naked eye’s
attention because of their presumed irrelevance or unimportance. While Abe’s
discovery of things that do not command attention from the naked eye occurs
after snapshots are taken and developed, Watanabe clearly deliberates the
arrangement of elements during photograph taking with full awareness, with
the reversal of hierarchy prescribed rather than incidental.
The book’s narrative corroborates the photographs’ efforts to dismantle the
legitimacy of human valuation by expressing frustration with and distrust in
the anthropomorphic representation of space that is a map. There are ref-
erences to three maps that confuse rather than guide characters, as they
superimpose different modes of representation of the featured places. Thus,
61 Kanai, “Atogaki,” 148.

the narrator’s mother complains of the unintelligibility of the map that she
is about to give her son (the narrator in his younger days, in his recollection
or imagination), as he takes on the mission of delivering some money to his
father, who lives with the other woman. “It’s like some kind of pattern,” the
mother laments.63 Another map is enclosed in a letter the narrator receives
from his mother when he is discharged from the hospital, in which she sug-
gests he should take a taxi rather than use public transportation. He eventu-
ally abandons the plan as this map is, again, unintelligible. Then he reminisces
about the area, which is so complex that it both challenges and invites the
body’s exploration, as a space covered by a public transportation system that
is like “a spider’s web.” Following this metaphor of a relatively flat image,
however, the narrator elaborates the undulation of the ground and the multi-
layered structure of the place:
The routes crisscrossed to and fro, twisting and turning multiple times,
and covering the undulating land. Indeed, that was—this is—such a hilly
land. It seemed as though innumerable slopes intersected one another
even on the low area around the bay. So much so that, as I try to remem-
ber the place right now right here, what occurs to me is the image of an
unintelligible map with multiple strata—probably about seven strata—
or, some gigantic structure, like an ants’ nest.64
Unlike “a spider’s web,” “an ants’ nest” has an obvious depth, which compli-
cates one’s understanding of the space. It cannot be flattened, and thus a
map is incapable of capturing it. Consequently, the protagonist can figure
out the place better with his corporeal body than with a map. The undulation
of the ground is experienced and recognized by his body in conjunction with
a machine—a bicycle:
The slope is not noticeable if one is on foot—walking along the com-

plexly folded road, one would not notice the topography around here.
However, on a bicycle, one would recognize clearly that the road goes up
in a subtle slope; one’s feet on the pedals and hips on the saddle would
communicate to one’s backbone and arms just that. The ever-bending
road and the buildings crammed on both sides of it would expand the
distance by detours, blocking and yet expanding the path. In contrast, it
is almost displeasing how easily a horizontal gaze across unobstructed
63 Kanai, Kishi no machi, 66.

64 Ibid., 51.
176 CHAPTER 4
space shrinks the distance. It’s like opening a map and connecting two
points on the flattened space by drawing a short straight line with a red
pencil. Of course there is a theory that a straight line can never arrive
from one point to another—so thought he.65
Without mentioning a map, the narrator here extends a theory of anti-cartog-

raphy. The flat, unobstructed view is “displeasing” as it “shrinks the distance”
by ignoring the physical challenges placed on the body of the traveler, such as
obstacles, distractions or uphill slopes. Though photography is not explicitly
mentioned in this passage, it serves as a validation of a ground-level explo-
ration of space as conducted by a roaming photographer like Watanabe.
The narrator-protagonist, whose experience fails to equate the space that com-
plicates his walk and viewing with that conveyed linearly and transcenden-
tally by the map, contests the validity of a bird’s-eye view that dictates and
prevails in the cartographic representation. In contrast, the pedestrian’s view
manifest in street photography (as propounded and practiced by Watanabe
or Kuwabara) is directed by the moving body of the photographer stumbling
across space with a camera in hand; the photographer experiences space
bodily, rather than distancing and objectifying it.
The ineptitude, or perhaps the insidiousness, of a map that blocks one’s way
to a destination is elaborated in the following excerpt from a letter that the
protagonist (thinks he) has received from a woman while still in hospital:
On another day, I passed through the dim-lit and depressing front foyer.
It was on the map—though I had no confidence that the foyer on the
map was identical to the one I was in; the map was so complicated, with
perspective, floor plan and cross-section drawn on the same plane, and,
furthermore, innumerable new additions and corrections in circles,
crosses and triangles made in pencil and colored pencil. Having walked
through the foyer—a rectangular hallway might be a more appropriate
term—I had no idea which of the four passages that opened into differ-
ent directions at the end of it I should take. From each of the passages,
I sensed the smell of fermented breath that feverish and clammy illness
would cause while one is asleep mingled with the bittersweet scent of
medicines, and the scent of wet dust (which had wafted as far as the
foyer) was intensifying to the point of suffocating me, as though the air
was becoming increasingly thin. This air, simultaneously thin and yet
heavy, muddled and sedimentary—. The void, from which the body odor
65 Ibid., 81.

of the building itself seeps, let out the aroma of the overcooked and
slightly bitter miso soup—a lot of it on the stove—the soup with pota-
toes and onions.
I thought that if I traced the route of the soup aroma, then I might
stumble upon another corner, an entrance door, or someone who could
help me decipher the map. However, I could not reach that point no
matter how hard I may have tried.66
This passage suggests that it is not the map with its (partly) bird’s-eye view
but the trajectory drawn by the itinerant, indeterminate and iterable body that
corresponds to space-time. The body’s reaction to various smells is a testa-
ment to space-time’s amorphous nature. There is neither distinct origin nor
destination for the body that is perpetually en route to somewhere else that
should be within reach and yet cannot be arrived at. Just as a smell wafts, the
human body walks around without a prescribed route that can be reduced to
a “straight line” on a flat map but with a vector invested with movement and
force.
The prominence in the text of the senses of smell and touch—more often
than not disturbing—corroborates Kanai’s renunciation of the dominance of
the vision/mind. In her text, almost every other page has a reference to a cer-
tain kind of smell—of water, something rotten, some medicine, some chemical
substance or some not particularly appetizing food. If a page lacks a reference
to a smell, then it refers to a tactile sensation—something sticky, rough, wet,
slippery, hairy or lukewarm. These non-visual sensations seem to pose a fun-
damental challenge to photography that is primarily if not exclusively visual.
For his part, Watanabe has made a conspicuous and ubiquitous artistic
technical decision in order to transcend the monolithic visuality, or vision-
orientedness, of photographs: he presents his photographs not in rectangular
blocks but in squares of varied sizes.67 As we discussed in Chapter 2, in refer-
ence to Bernard Faucon, interviewed by Abe, looking at square images reminds
us that the rectangular frame that we are accustomed to is contingent upon
specific artistic conventions, and that its predominance has administered the
66 Ibid., 32–33.

67 The Asahi kamera feature of selected pictures from Watanabe’s Kishi no machi specifies
the camera used as Minolta Autocode Rockall 75 mm. See Watanabe, “Kishi no machi: Dai
7-kai Kimura Ihei Shō jushōsaku,” Asahi kamera 67, no. 3 (March 1982), 73. The Minolta
Autocode I, used with a 75 mm lens, allowed the taking of square photographs. http://
camerapedia.wikia.com/wiki/Minolta_Autocord (accessed December 11, 2012). I thank
Michelle Smith for this information.
178 CHAPTER 4
FIGure 29 Kanai Mieko and Watanabe Kanendo, Kishi no machi (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1980), 97.
Photograph by Watanabe Kanendo. Layout by Sakurai Shōji. Reprinted
with the permissions by Watanabe Kanendo, KANAI MIEKO and Shinchosha
Publishing Co., Ltd.
way we register in our mind scenes represented photographically as though

they were naturally rectangular. The choice of square blocks over rectangular
ones foregrounds the contingency of photographic representation, effectively
exfoliating a layer of fictitiousness that we might have wrongly attributed to
nature or reality rather than the apparatus of representation. It is worth stress-
ing that three-dimensionality is denied within the frame (as we saw earlier)
but is experienced by those viewing it outside the frame.
A square image in the book sometimes occupies a rectangular page, leaving
an awkward blank space below the image, and at other times expands across
the binding, in which case allowing even more prominent blank space to dom-
inate the rest of the two-page visage of the book, with printed characters of the
text either pushed aside or silenced completely (Figs. 29 and 30).68 The neces-
68 The constant use of rectangular pages in printed matter is historically specific. See Peter
Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor, eds., The Future of the Page (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2004). I thank Jon Bath for referring me to this book.
FIGure 30 Kanai Mieko and Watanabe Kanendo, Kishi no machi (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1980),
98–99.
Photograph by Watanabe Kanendo. Layout by Sakurai Shōji. Reprinted
with the permissions by Watanabe Kanendo and Shinchosha Publishing
Co., Ltd.
sity of labor-intensive binding to match the two segments of a square photo

across two pages and the gutter attests to the deliberateness of the design.69
The territorial dispute, if you will, between image and text confirms Kanai’s
aforementioned statement that the two modes of representation do not
seek a harmonious union in this case but instead coerce each other. By vying
with each other for space on the white pages, rather than complacently sit-
ting next to each other in obvious balance, image and script remind us of the
contingency of the page layout, or in a more general sense the material compo-
sition of books, which is not natural but conventional.
The square is Watanabe’s preferred photographic space, and he tends to
print his photographs in squares of various sizes. Watanabe Yoshio, a profes-
sional photographer who served on the jury of the seventh Kimura Ihei Prize,
notes in a juror’s remark on Kishi no machi the exhibition that while “the square
69 This observation is courtesy of Jon Bath, in my conversation with him on November 9,
2010.
180 CHAPTER 4
block often annihilates motion in the image and ends up becoming plastic art,”
Watanabe’s images in squares “transcend the frame and expand into its sur-
roundings, enriching themselves doubly and triply.”70 Watanabe’s pictures do
not purport to represent real/natural space objectively and yet become a part
of the environment and remind the viewers that they exist as bodies in the
environment that they share with the object of art.
‘Having-seen-ness’: Anonymity and Banality
The title Kishi no machi, shared by the jointly created book, the photo exhibi-
tion by Watanabe and the story by Kanai, has tempted critics to decipher it. The
most obvious (and possibly least relevant) reason for the title that one could
hypothesize would be repetitions of comparable images, such as vegetation left
untended, abandoned properties, extensive barren land in the foreground and
architecture beyond it, images cast on the water, glass or some kind of reflec-
tive surface, the river and the opposite shore, water (or its absence) under the
bridge, construction/demolition sites and parked pickup trucks. The repeti-
tion within the group of images gives the sense of ‘having-seen-ness.’ Among
those motifs, reflections on the water or glass bear particular conceptual sig-
nificance. They are metaphors of photography, which is an art of light that
is reflected from the object. As per Baudrillard, Derrida and Faucon, among
others, photographs are by definition reflections of light. Thus, photographing
reflected images or reflective surfaces is a metafictional act, reminding us that
photography is ‘having-seen-ness’ by default. The title in question, one might
argue, confirms this nature of the art. I find this interpretation least relevant as
Watanabe’s photography is less about ‘having-seen-ness’ than about ‘having-
been-there-ness,’ once again borrowing the opposition from Barthes: “The
Photographer’s ‘second sight’ does not consist in ‘seeing’ but in being there.”71
Watanabe’s images refuse to be “mere” representations of something else
and instead seek to establish connections with other images. Thus, the pho-
tograph on the slipcase of the book, which features a leopard, a monkey and
some horned animals, apparently cohabiting a confined space (with a window
revealing lushly vegetated surroundings in the back), is taken from his earlier
70 Watanabe Yoshio, “<Genjitsu> no naka ni dokuji no <hakken>” (Unique ‘Discoveries’ in

‘Reality’) Asahi kamera 67, no. 3 (March 1982), 77.
71 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 47. Emphasis mine.
work “Shinpi no ie aruiwa Erubenon no kyōki” in 1974 (mentioned earlier),

which was also featured in the journal Shashin hihyō (Photography Review) in
the summer of the same year. Just as Watanabe’s photography is connected to
other bodies of his work, Kanai’s novel is open to the intertextual web extend-
ing into her other texts. The text of Kishi no machi is replete with repeated
words (e.g., “karui memai,” or “vague vertigo,” a phrase which was to be used as
the title of a later novel) and features scenes (e.g., the shaving of the nape of
a neck) and plot segments (e.g., a child sent by his mother for his father, who
lives with another woman in the guise of staying in a relative’s house) that we
see recurring in other narratives by Kanai and thus experience ‘having-seen-
ness’ upon encountering them. Such fluxes, or instances of overflow beyond
the edges of a work of photography or text, effectively unbind the photo-book
from its assumed autonomy and release it into the sea of motifs, evoking
‘having-seen-ness’ in the reader/spectator’s mind. (This makes a contrast with
the feeling of not having seen when the scene has most certainly been experi-
enced by the viewer, instances of which in Barthes’s and Kanai’s writings will
be examined below.)
Quotations of images and texts are not limited to the inter-text but occur
intra-textually as well. They are not stationed in positions within the boundar-
ies of the photo-book, as it needs to be activated by the reader/spectator who
may or may not read/view as prescribed by the way the book is printed. As
Susan Sontag states:
For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arrang-
ing (and usually miniaturizing) photographs [. . .] The sequence in which
the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but
nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount
of time to be spent on each photograph.72
The unfettering of images from their given order is exactly what Iwaya Kunio
let happen. He could not resist his curiosity about the photographic images
and, suspending the act of reading, turned the pages in search of pictures. He
then went back to reading the story linearly and viewed the photographs again,
thus experiencing a ‘having-seen-ness’ about them. The prominence of photo-
graphic images always has the potential to disrupt the process of experienc-
ing the text, disturbing the pace and probably the order of reading. Thus, the
72 Sontag, On Photography, 4–5.

182 CHAPTER 4
story may not be represented in the reader’s mind as printed, and rather than
being surprised by new incidents, the reader is bound to feel s/he has already
seen them.
If readers/spectators violate the order of presentation set by the artists, still
their experiences cannot be entirely invalidated. The prospect of such violation
did not make the artists abandon their intent in ordering—or disordering—
images amid textual space. The images do not necessarily correspond to the
scenes verbally described in the adjacent places in the book in question, but, as
Nomura Makio points out, they often appear relevant to what the text speaks
of in other places, earlier or later.73 The tempo-spatial gap—or Derridian “dif-
férance”—contributes to the sense of ‘having-seen-ness’ across the media of
image and text. Encounters with a corresponding passage or picture evoke the
memory of an image or a textual instance displaced, which both instigates and
derails the desire for interpretation that Kanai firmly renounces in the post-
script, as we saw above. Disoriented temporally or spatially, the reader/viewer
may resort to interpretation to make sense of and grasp the photo narrative as
a structured body, and yet the constant slippage seems to invalidate the very
attempt at meaning-making.
Another conceivable reason for ‘having-seen-ness’ involves the position
of the camera. As Iwaya points out, the height of the gaze is set along the
casual stroller’s eye level.74 There is nothing contrived about the placement
of the camera. Hardly any picture radically departs from the angle available
to the flâneur, an anonymous and purposeless passerby, presenting little
threat to the familiar spatial sensibility. Watanabe himself is known to be a
walker par excellence. Kajikawa Yoshitomo, the director of the Kahitsukan/
Kyoto Museum of Contemporary Art, which owns Watanabe’s work up to 2003,
notes that the photographer walks thirty kilometers per day with his camera in
search of objects that command his attention.75 It may then be only fitting that
Watanabe’s Kimura Ihei Prize acceptance remarks are entitled “Mata aruki
hajimeru,” or “I resume walking.”76 For him, walking is both an essential part
73 Nomura Makio, “Bungaku tekusuto ni okeru maruchi modariti no kanōsei: Monogatari
ehon kara Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close made,” Jōetsu kyōiku daigaku kenkyū kiyō
31 (February 2012): 219–20. http://repository.lib.juen.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/10513/1450/4/
kiyo31-21.pdf accessed May 30, 2015.
74 Iwaya, 214.
75 Kajikawa, “Fuzai no naka no sonzai,” in Kajikawa Yoshitomo (ed.), Watanabe Kanendo
(Kyoto: Kahitsukan/Kyoto Museum of Contemporary Art, 2003), 7.
76 Watanabe, “Jushō no kotoba: Mata, arukihajimeru,” Asahi kamera 67, no. 3 (March
1982): 74.
of his photographic practice and also a theoretical foundation for it. Here, we
might propose to draw a parallel between the artist Watanabe and the narrator-
protagonist(s) of Kanai’s narrative, who declare(s) as follows:
I shall walk. As the destination is unknown, my walk shall proliferate

as intersecting routes, expanding time in multiple directions as though
it were space. This distance, impossible to call a “route,” is more like a
cell proliferating and extending into intersecting directions, and yet
also finite.77
This is not to suggest that Watanabe is a model for the main character of
the narrative, but that the definitive and formative method of production is
shared between photography and narrative in Kishi no machi. The peripatetic
orientation of photographing is manifest in Watanabe’s practice, which one
might say is reflected in Kishi no machi’s structure. The anonymous perspec-
tive often experienced in everyday perambulations contributes to creating
the sense of ‘having-seen-ness,’ even if one has not already seen exactly the
same scenery or objects. With or without a visit to the exact spot in reality,
one may still experience the scenes as visually familiar. As we shall see shortly,
however, these mundane impressions are nothing but deceptive. That the
mundane has earned an opportunity to be professionally photographed and
artistically represented is anything but mundane.
The narrative’s use of repetition is another source of ‘having-seen-ness.’
In the story this quality manifests itself as the narrator keeps questioning
whether or not he has already experienced something, and if he has, then how
often. He also repeatedly asks himself whether there was only one accomplice
or more in the furtive acts (often sexual) that he recalls—acts that he may or
may not have engaged in. The multiplicity and anonymity of the partners not
only resonate with the proliferation and dissolution of the narrative agency, as
we saw above, but also contribute to the evocation of the mundane and banal.
If the subject matter is familiar, the procedure through which it is exposed to
attention is anything but.
Instead of aestheticizing special moments in time, the photographer and the
writer seem intent on highlighting the banality that persists in repeated occur-
rences that one cannot quite locate in particular space-time. Something that
could happen anywhere, anytime and to anyone is felt as familiar and yet may
not be memorable because it is unidentifiable as a unique incident worthy of
commemoration. The insistence on repetition thus exposes the v ernacularity
77 Kanai, Kishi no machi, 116.

184 CHAPTER 4
of prose narrative and photography, that is, the myth of accessibility about
those media in modern print culture: anyone can produce and reproduce
prose narratives or photographs. Modernity and nationalism redefined art as
vernacular, transparent and individual, to be owned by anyone who shares
the same nationality. Homogeneity, anonymity, mediocrity and banality dic-
tate and are dictated by prose fiction and photography as legitimate modes of
mechanical reproduction in the age of nationalism and beyond. Obviously, our
photographer and writer refuse to comply with the normative reproduction
of the modern myth. The very fact that Watanabe and Kanai succeed in reveal-
ing the vernacularity of their respective media testifies to their transcendence
of their artistic apparatuses’ delimiting premises. The complicity between the
narrative, photography and institutional authority is broken from within rather
than from without, in which case prose narrative and photography would have
been simply renounced.
The familiar and the unfamiliar are not opposite but rather adjacent
turfs that could erode each other; they are like the negative and positive
images that can be reproduced from the same film and inverted into each
other with the application of light. One might “have seen” something and yet
might not remember “having seen” it unless and until being shown its image or
being asked to relate it. Even then one might not know whether or not one has
actually seen the thing in question, or if so, when and where one came across
it. That is the reason that the photographed scenes in Kishi no machi look
alienating rather than endearing, despite the fact that “[t]hese photographs
do not represent an unknown landscape, an unusual landscape or remnants
of a bygone Tokyo—these photographs are about nothing extraordinary.”78
Watanabe’s photographs, even those whose location can be identified,79 offer
no handle for the viewer to feel affected by landscape.
The things that we see and have seen in our everyday life, things with which
we are familiar, are not the things that we make a concerted effort to look at.
Thus they may not register in our memory as noteworthy but tend to submerge
into the background. It is for this reason that they strike us as unusual when
they are represented within frames (as in photographs). As we heard Abe state
in Chapter 2, we may come to notice only within the frame of a photograph
what we have overlooked with our own eyes. It is not that they are inherently
unusual but that it is unusual for them to be represented in visual art as
though they were worthy of interpretation. As Sotokubo Keiko, the curator of

79 Nomura, 219.
FIgure 31 Kanai Mieko and Watanabe Kanendo, Kishi no machi (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1980), 85.
Photograph by Watanabe Kanendo. Layout by Sakurai Shōji.
Reprinted with the permissions by Watanabe Kanendo, KANAI MIEKO and
Gallery Maestalla in Tokyo, which owns and has exhibited many of Watanabe’s
works, states in a critical review of the photographer’s career, “As photography
renounces the continuity that is taken for granted in the everyday, its existence
is predicated upon the lack of affinity with the world.”80
The discontinuity might become evident not only in relation to the every-
day itself but to its conventional visual representation. Two of the pictures
feature trucks with legible license plates (Figs. 31 and 32).81 As our mass-media-
saturated vision is more accustomed to seeing such identification markers
deliberately blurred in publicized images to anonymize them and protect
the privacy of the articles’ owners, the photographic representation of them
as seen in situ strikes us as unusual, while reminding us of things that we have
seen and yet have grown used to not looking at or registering, in the absence of
80 Sotokubo Keiko, www.gallerymestalla.co.jp/exhibisions/07/watanabe (accessed May 30,

2015).
81 Kanai and Watanabe, Kishi no machi, 85 and 101.
186 CHAPTER 4
FIGure 32 Kanai Mieko and Watanabe Kanendo, Kishi no machi (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1980), 101.
Photograph by Watanabe Kanendo. Layout by Sakurai Shōji.
Reprinted with the permissions by Watanabe Kanendo, KANAI MIEKO and
any specific vested interest in doing so (such as an investigation). This practice

also reminds us that we as the spectators of the photographs are not cast as
neutral observers but put in the privileged and, arguably, morally questionable
position of voyeurs. As anonymity is lifted from the objects in the images, the
position of the viewer becomes compromised.
While photographs might be inherently “nostalgic” or “elegiac,” as Susan
Sontag declares,82 Watanabe’s photographs—or Kanai’s words—do not invite
the spectator/reader to indulge in memories of the past, despite the “déjà-vu”
of the title, which may tempt such an interpretation. As Kanai states, “Watanabe
Kanendo’s photographs evoke the sensual irritation of ‘having-seen-ness’—
they are not nostalgic, and yet they remind us of a certain ‘wind’ that we
have seen somewhere.”83 It is not indulgent but irritating to look at Watanabe’s
photographs, as spectators cannot afford to remain complacent with the famil-
iar and instead are accosted by the discomfort of their inability to articulate
82 Sontag, On Photography, 15.

specifics of the experience. Here one might recall Barthes’s punctum or the
“prick” associated with it. The images seem familiar, but they do not help to
restore a disrupted connection with a piece of the past that one may wish
to commemorate as precious and formative of one’s purportedly continuous
and coherent life history. As suggested above, Watanabe’s photography, like
Kanai’s text, calls for the death of the narrative and as a corollary the dissolu-
tion of biography.
Nothing specific or special is being recalled, but a flow of air is being felt as
having been experienced by the body of the spectator. Indeed, the spectator
ceases to “see” but to be immersed in the movement of air—vision does not
dominate one’s memory, but skin or tactile sensibility is open to sensation of a
familiar kind. As psychoanalyst and photography critic Serge Tisseron says in
Le Mystère de la chambre claire (The Mystery of Camera Lucida), “photography
evidences less ‘what was there’ than ‘what was lived’ by the photographer,” who
“is breathed into the world the moment he breathes it in.”84 It is not the eye but
the body that registers space-time. Watanabe’s own writing, the Kimura Ihei
Prize recipient’s statement, evokes multiple senses not limited to vision: heat
so suffocating that it could cause vertigo; the sound of the shutter resonating
in utter silence; the sound of the rolling of the lever; the resistance of the right
index finger to the brain’s directive to move; the thirst for a chilled beverage,
pleasant to gulp down;85 goose bumps at the thought of the infinite repetition
of photographing; the immobility of the left and right feet as though deferring
to each other. Barthes shares some of these physical senses, as evident in the
following passage from Camera Lucida:
For me, the Photographer’s organ is not his eye (which terrifies me) but
his finger: what is linked to the trigger of the lens, to the metallic shifting
of the plates (when the camera still has such things). I love these mechan-
ical sounds in an almost voluptuous way [. . .]86
84 Serge Tisseron, Le Mystère de la chambre claire: Photographie et inconscient (Paris: Les
Belles Lettres, 1996), 60. My translation. I consulted the Japanese translation by Aoyama
Masaru, Akarui heya no nazo: Shashin to muishiki (Kyoto: Jimbun shoin, 2001), 67. The title
suggests this book is intended as a response to Barthes’s reflections on photography.
85 Watanabe Kanendo, “Jushō no kotoba: Mata, arukihajimeru,” 74–75. Watanabe may be
alluding to Roland Barthes’s praise for chilled beer in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes,
trans., Richard Howard (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1977), 116.
188 CHAPTER 4
Kishi no machi demonstrates how the novel and photography, two arts privi-
leged in the age of mechanical reproducibility, can transgress the norm of
modern representation. Instead of subscribing to the myths of modernity—
visuality, anthropomorphism and vernacularity—both Watanabe Kanendo
the photographer and Kanai Mieko the novelist engaged in exploration
of the physical sensations, multiple subjectivities and rhetoricity that consti-
tute space-time. Countering the implicit and insidious celebration of authority
bestowed upon the anonymized and disembodied eye that is latent in photo-
graphic images and vernacular fiction, both claiming transparency, Watanabe
and Kanai succeed in revealing an artistic rhetoric that manipulates vision
and writing.
Photography as Corporeal Reproduction: Kanai Mieko’s Tama-ya
In her 1999 essay “Arguing with the Real,” Sharalyn Orbaugh examined two
of Kanai Mieko’s early short stories that manifest the desire for a procreative
alternative to reproduction by a maternal body.87 The resistance to heteronor-
mativity presented in those stories may appear less prominent in a group of
Kanai’s novels wherein comedic errors in the everyday prevail. While the latter
type of novels—often labeled as “Mejiro-mono” (works set in Mejiro), in refer-
ence to a middle-class residential area in Tokyo—may appear to celebrate the
hedonistic lifestyle of late capitalist consumerist society, they in fact submit an
antithesis to the normative lifestyle of 1980s Japan, in which they are set, with
its pillar priorities of family and job.
Photography and pregnancy come to play two seemingly separate yet
equally prominent notes in one of those novels of quotidian life, Tama-ya, a
fast-paced comedic novel that centers on the narrator-protagonist Natsuyuki,
an out-of-work photographer who comes to know other male characters
through the pregnancies, present or past, of three females. These females
include: Natsuyuki’s mother, who has left another son, Fuyuhiko, with her sec-
ond husband when she divorced him and has since neglected to maintain any
ties; Tsuneko, a bar hostess with whom Natsuyuki has had an affair, who has
swindled money from a few of her regular clients, any of whom could have
fathered her unborn child, prior to disappearing without a trace; and Tama,
Tsuneko’s cat, who while pregnant is adopted by Natsuyuki—or rather is
87 In Stephen Snyder and J. Philip Gabriel, eds., Ōe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary
Japan (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), 245–77.
imposed on him by Tsuneko’s half-brother Alexandre.88 All of these mothers

effectively defy the conventional belief that mothers love their children
unconditionally and keep them foremost in their thoughts at all times. Thus,
as various individuals adopt Tama’s kittens, it takes her only a few days to stop
searching for them and, apparently, to forget them. In return, the children of
these unattached and self-centered mothers do not suffer from deprivation
of maternal love but rather feel liberated from maternal control and domina-
tion. While Natsuyuki’s upbringing has by no means been ordinary, he has not
grown up to be antisocial. On the contrary, he faces a constant flow of people
passing through his household, demanding and offering human and material
resources. So much is this the case that he sometimes has to take refuge in
public places such as bars, coffee shops and restaurants to avoid those who vio-
late boundaries and take charge of his home. The story ends with one of these
“escapes” as Natsuyuki wonders where to go to dodge another unwelcome visi-
tor, suggesting his life with intrusive friends might continue without change
beyond the story’s last lines.
Such a setting affords us an opportunity to rethink the notion of the family
as the solid foundation of human existence. The story suggests that rather than
being essential and stable, the family is contingent and variable. Mothers in
the novel, who would conventionally be the glue of their families, do not offer
their children unconditional love or demand from them unconditional loyalty.
The biological connection between mother and child is deemed incidental
and far from essential, definitive, irreplaceable, given or withstanding the test
of contingencies of space-time.
The dissolution of original and authentic mother–child bonding is well
orchestrated by this novel’s other theme, that of photography as Walter
Benjamin’s “art of the age of mechanical reproducibility” and also as a source
of affect, in Deleuzean terminology.89 While photography as a visual techno-
logical register is attributed to the loss of aura, the photographic activities
of taking pictures, developing films and living with prints are recognized as
corporeal and sensational.
88 The mother of Tsuneko and Alexandre could be added to this list, though she does not
appear as a character in any scene; she is simply referred to by others and does not inter-
vene in the story’s progress. The mother of the siblings by different partners, however,
might fit the scheme of demystification of maternity in this novel as far as Alexandre’s
dismissive portrayal of her character goes.
89 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility.”
190 CHAPTER 4
The secondary story line concerning photography begins with Natsuyuki’s

commission to reproduce images from previous publications—a commis-
sion that has come his way because of his reputation for the skillful repro-
duction of photographs taken by others. Thus, the topic of reproduction of
reproduction—an obsession of Horie seen in Chapter 3—sets off in this novel.
As Natsuyuki encounters an old acquaintance, “the pornographer-photogra-
pher,” and tells him, “I’ve got a job copying plates,” he is asked, “So you don’t
produce photographic ‘works’ of your own?”90 The “pornographer-photogra-
pher” readily equates Natsuyuki’s talent at printing/developing with a potential
deficiency in creativity. His suspicion, which gradually penetrates Natsuyuki’s
self-awareness as the narrative progresses, reflects the classic binary between
the authentic and the fake, privileging the former. Natsuyuki tells the
“pornographer-photographer” that he has pawned his camera, a fact that is not
only a crucial inconvenience to his livelihood but that also repeats the novel’s
theme of replacements, surrogates and alternates in motherhood as well as in
visual art.
Natsuyuki’s proclivity for simulation is evident in the following passage, in
which he reminisces about his preoccupation with it in his youth:
I went back to my room and, while rereading The Waste Land by [T.S.]
Eliot in Yoshida Ken’ichi’s [Japanese] translation that I had bought in
a used bookstore, was absorbed in the reverie of taking black-and-
white photographs in London for a book in honor of The Waste
Land—which was, in retrospect, such an anachronistic, gross and
silly idea. While Eliot dedicated his Waste Land “to Ezra Pound, il
migliore fabbro [a superior poet],” my Waste Land the photographic
book (though it’s about London cityscape) shall be a tribute “to Robert
Bresson, whose image taught me that stoicism is the most excessive
and inauspicious desire.” Ah, if so, should I take pictures for The Waste
Land in color, as the colored emulation sparkles, as if smiling trium-
phantly, in the color of flesh in [Bresson’s] Quatre nuits d’un rêveur
[Four Nights of a Dreamer]?!91
90 Kanai, Tama-ya (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1987), 26, my translation. The corresponding text in
Tomoko Aoyama and Paul McCarthy, Oh, Tama! (Fukuoka: Kurodahan Press, 2014) can be
found at 19–20.
91 Kanai, Tama-ya, 53, my translation. In Aoyama and McCarthy, 45–46.
The photo book that he dreamed of producing is not only inspired by a book
of poetry (The Waste Land) in terms of its object (the London cityscape) but is
also indebted to a body of work by a filmmaker (Robert Bresson) in terms of its
visual register, through its privileging of a specific color scheme. For Natsuyuki
no work of art is an island; every piece should be a tribute to a precedent that
inspired the later artist. It is not only photography that is reproducible art—
every work of art comes into being in its relation to another.
The lack of authenticity, originality and autonomy reemerges toward
the end of the narrative. Still unemployed and apparently without his own
camera, Natsuyuki has to rent another photographer’s camera to take on an
assignment—replacing someone else who had withdrawn from it because
of an emergency. A replacement photographer with a replacement camera,
Natsuyuki visits a novelist whose portraits he is to take for a magazine:
I took two shots in the house. Then I took the final picture on the pedes-
trian bridge against a backdrop of skyscrapers in the sunset, upon the
request of the novelist, who said, “Mickey Rourke looked so cool in that
worn-out linen jacket in Angel Heart,” and changed into a linen jacket
and sneakers. Looking into the viewfinder of the rented Hasselblad, I
realized it was for this shot that the novelist had let his beard grow. “You’re
looking sharp . . . don’t move . . . that’s it. I wish it were color film. Oh, how
about wearing these? I think you’d look even sharper.” So saying, I handed
him a pair of the Wellington-style dark green sunglasses. I even fluttered,
“No kidding, you’ve slipped into Mickey Rourke’s shoes.” The novelist
easily surrendered to this “ordeal by roses.”92
92 Kanai Mieko, Tama-ya, 158–59. The complicated nature of the negotiation between the
author-turned-model and the cameraman on an assignment to take a portrait for a pub-
lication is articulated in the second episode in Natsume Sōseki’s Garasudo no uchi (1915;
trans., Inside My Glass Doors, 2002). I thank Jonathan E. Abel for calling my attention to
this text. In the essay “Sakka no shōzō” (The portrait of the author, 1979) in Te to te no aida
de (Between Hands; Tokyo: Kawade shobō, 1982), 73–82, Kanai dismisses two collections
of photographic portraits of authors and, by extension, the convention of publishing
authors’ portraits as if they were privileged enough to warrant photographic representa-
tion. Kanai may also have had in mind Takanashi Yutaka, renowned for his portraiture of
literary authors including Mishima Yukio, Murakami Haruki and Kanai. One chapter
of Tama-ya, “Amanda Andāson no shashin,” appeared at first with Takanashi’s pictures of
Kanai in L’Enchanteur 4 (March 1987), 4–8.
192 CHAPTER 4
The theme of loans, replacements or copies is significant, extending beyond the

matter of the camera and cameraman. The concept of the portrait is borrowed
from a film, a fashion article (the sunglasses) is on loan, and the image pro-
jected by the photographed author is compared to Mishima Yukio’s highly
staged portraits by Hosoe Eikoh, in the famed collection entitled Barakei (1963;
trans. Ordeal by Roses, 1985). Furthermore, the film referenced, Angel Heart
(1987), directed by Alan Parker, deals with possession of another’s soul and
identity swapping, which makes the film appropriate for a scene that repeats
the theme of copying.
While a recognizable degree of cynicism is directed at the affected novel-
ist and the professionally fluttering photographer, it should be confirmed that
the narrator projects little disdain into the copy-orientedness that is ubiqui-
tous throughout the passage. Rather than expressing dismay over the lack of
authenticity, originality or integrity in Natsuyuki’s photographic output, the
narrative implicitly denies significance to identity and ownership, corner-
stones of democracy and capitalism. Instead of a unique self or a solid belong-
ing, a constant act of copying dictates the habitus of the narrator-protagonist.
Indeed, it is reproduction, or relation to others, that defines his existence.
Formed and transformed by beings temporally, spatially or ontologically dis-
tant, the subject is always elsewhere and someone else.
It is not as though Natsuyuki has always been against ownership. There are
a few things that he has grown possessive about, which seem out of charac-
ter at first. However, closer examination will reveal that these “exceptional”
instances indeed further question the validity of ownership as a concept.
One is the right to properly introduce Japanese photographer aficionados to
Amanda Anderson, an unknown American photographer, which I shall dis-
cuss later, and the other is an original print of a photograph by Eugène Atget.
Natsuyuki describes his surprise when Tsuneko, whom he has just slept with,
expresses her interest in the print and defends himself for his resistance to
giving her the prized possession as follows:
I don’t think I am miserly, but it’s true that I was not so generous as to
offer Tsuneko the original print of Atget’s photograph—one that the
owner of Zeit Foto Salon had sold me at ten percent discount, that I
would rescue from a fire first of all my possessions, that features an early
twentieth-century building, now lost, and a maid with a white apron,
then still living in Paris, standing still inside a grocery store—“From a real
body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me,
who am here” a leaf of the “treasury of rays”—however longingly she
might gaze upon it from this way and that. I was rather confounded by
her show of assumption (unless I had misinterpreted it) that I might

present her with the original print.93
This manifestation of attachment to the Atget photograph serves to down-

grade Natsuyuki’s connection with Tsuneko. She felt she deserved a special gift
after, or because of, having sex with him, perhaps a testament to her entrap-
ment in a capitalist or humanistic logic based on exchange of value. For him,
however, this particular gift was out of the question. His firm declaration of
ownership of the Atget print has confirmed by contrast his lack of interest in
paying for sex or consolidating his relationship with Tsuneko. Thus, the narra-
tive rejects the humanistic convention that emotional or sexual bonding leads
to sharing of things of material—and spiritual—value.
Natsuyuki’s attachment to the Atget “original” print submits an antithesis
to Walter Benjamin’s definition of photography as a reproducible art: “From a
photographic plate, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask
for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense.”94 As Imahashi Eiko explains, “origi-
nal prints” are authorized by a given photographer as definitive and thus have
specific value and connection to the origin of the creation.95 As is obvious from
the above quotation, the print in Natsuyuki’s possession has distinct value
for him as an irreplaceable object of affection.96 This further complicates the
conventional binary between original and copy, as this novel does in other
93 Kanai, Tama-ya, 29, my translation. In Aoyama and McCarthy, 23. The quotations in this
passage are from Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 80 and 82, respectively. The maid with
an apron is a motif that appears in a description of Amanda Anderson’s photograph of a
Cape Cod house, to be discussed later.
94 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” 106.
95 Imahashi, Foto riterashī, 120.
96 Kanai’s later essay, “Hizuke to kioku, sono ta 2” (Dates and Memories, and Other Matters,
no. 2) in Hibi no arekore 4 (Miscellany of the Everyday; Tokyo: Asahi shimbun shup-
pan, 2011), suggests that this scale of value on which the Atget original print is placed
might have been inspired by the film Un homme et une femme (1966), directed by Claude
Lelouch. Kanai quotes the heroine as saying that she would save a kitten rather than
Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture in the event of a fire (123). In the film in question, in fact,
the question asked was “a painting by Rembrandt or a kitten?” and Giacometti is quoted
to have answered he would choose a kitten. See Maurice Elia, « Un homme et une femme
de Claude Lelouch: Rembrandt, Giacometti, le chat, le chien », Séquences: La revue de
cinéma no. 214 (2001), 35; http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/2161ac (accessed May 23, 2015).
The quotation’s reference to a kitten makes it even more relevant to the current con-
text in Tama-ya. A latent question is which Natsuyuki would rescue from a fire: Tama
or the Atget print. Regardless of his choice, it is evident that a cat and a photograph are
posited against each other as comparable, both as irreplaceable rather than reproducible.
194 CHAPTER 4
places as well; a copy as a thing has an original place in a character’s mind, or

hands, that belies interchangeability.
Another point of importance in this passage is the sudden switch to quota-
tional mode: the narrator quotes from someone else’s writing, namely that of
Roland Barthes, without citing him or explaining how the quotation has been
arrived at. Only the French quotation marks (guillemets—« . . . ») inserted in
the Japanese text alert the reader to the heterogeneity of the text. This does not
indicate Natsuyuki’s lack of descriptive or narrative skills, which are plainly
proven impressive. The choice of quotation as a method of composition sug-
gests the level of ease with which Natsuyuki merges his text with that of others.
As is the case with photography, he smoothly traverses the space between nar-
rative agencies. Ownership is acknowledged yet bracketed for intertextuality.
This particular case bears additional significance in our context, as the
Barthes quotations come from the context of his Camera Lucida and in par-
ticular the famous “Winter Garden Photograph,” or the picture of the author’s
mother as a young girl. Barthes recalls his mother’s portrait with much affec-
tion without ever showing the image in print to the reader.97 This passage from
Barthes’s book bears significance elsewhere in Kanai’s work Indian samā, as
we shall see later. Here in Tama-ya, an effect comparable to the “treasury of
rays” recognized by Barthes is felt from the photograph Natsuyuki describes,
while its subject matter is different in kind from that of the “Winter Garden
Photograph.” So is Natsuyuki’s sentiment toward his mother. Natsuyuki feels
the Atget original print as a source of light not because of his affection for the
female in the Atget picture (she is not even his mother), as is the case with
Barthes, but because of his love of Atget’s art, which he elaborates in material
terms in the passage quoted above. Natsuyuki describes the value the picture
holds for him in terms of its susceptibility to material damage and the imag-
ined physical feat of rescuing it from destruction. The photograph’s presence
as a thing and its intimacy with his body defines it as more than what it repre-
sents—it is valuable in itself, in its own materiality rather than in its connec-
tion to someone or something whose image it bears. The photograph is not an
image to be looked at in lieu of a person photographed who is now lost, but a
97 See Carol Mavor, “Black and Blue: The Shadows of Camera Lucida,” and Margaret Olin,
“Touching Photographs: Roland Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’ Identification,” both in Geoffrey
Batchen, ed., Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 211–42 and 75–89, respectively, on the absence of
the “Winter Garden Photograph.” The recent scholarship, however, proved that the pho-
tograph indeed does exist, which changes our interpretation of Barthes’s gesture from
fictitious to private. See n. 122 for more.
material being to be embraced, literally, right there, in the present. Longing for
maternity is replaced by desire for materiality. The intimacy with the mother,
however imagined, is replaced by an intimacy with a photograph.
Kanai brings the corporeality of photographs felt by a human body to its
full potential in the following passage from Tama-ya, in which the process of
film development in a darkroom is described (the developer’s reaction to the
gradual emergence of the image may remind the reader of the box man’s imag-
inative account of a similar process in Hako otoko as discussed in Chapter 2):
The enlargement of the reproduced photos, which I had been hired to do

for a fee, had gone quite smoothly, so I proceeded with the additional
request for enlargements from the moldy film that I was told a cinema
critic had taken in Paris. In the middle of the process, I choked—
the image that emerged on the contact sheet, soaked in the light of the
enlargement machine, was a snapshot of Anna Karina, smiling toward
the mirror as she raised her hair as if to tie it in the back. The mildewed
Kodak film had captured one snap after another of Anna Karina, vari-
ously posed. In rapture, I kept enlarging them—I was mesmerized by
Anna Karina, whose image took shape slowly and gradually, bearing a
smile like hazy clouds, through the wavering liquid membrane in the vat
full of the sour-smelling fixer. Though I had not photographed her, I felt
as though I owned this Venus floating up from the fixer. I decided to take
home an enlarged quarto of Anna, which I printed with exceptional care
for myself, without asking the photographer’s permission. It is also true,
though, that I felt slightly dejected by the thought that I might be meant
to be a master of the darkroom rather than a cameraman.98
The “cinema critic” who photographed Anna Karina in Paris is easily iden-
tifiable with Yamada Kōichi, who published a comparable picture of the
actress—with the same specific pose and surroundings—in his memoir Tomo
yo eiga yo: Waga nūveru vāgu shi (To Friends and Films: My Account of the New
Wave, 1978; revised, 1985; paperback edition, 2002). Yamada was a contributing
writer for Cahiers du cinéma in the mid-1960s and had known and interviewed
many of the New Wave directors and producers, including François Truffaut,
to whom his book is dedicated. Kanai herself wrote on this book, in which
she treasures the fact that that particular portrait is blurred because of the
photographer’s trembling hands, which he could not subdue in his excitement
98 Kanai, Tama-ya, 55–56, my translation. In Aoyama and McCarthy’s translation, the
passage is in 48–49.
196 CHAPTER 4
at being with Anna Karina across the lens.99 This episode reveals how the body
of the photographer is involved in the act of photographing rather than stay-
ing behind the camera as the eye. The object of photographing becomes a
source of affect for the photographer, causing sensation in him. The result of
the process in this case is the blurriness, which is not to be taken as a technical
deficiency but a trace of the collapse of the boundaries between the bodies of
subject and object, or the corporeal orchestration between the two. As we saw
consistently in Horie’s philosophy of photography in the previous chapter, and
especially in “Kuma no shikiishi,” traces of the photographer’s body are appre-
ciated as puncturing the purported neutrality of photography.
Natsuyuki, however, feels disturbed when his half-brother Fuyuhiko, a
practicing professional psychiatrist, articulates precisely the dissolving of the
subject–object binary, as his eloquent speech unfolds in analytical discourse
that obliterates the body of the critic:
I reached for the bookcase and [ from a shelf] took in hand the green bag
of negatives. As I was looking at the quarto of Anna Karina’s portrait,
Fuyuhiko, who, like me, had been lying on the floor absent-mindedly,
asked if he could see the picture. “Sure,” I said, handing it to him. He said,
“Ah, this is . . . I know who it is . . . I mean, she’s Anna Karina, isn’t she?”
“Indeed she is,” I replied, thinking to myself what a surprise he would
watch any movie other than Blade Runner. He observed, “Such a great
picture—just stunning,” with the attitude that I had witnessed on another
day when I’d let him see Amanda Anderson: Her Life and Photography,
with a show of self-assuredness that said “I get photography.” Not only
that; he went so far as to offer a commentary: “While the photographer
casts onto the object the enraptured and admiring gaze through the
anonymous little machine of the camera, the object returns to the film
the enraptured gaze cast by the photographer, who has his own anony-
mous yet unique body. It is for that reason that the object, Anna Karina,
shines in the reflection of the mirror behind her.” I did not know quite
what to say to him.100
99 Kanai, “Yamada san to eiga-teki bijo” (1989), in Kanai Mieko, Hon o kaku hito yomanu hito,
tokaku kono yo wa mamanaranu II, 166. This essay was originally written as the introduc-
tion to a paperback edition of another book by Yamada, in which she touches upon his
book in question here.
100 Kanai, Tama-ya, 97–98, my translation. In Aoyama and McCarthy, 85–86.
Given that, as we have seen earlier, Kanai has written about the gaze of the
photographic object cast onto the photographer—which can be equated
with what Victor Burgin calls “the fourth look”—revealing the interaction
between the object and the photographer taking place behind the scene (in
Teresa de Lauretis’s “space-off”), it is hard to imagine that she would disagree
with Fuyuhiko in his interpretation of Anna Karina’s photograph, or, to put it
precisely, the relationship between the model and her photographer, Yamada
Kōichi. The point of Natsuyuki’s reaction to Fuyuhiko’s commentary lies
elsewhere.
In the original Natsuyuki says he is “in awe of” (osoreiru) Fuyuhiko, which is
an idiomatic euphemism for the state of being taken aback by something, or
of not knowing how to deal with it. Natsuyuki senses something inappropriate
or out of context about the way in which Fuyuhiko speaks of the photograph.
It is evident, then, that Natsuyuki is “taken aback” by the “self-assuredness” of
Fuyuhiko’s speech, in which he voluntarily and assertively attempts an analy-
sis of the photograph as if to suggest he “[gets] photography.” It is not what
Fuyuhiko says but the fact that he takes on the task of interpretation know-
ingly and transcendentally that bothers Natsuyuki. The latter’s interaction
with photographs is more corporeal than analytical and does not grant him a
critical distance from which he can take the liberty of interpreting the object.
Natsuyuki would prefer immersing his body in the ecstasy of coexisting with
the source of affect. Just as the photographer couldn’t make his hands stop
trembling, producing indistinct pictures of his source of affect, the observer is
stunned and at a loss for words. Thus, he cannot but feel alienated from and
irritated by Fuyuhiko, who displays eloquence in accounting for “the fourth
look” and its effects, without any regard to the distance between himself and
his object of analysis, or the privileged vantage point that he takes for granted.
Natsuyuki’s rejection of interpretation is evident in the above passage, in which
Fuyuhiko presents himself as a self-appointed critic oblivious to the premise of
critical discourse.
Natsuyuki later recalls that moment of affect experienced in the darkroom
as he reflects on the stagnation of his project of writing about American pho-
tographer Amanda Anderson for the first time in Japan. His devotion to the
project is seen in a lengthy summary of the book cited above, which he offers
Alexandre earlier in the narrative. The summary is so substantial that the nar-
rative removes quotation marks from Natsuyuki’s speech, separates it by a
break and makes it into a subordinate narrative in its own—with occasional
interruptions from Alexandre, the self-imposed listener to this story, being the
only reminders that the summary is part of a conversation:
198 CHAPTER 4
It was Gloria Swanson, the grandniece of Amanda, who discovered her,

an amateur photographer of absolutely no renown, posthumously. In
June of 1955, Swanson found in the attic of the second house, a bequest of
her mother who had earlier inherited it from Anderson, in Cape Cod—
“Wait a minute, did you say cod? Tama loves canned cod roe—you should
get some for her next time you have a chance,” interrupted Alexandre—
several old cameras, a few dozen dry plates (many of them cracked), sev-
eral hundred rolls of film in various sizes and several thousand discolored
quartos, amongst old clothes in the oak chest. At first Swanson thought
they must be photographs Amanda’s father had taken as he—Robert
Anderson by name—was a trader with the hobby of photography, some
of whose pictures are always included in histories of American photogra-
phy. As Swanson investigated, however, she came to realize that his
daughter Amanda had taken those photos. So Swanson enlisted a skilled
printer to collaborate in the production of prints. Some portion of those
pictures culminated in this album. So I explained [to Alexandre].101
Within the above summary of the background, it becomes obvious that

Natsuyuki’s attention is toward material details of tools and prints of Anderson’s
photographs that Swanson stumbled upon. The mention of a “skilled printer”
who brought to life images latent in the films seems apt for Natsuyuki’s aware-
ness of this particular line of work as a distinct part of photographic repro-
duction, and is related to the conclusion he draws as to the reason that he is
obsessed with Anderson’s photographs, as we shall see later. His focus extends
into the frame of Anderson’s pictures once he begins to describe them:
If you ask me, what’s unique about Amanda Anderson’s photographs is

that they are eccentrically—insanely—focused, which is simply uncanny.
[. . .]
The photograph of the white house with the large windows facing the
sea was shot from the direction of the sea. Judging from other pictures of
the same house from other angles, and from the distance between the
location of the house and the coastline, the photo could not have been
taken from anywhere other than atop a boat. The center of the frame is
occupied by the entire prospect of the white house, in a scheme as innoc-
uous as a child’s drawing. The two large windows behind the porch,
the four rectangular windows on the second floor and the small round
window of the attic below the triangular roof are all open, and from
101 Kanai, Tama-ya, 73, my translation. In Aoyama and McCarthy, 64–65.

them, the interior of the rooms can be seen distinctly and clearly,
as though one is looking into a dollhouse.
At first I thought the picture might be a montage—if so, then its
technical level would be admirable. The picture is uncanny in that it is
focused even on a bed and the vase with a chrysanthemum or rose in it,
on the bedside table in the second floor bedroom, which is impossible.
In the sitting room downstairs, you can even see clearly a maid in a
dark-colored uniform and with a white lace headpiece and apron, hold-
ing newspapers and a letter in a hand.
I can’t comment on her later pornography because I haven’t seen any,
but this picture of the white house is already nothing but fantastic—so
saying, I passed on to Alexandre a magnifying glass . . .102
This is an impossible photograph—impossible to take (though possible to

describe) with such clarity at such a distance. This picture realizes in its
description the dream of the photographer in “Mado,” who aspires in vain to
take a picture of the ruin in its entirety without sacrificing representation of its
every detail.103 While the narrator repeats “uncanny” (kimochi ga/no warui), he
ensures the reader stays with him in examining this photograph as real. Rather
than dismissing it as improbable and thus fabricated, unworthy of further con-
sideration, he demarcates the limit of the photograph’s clarity: one cannot tell
whether the flower arranged in the vase is a chrysanthemum or a rose. That
realistic detail, or failure of the technology, in turn seems to confirm that this
is not a product of boundless imagination but a reality, produced by an tech-
nology with real-world limitations. With that confirmation, the photograph
remains within the range of realistic consideration, in quest of the answer to
the question of how it was possible to take it, resolving photography’s inherent
dilemma of focus versus distance, entirety versus detail.
That Natsuyuki passes a magnifier to Alexandre (who then turns out not
to share his enthusiasm) suggests that he has studied the photograph with it
in hand over and again. This practice defies the common understanding that
a flat image can be grasped in a moment, with a single glance. Instead, Kanai
indicates that photographs, just like texts, can be and perhaps should be stud-
ied with careful, sustained attention. The experience of viewing a photograph
extends over time, as any physical activity might. It is not an imagined visual
102 Ibid., 74–76, my translation. In Aoyama and McCarthy, 65–67. As I noted above (n. 47), the
way the maid is dressed is similar to Atget’s picture.
103 Kanai, “Mado,” 41–42, my translation. In McCarthy, 19. See n. 26.
200 CHAPTER 4
observation but a physical one, which may require a hand to hold a magnifying
glass.
Though photographs are thus determined to be less than automatically
revealing, however, this is not to say that they should be explained by narra-
tives. Kanai’s rejection of the conventional image–text collaboration, with
each illustrating the other, which we will examine shortly in the next section
of this chapter, is apparent in Natsuyuki’s abandonment of the plan to write
on Amanda Anderson. The conclusion he draws as to what he wants to do
with the Anderson photographs and what he does not defines his existential
orientation:
I began to feel that Amanda Anderson’s photographs were for Fuyuhiko

to write a research paper or something about. . . . Then I remembered
Anna’s smile, emerging as a wavering, subtle, gray shadow in the liquid as
I had enlarged the cinema critic’s film from the Paris of twenty years
before, in the darkroom a few days earlier. The pleasure (almost enough
to make me sigh) that I experienced as the hazy shadow floating in the
gray water gradually took shape (even though they weren’t my own pho-
tographs) vividly revisited me. Then I realized: all I wanted was to see
hundreds of unprocessed pictures by Amanda Anderson in the fixer in
the darkroom. I had nothing special to write about her photographs.104
In his development of the Anna Karina films, Natsuyuki is not unlike a midwife,
helping someone else’s babies come to life. It is the role he nearly performs
earlier in the novel, when Tama the cat gives birth to her kittens in his closet.
Though he does not manually help her deliver them, he adopts her in the last
stage of pregnancy, prepares a cardboard box for her, tries to console her after
the birth when he suspects she is suffering from postpartum depression, stud-
ies a book on how to live with cats and finally arranges the kittens’ adoption.
Natsuyuki is willing to act as a surrogate mother for Tama and her offspring.
The “squashy” and drab state of her kittens is comparable to the indistinct-
ness of Karina’s emergent images, which gave him a hallucinatory sensation.
To witness the nascent state of an existence, whether it is a baby or a print, is
a physical experience that leaves one with a feeling of sharing space-time with
the newborn entity along with a lack of bearings. The sensations and uncer-
tainties of being a surrogate mother, as experienced by Natsuyuki, complicate
the notion of motherhood and photography as the process of reproduction.
Instead of claiming the status of the creator or owner, Natsuyuki is involved in
104 Kanai, Tama-ya, 80, my translation. In Aoyama and McCarthy, 71.

the process as the intermediary, and is reminded of his own physical bearing
in the world.
Desiring a corporeal experience, Natsuyuki seeks to immerse himself in the
process of photographic reproduction. In this phenomenological moment, his
body becomes one with the object of affect that his hand gives a tangible—and
emphatically not simply visible—shape to. To Natsuyuki, the photographer
and film processor, the tactile (and olfactory, as he is also stimulated by the
scent of the processing chemicals) sensations of photography are as important
as the visual impact, if not more so. Two messages are being sent here. First,
despite a common definition of photography as a visual art, the taking and pro-
ducing of photographs involves not only optical but also manual acts, making
the art a sensorially complex one. Second, in its physical involvement in the
process of photographic reproduction, the subject’s body becomes indistin-
guishable from the object’s. The subject gives up the privilege of a hypothetical
eye to observe, decipher and encode the object as a body at a distance.
In this collapse of the division between the two bodies, it becomes relevant
that Natsuyuki does not desire to interpret photographs as a critic. While he
attributes his reluctance to write to the fact that he is not a professional writer,
a more formative reason would be his refusal to purport to be a neutral agent
of analysis whose body is transparent and whose mind/eye can penetrate the
surface of the object. The surface is conventionally taken as flat and immate-
rial, its only function being to conceal a content that exists to be brought to
light by way of interpretation. To Natsuyuki, however, the surface is all that
matters, as it is matter—and is matter that engages him physically in the object
of affect, causing perspiration, accelerated heartbeat and (almost) a sigh.
The negative, the contact sheet and the print that it becomes in the hands
of the developer are surfaces of material existence with texture and thickness,
not a mere insubstantial, imagined existence whose exclusive role is to repre-
sent an image. He realizes there is “nothing special to write about her photo-
graphs” because for him nothing is hidden behind their surface, and because
he does not exist apart from the prints to establish the agency of the critic that
is autonomous of the object.
Natsuyuki struggles between the desire to preserve and proclaim the special
bond he feels with Anderson’s photographs and the aversion to interpretation,
until he all but gives up the plan to publish an introduction to her in Japanese,
upon Fuyuhiko’s information that her photographs have already attracted crit-
ical attention and produced some publications in France:
In the end, it comes down to the fact that I had done nothing with
Amanda Anderson’s photographs. Perhaps some young critic might write
about her pictures as the dernier cri in some journal. Perhaps a Japanese
202 CHAPTER 4
edition of the photo book might come out. Of course, I have no monop-
oly on her photography. I did not even discover it; all I did was stumble
upon it at a used bookstore. So if Zoom magazine were to devote a special
issue to her and publish the unpublicized photographs, I’d have no cause
to feel slighted.105
Natsuyuki admits that he has no claim on the work of Amanda Anderson. He

does not have access to the negatives of her photographs or even original prints
of them. He cannot have the honor of being “the first to introduce her to Japan.”
He is neither the owner nor the source of the myth of Amanda Anderson, liter-
ally or figuratively. He is an intermediary—a position he no doubt shares with
many others—just as his role as a developer has been defined.
Amanda Anderson is a figure that further complicates the concepts of origi-
nality and authenticity. In the postscript to the first edition of Tama-ya, Kanai
states that she would have used a photograph by Amanda Anderson for the
dust jacket “if only we had not encountered problems with copyright permis-
sion and other matters.”106 This “confession,” which suggests an attempt to
contact the artist’s representative, turns out to be false, as Amanda Anderson
is fictive; Kanai revealed in a recent interview that the photographer existed
only in a dream she once had in which she saw her picture clearly—so much
so that she can still remember the image in every detail.107 Citing Anderson
in the postscript, amid a discourse in which the reader would expect to hear
the author’s unmediated voice, and in the context of copyright negotiations
wherein the author’s identity and ownership of property are at stake, Kanai
fabricates the existence and function of the fictitious person. Kanai further
exploits the faith in the solid identity manifest in the legal name for a given
person; she complains that she could not execute a wordplay of embedding in
each chapter title the syllables of “tama” to echo the cat’s name, had Anderson’s
name been Tamara or Tamajo, and resigns herself to the fact that she is not at
liberty to change the name of Amanda Anderson and has settled for the chapter
105 Kanai, Tama-ya, 184, my translation. In Aoyama and McCarthy, 171.

106 Kanai “Tama-ya ni tsuite: Atogaki ni kaete” (About Tama-ya: In Lieu of a Postscript)
in Kanai, Tama-ya, 188. In Aoyama and McCarthy, 176.
107 Kanai Mieko and Taguchi Kenji, “ ‘Shōsetsu’ to ‘futtobōru’ no kagekina kankei” (The
Volatile Relationship between “the Novel” and “Football”) in Kanai Mieko, Shōsetsu ron:
Yomarenaku natta shōsetsu no tame ni (On the Novel: For Novels That Are No Longer
Read; Tokyo: Asahi bunko, 2008), 238.
title of “Amanda Andāson no shashin” (Amanda Anderson’s Photographs).108

The manipulation of the reader through the façade of a proper identity for a
non-existent person makes us realize how obsessed we are with identity and
ownership, slippery concepts that are only authenticated by social contracts.
Indeed, the narrative itself also lacks both origin and ownership. It begins in
medias res, and it ends without conclusion. The narrator is neither as elusive
nor as amorphous as in some of Kanai’s novels, but he does not dictate the nar-
rative while tightening and loosening his grip over it. In a fashion reminiscent
of the changeable gradations or resolutions of photographs, his voice fades in
and out of the narrative, as the mode oscillates between the narrator’s speech
(or interior monologue, hypothetical writing) and that of one of the charac-
ters. The narrative control is not absolute or absent, but variable.
In a postscript to a paperback edition, Kanai declares that this novel
“has models for its characters” a practice that is “atypical for [her] fiction.”109
Natsuyuki, the intra-diegetic narrator, can be identified at least in part with
photographer Watanabe Kanendo, whose art we discussed in depth earlier;
Yamada Kōichi, the aforementioned film critic who took the Anna Karina
portrait, acknowledges at the end of his book that Watanabe is the one who
developed and printed the pictures in the book.110 Such identification between
characters and the author’s friends—a very shishōsetsu-like procedure,
indeed—is not important here in itself but is significant in terms of the theme
of reproduction. The characters are not “authentic” human beings but copies
of people. As such, however, they still have both physicality and affect.
In the postscript to the first edition of the novel, Kanai states that Yamada’s
portrait of Anna Karina (Fig. 33)—which is “exactly like” the picture that
Natsuyuki develops and prints—is used for the dust jacket of the book
108 Kanai, “Tama-ya ni tsuite,” 188, my translation. In Aoyama and McCarthy, 175–76. The
other chapter titles are: “Tama-ya,” “Tamamono” (Gift), “Hyōhaku no tamashii” (Wander
ing Soul), “Tamayura” (Evanescence), and “Kusudama” (Balls of Confetti; “dama” is
a euphony of “tama.”). (The title translations according to Aoyama and McCarthy.)
Incidentally, the aforementioned initial publication of “Amanda Andāson no shashin” in
the magazine L’Enchanteur (see n. 93) was without any representation of or reference to
photographer Amanda Anderson. The absence of any picture credited to Anderson in this
issue was the most explicit hint at her non-existence.
109 Kanai, “Bunkobon no tame no atogaki” (Postscript to the Paperback Edition), in Tama-ya
(Tokyo: Kawade bunko, 1999), 194, my translation. In Aoyama and McCarthy, 181.
110 Another presumed “model” is Nakanishi Natsuyuki, the conceptual artist, who has
inspired Kanai since she was in her teens and who was interviewed by Kanai in the 1970s.
204 CHAPTER 4
FIGure 33 The reverse side of the dust jacket of Yamada Kōichi, Godāru, waga Anna Karīna
jidai (Tokyo: Weides Shuppan, 2010).
Photograph by Yamada Kōichi. Reprinted with the permissions by Yamada
Kōichi and Weides Shuppan.
(Fig. 34) “by fortunate coincidence.”111 This arrangement not only collapses
boundaries between the text’s interior and exterior, but it also disturbs the
chronological and genealogical order involving origin and offspring. Which of
the two pictures came first, Yamada’s or Natsuyuki’s, and which is an “exact”
copy of the other? Yamada’s photograph of Anna Karina—which is printed
and distributed in a book by him and thus is verified to exist, is an authentic
portrait of the actress (Fig. 35).112 and should be an inspiration for the scene in
which Natsuyuki develops a picture—is declared by Kanai to be a substitute
for an image, one that is “exactly like” the picture that exists only in Kanai’s text
(and is not even printed as such). Thus the values of authenticity and original-
ity are further challenged.
111 Kanai, “Tama-ya ni tsuite,” 188, my translation. In Aoyama and McCarthy, 176. In fact, what
is used is not a single print but contact sheets that show the portrait in gradations of black
and white. I thank Banu Kaygusuz for pointing this out for me.
112 Yamada had a print of one of the portraits of Anna Karina (which he took on May 25,
1965) autographed by her when she visited Japan in 1997 and published it in the
paperback edition of Tomo yo eiga yo: Waga nūveru.vāgu shi (Tokyo: Heibonsha raiburarī,
2002), i.
FIGure 34 The dust jacket of Kanai Mieko, Tama-ya (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1987).
Photograph by Yamada Kōichi. Design by Kanai Kumiko.
Reprinted with the permissions by Yamada Kōichi, Kanai Kumiko and
Kodansha Ltd.
Just as Natsuyuki assumes the role of surrogate mother to Tama, he is also

assigned the role of surrogate narrator for Kanai the female author. Gender
identity is not inherent in the anatomical body of any agent but is inciden-
tal, formulated by circumstantial factors such as relationships. The same is
true of his raison d’être. Natsuyuki’s realization that he is a developer/printer
of photographic films rather than an original, creative photographer is not a
declaration of defeat. Rather, his printing process cleanses him of any resid-
ual faith in originality, with which he (or we) might have disdained the act
of reproduction. His experience with this process suggests that reproduction
is a corporeal act that helps the human body to restore its connection with
the object of affect and its environs. Thus, Tama-ya should not be read as an
anti-Bildungsroman in which an individual fails to become an artist. Instead,
it is the story of a renunciation of the myth of originality, authenticity and
autonomy, and a discovery of the collapse of the boundaries between self
and other. Just as adoptive mothers of cats may offer them love and care that
birth mothers may not, printers of photographs may establish intimate rela-
tionships with them the way the photographer may not. The same applies to
206 CHAPTER 4
FIGure 35 The frontispiece of Yamada Kōichi, Tomo yo eiga yo: Waga nūveru vāgu
shi (Tokyo: Heibonsha Raiburarī, 2002).
Photograph by Yamada Kōichi.
Reprinted with the permissions by Yamada Kōichi and
Heibonsha Ltd., Publishers.
the book as well. Hence Kanai’s expressed wish: “I hope this novel will be cher-
ished by readers who have adopted it, just like Tama’s kittens.”113 She hopes for
the book to create intimacy with its readers, just as Roland Barthes’s books did
for her, as we shall see shortly. Tama-ya thus poses a defiant question: if some-
thing is not original but a reproduction, why, then, does it generate a strong
sensation in us, making us realize that we exist as bodies in reality?
The Reader/Viewer’s Body in Relation to the Book
In the essay entitled “Tekusuto to tekusuchuā” (Text and Texture, 1986 and
1988),114 Kanai compares the musings of a man who looks at an old photograph
of his lost mother in her own story, “Mado” (discussed earlier in another con-
text) with a similar passage in Barthes’s Camera Lucida. In both texts a portrait
of the narrator’s mother as a young girl takes him by surprise, stirring a sense of
‘not-having-seen-ness.’ In “Mado” an amateur photographer reminisces about
how his fascination with the art started:
My father told me that this girl [in the picture] was my mother before she
married him, and that the photographer must be her younger cousin,
then still a junior high school student. [My encounter with his photo-
graph] was the first time—in fact the only time, to be precise—that I had
seen my mother’s face, as it was the only existing portrait of her. That
experience itself made me feel a very odd, poignant and, if you will,
infantile solitude for the first time. But what made me even more uncer-
tain was the light that enwrapped my mother, who was then no longer—
the girl in the picture, who, soaked in that light, had never thought of me,
her future son to be. Where had the light gone?115
113 Kanai, “Tama-ya ni tsuite,” 189, my translation. In Aoyama and McCarthy, 177.
114 The original publication venue was the “geppō” (literally meaning “Monthly Report,”
the term denotes a promotional brochure conventionally inserted in each volume of a
series publication) in the third volume of Shin Iwanami kōza tetsugaku (New Philosophy
Compendium, published by Iwanami shoten), Kigō. ronri. metafā (Sign–Logic–Metaphor),
May 1986. Later, she published the same essay.
115 Kanai, “Mado,” 36–37, my translation. The same passage has been translated in McCarthy,
“Windows,” 16.
208 CHAPTER 4
Kanai’s narrator hints in another section of the story that this picture has
become a foundational image for him; he remembers it involuntarily when-
ever he feels he has encapsulated something as a bright and well-delineated
image within the viewfinder.116 A comparable passage in Camera Lucida reads:
With regard to many of these photographs, it was History which sepa-

rated me from them. Is History not simply that time when we were not
born? I could read my non-existence in the clothes my mother had worn
before I can remember her. There is a kind of stupefaction in seeing a
familiar being dressed differently.117
While both narrators speak of the sensation of ‘not-having-seen-ness’ pro-

voked by their respective mothers’ portraits, those who read both texts must be
struck with the impression of ‘having-seen-ness,’ no matter which order they
might read them in, Barthes first or Kanai first. The order of the two works’
publication dates—Kanai’s story having been published four years before
Barthes’s book—as well as the lack of translation of either text into any lan-
guage that the other author had access to at the time of writing—proves that
this is no case of adaptation (let alone plagiarism).118
Kanai identifies a curious bond between Barthes’s text and her own else-
where. The disturbed, and perhaps disturbing, chronology in the two similar
passages—the mother—son age gap being toppled by the passing of time
116 Kanai, “Mado,” 38. In McCarthy, 17.

117 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 64. Italics original.
118 This apparent coincidence led the French-literature scholar turned critic Yoshikawa
Yasuhisa to praise Kanai as a visionary predating Barthes (Shōsetsu ai: Sekai ichi fukōna
Nihon bungaku o sukuu tame ni [Tokyo: San’ichi shobō, 1995], 110). Perhaps another com-
ment on Kanai by Yoshikawa, that her critical sensibility “lets singularity be buried in
anonymity” (110), might deserve serious attention. To the extent that Kanai’s text is not a
“quotation” of Barthes, her text and his are not parodying each other, and yet their similar-
ity calls for “anonymous” and shared reserve, distinct from either author’s singular, unique
and (not the least important) copyrighted literary property, a concept that used to haunt
production and reception of modern literature. Kanai and the critic Kidono Tomoyuki
mock Yoshikawa’s praise as spaced-out. See Kanai and Kidono, “Eiga, Shōsetsu, Hihyō:
Hyōshō no kioku o megutte” (2002), in Kanai, Shōsetsu ron, 190–91. Yoshikawa’s unsolic-
ited defense of her work, in the context of his gesture as a savior of Japanese literature
from its marginalization in the world, perplexed Kanai, who appears untroubled by the
relative obscurity of the Japanese language and its distance from the perceived frontier of
theory where Barthes’s work is located.
between the shooting of the photograph and the son’s viewing of it—evi-
dences the conundrum inherent in photographic representation. The layer-
ing of disparate temporalities in photography offers an opportunity for us to
reconsider the relationship between the body mediated by the image and the
viewer of the image. In the two cases in question, the viewer (the son) assumes
a position of authority and advantage over the viewed (the mother) that is
bestowed upon him by the subject–object relationship embodied in the act
of viewing as well as the advantage of the passing of time, which has allowed
the son to outgrow the mother. In both works, that hierarchical relationship is
complicated by the parent–offspring relationship, which further destabilizes a
lineage between the original and its image.119
Unconcerned with genealogy, Kanai identifies two specific points at which
these otherwise similar cases diverge. First, while Barthes gazes at his mother’s
picture with affection and longing, the narrator-protagonist of Kanai’s story
“does not love his mother so dearly.”120 The photograph that Barthes speaks
so intently of is famously absent from his book, which is otherwise generously
adorned by photographs, for the reason that the image “exists only for me.”121
This suppression of visual representation of the loved one (or a gesture at that),
which has been problematized by scholars,122 confirms intimacy between the
two, especially as Barthes explains that in the senility of her last days she had
reverted to the girlhood captured in the photograph. In contrast, the absence
119 In my essay “The Photographs, Lost, Found and Fabricated” in Claude Paul and Eva
Werth, eds., Comparatisme et Intermédialité Comparatism and Intermediality, I discuss
Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s Diary of a Century (1970), the photographer whose autobio-
graphical image–text presents a similar father–son dynamic that nevertheless differs in
terms of the mother’s position (270–72).
120 Kanai “Tekusuto to tekusuchuā” (1988) in Kanai Mieko, Indian samā (Tokyo: Chūō
kōronsha, 1988), 170, in my translation. The equivalent passage can be found in Tomoko
Aoyama and Barbara Hartley, trans., Indian Summer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell East Asia Papers,
2012), 114.
122 See Liliane Weissberg, “Circulating Images: Notes on the Photographic Exchange,” and
Diana Knight, “Roland Barthes, or The Woman without a Shadow,” in Writing the Image
after Roland Barthes, Jean-Michel Rabaté, ed. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1997), 113 and 138–39; and especially Margaret Olin, “Touching Photographs: Roland
Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’ Identification,” aforementioned in n. 98. On how their arguments
may be qualified by the recent surfacing of the “Winter Garden Photograph,” see Neil
Badmington, “Punctum Saliens: Barthes, Mourning, Film, Photography,” Paragraph 35, no.
3 (2012): 318–19, n. 28.
210 CHAPTER 4
of the crucial picture of the mother in Kanai’s story, which is not accompanied
by any photograph, does not indicate such a private pact between mother and
son. It is significant not only that the reader is excluded from the image of the
mother, but also that the son, the viewer-narrator, fails to achieve any sense of
bond with his mother as a girl, as mediated in the photograph—a failure that
brings “Mado” closer to Tanizaki’s “Yume no ukihashi,” discussed in Chapter 1.123
The slippage in perception is even more acutely and strategically presented in
Kanai’s text, wherein the ruptured temporality leads us to considerations of
fundamental questions of space-time.
The second definitive distinction Kanai points to is that while the image of
Barthes’s mother serves as a source of light, light dissipates from the image
of the mother of Kanai’s protagonist. In Barthes’s text light radiates to the
viewer, who basks in it, while in Kanai’s text light eludes the viewer, who is
left with anxiety: “Where did the light [that surrounded my mother] disappear
to?”124 Given that the word “photograph” literally means inscription of light, as
we saw via Baudrillard and Faucon in Chapter 2, the trajectories of light and
their consequences are essential to the two authors’ stances vis-à-vis photog-
raphy. In other words, the engagement with photography by both authors does
not stay on the level of subject matter but is revealed as a philosophical inevi-
tability. While one can point out that in Barthes’s case the abundance of light
is only possible in the absence and verbal conjuring of the image, Kanai’s case
seems to suggest how photographs deny the viewer access to light captured
within the frame.
While the above-cited essay, Kanai’s “Tekusuto to tekusuchuā,” quotes from
and compares “Mado” and Camera Lucida, the essay itself is also quoted almost
in its entirety in a novel by Kanai, Indian Samā, that shares with Tama-ya
some of its characters (such as the photographer Natsuyuki, here appearing
as a neighbor of the narrator-protagonist Momoko). Within the novel the self-
quotation functions as a piece that the character Chieko (aunt to Momoko), a
novelist and an apparent self-caricature by Kanai, has written for the volume
in the philosophy compendium by established publisher Iwanami shoten, the
exact venue wherein Kanai indeed published the essay first. Kanai revised
the version within the novel slightly and yet distinctly, by eliminating the
citation of the short story collection Tango shū (1979; trans., The Word Book,
2009) that included “Mado,” which would have been a trace of the author’s
presence off the novelistic discourse. By this maneuver, Kanai cracks a narrow
123 On this see my “The Photographs, Lost, Found and Fabricated,” esp. 268–70.
124 Kanai, “Tekusuto to tekusuchuā,” 171, in my translation. In Aoyama and Hartley, 114. The
quotation is from “Mado,” 37, in my translation. In McCarthy, 16.
parallactic chasm between character and author, or the texts (imagined enti-
ties) and the publications (material entities), insinuating a parodic effect that
involves both proximity and declination.
A more discreet and perhaps manipulative quotation from “Tekusuto and
tekusuchuā” is made in another essay by Kanai, “Kairaku to kentai” (Pleasure
and Lassitude), the second of the two postscripts to another collection of short
stories by the author, Akarui heya no naka de (In the Room with Light, 1986),
to whose title we shall return later. It is uncommon to have two postscripts
by an author in the same edition of a book, without the lapse of time that
warrants another, new reflection by him or her on the text or its historical
significance. The first postscript, which precedes the text in question and is
entitled “Atogaki, aruiwa <unubore> ni tsuite” (Postscript, or on <Narcissism>)
references the collection of stories as well as other contemporaneous writ-
ings by Kanai, making suggestions as to how the volume should be read. Thus
the first postscript seems to meet the reader’s expectation of a writing of that
kind. “Kairaku to kentai,” on the other hand, makes no reference to Akarui
heya no naka de, the body of work that it is attached to. Instead it deals almost
exclusively with Barthes, most prominently (though not exclusively) his work
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes.
“Kairaku to kentai” and “Tekusuto to tekusuchuā” have much in common,
especially when they cite Barthes’s The Fashion System and when they talk
about intimacy, both tactile (“caress”) and emotional (“empathy” or “love”).
Thus the textual intimacy is created around the theme of intimacy.125
In “Tekusuto to tekusuchuā” Kanai confesses how she loves to leaf through
Barthes’s books, including one of his photographic books—Akarui heya:
Shashin ni tsuite no oboegaki (1985, reprint 1997), the first Japanese translation
of La Chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Camera Lucida in English).
Both Japanese and French editions are 157 pages long and about 19 × 13 × 2 cm,
making them just as “thin and small”126 as their French or English editions and
easy to hold while in bed, as Kanai confesses to doing occasionally. Barthes
125 Kanai elaborates on the notion of empathy (“kyōkan”): “Empathy—is a slight perspira-
tion” (Kanai, “Kairaku to kentai,” 216). This sentence constitutes an entire paragraph,
commanding attention. To understand this corporeal translation of the mental state, we
might turn to the epigraph of another Kanai story, “Pikunikku” (Picnic, 1979), which is a
quotation from the philosopher Watanabe Satoru: “Is sweat [a part of] the body or [of]
the environment?” (Kanai, “Pikunikku,” in Tangoshū, 211, in my translation. In McCarthy,
trans., “Picnic,” in The Word Book, 124). Perspiration forms the interface of self and other,
a result of an encounter with each other rather than a product of either. Similarly, “empa-
thy” is something that blurs the boundaries of subjectivities.
126 Kanai, “Tekusuto to tekusuchuā,” 169.
212 CHAPTER 4
is not only for reading but also for fondling; spending time with Barthes is as
much about fingers as about the eye/mind. It is a matter of fetishism.
Folded page corners (which Kanai admits to using as page markers) are
comparable in function to the notches that publishers cut out of reference
books for “thumb-indexing.” Indeed, Kanai’s texts are more indexical of than
similar to Barthes’s texts, connected to his by way of metonymy rather
than metaphor. Aside from physical intimacy with the Frenchman’s books,
Kanai’s engagement with Barthes remains tangential and incidental. In fact
her procedure resembles his in its seemingly, if deceptively, tangential and
incidental contacts with other texts and non-textual registers. In the follow-
ing instance, Kanai’s thought wanders from Barthes’s text and into her private
memory, which is, as Laura Marks has noted, more closely connected to the
non-optical senses,127 as is the case here:
I have not gazed at these pictures intently. For these pictures in the book
by Barthes make my memory effervesce toward the light in pictures from
my childhood and toward the photographer’s voice, saying, “Be still for
a minute, don’t blink,” and then the momentary tension of trying not
to blink.128
What Kanai is referring to is the sequence of pictures preceded by the follow-

ing: “To begin with, some images: they are the author’s treat to himself, for
finishing his book. His pleasure is a matter of fascination (and thereby quite
selfish). I have kept only the images which enthrall me, without my knowing
why [. . .].”129 Barthes’s book seduces Kanai to go on a tangent. Her thought
does not stay in focus but drifts out of the context, traversing space rather
than pursuing a line, weaving fabric rather than pulling a thread, and embrac-
ing ambience rather than forming a narrative. Thus, Kanai contemplates:
“So even though I open Barthes’s book all the time, throughout the year, I think
127 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses.
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 130.
128 Kanai, “Kairaku to kentai,” 218. While ostensibly citing Barthes, the childhood memory of
an interaction with the photographer may have been inspired in part by Ishii Momoko’s
Osana monogatari, in which a similar episode is retold. Kanai’s reading of Ishii’s child-
hood episode appears in Kanai, “Fotogurafu oboegaki,” 127 as we saw earlier (p. 152). The
original episode is found in Ishii Momoko, Osana monogatari (Tokyo: Fukuinkan shoten,
1981), 23–27.
129 Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 3.
I have hardly read it.”130 By leaving Barthes’s content behind, she comes closer
to Barthes’s mode of operation, which is to create the apparent deception of
leaving textual structure to chance, concealing meticulously and strategically
the placement of fragments.
This intimacy materializes even when meaning is lost in translation:
Barthes’s books ferment boredom, or lassitude, to use one of his favourite

words. The photograph captioned “Boredom: a panel discussion” and
the one captioned “Distress: lecturing” on the same page as well as the
portrait of Barthes as a boy sitting in a blank space on the opposite
page—all representing Barthes’s face out of focus, typical of amateur
photographs—arouse in me indescribable lethargy—not to be confused
with helplessness.131
The “distress” in English reflects the original French “détresse.”132 Both words
mean suffering from lack of means to overcome difficulties. The Japanese
translation that is quoted by Kanai is “yorubenasa,” literally meaning shore-
lessness, which denotes the condition of a boat without a shore to moor at
and connotes the uncertainty of not knowing where to turn to for help. While
the sentiment is not entirely different from what the original suggests, the
degree of the subject’s emotive involvement in the circumstances is somewhat
different, and as Kanai exploits the nuance of uncertainty, tentativeness and
being in the middle of nowhere, rather than the meaning of agony, Barthes’s
caption in the Japanese translation drives her text in quite a different direc-
tion. Thus the liberal translation even sharpens the angle at which Kanai goes
offshore. Ironically, however, since the French or English caption of the pho-
tograph is itself tangential to Barthes’s narrative, Kanai’s interpretation seems
to capture Barthes’s predominant sentiment of ambiguity. Thus, translation
ceases to be a medium between languages and becomes an active catalyst in
the erosion of boundaries of identity.
130 Kanai, “Kairaku to kentai,” 219.

131 Kanai, “Kairaku to kentai,” 217. I have used Richard Howard’s translation of the two cap-
tions in Barthes 1977a, 25. The list of illustrations in the volume identifies the place and
time of the photograph captioned “Distress: lecturing” as “Tokyo, 1966” (Barthes, Roland
Barthes by Roland Barthes, 186).
132 Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 25, and Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland
Barthes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975), 29.
214 CHAPTER 4
Photography and Fabric
The artist simultaneously separates and brings together, in both space

and time.
JEAN ARNAUD and MOLLY STEVENS133
Kanai and Barthes are both interested not only in photography, but also in fab-
ric. Their common engagement with photographs of window drapery reveals
an intriguing analog for the art of parody. Drapery fabric and photography both
interfere with and exploit the passage of light; drapery divides and connects
rooms, just as photography differentiates and brings together spaces within
and outside the frame. Photography may not exclusively represent what the
photographer meant to convey (Barthes’s “third meaning” looms within
the frame), but it also represents a scene only selectively, leaving much out-
side the frame. Thus, as we have seen in Chapter 1, Marguerite Duras believes
“photographs promote forgetting” as “the million other images that exist in the
mind” are expelled in favor of “only one image.”134 A contemporary scholar
of French philosophy, Kobayashi Yasuo, also remarks that photography is not
about one selected image but about the numerous rolls of film that were left
behind in favor of the ultimate one.135 It’s about negativity: what is beyond
the frame, what is not printed, what is in the “space-off”.136 These are what
matters and what makes photographs things of relevance in themselves rather
than representations of “what was there.” Similarly, sewing requires not only a
needle and thread to connect pieces of cloth but also scissors to cut the cloth
into pieces, some of which are then discarded. By photographing or sewing,
one affixes unlikely relevance to separate moments that will be reviewed in
sequence to constitute an arbitrary history. Thus, the choice of both drapery
and photography as subject matter is conceptually accountable, rather than a
matter of personal preference exercised by Kanai and Barthes.
Drapery fabric is a site par excellence in which to consider the merging of
the senses: tactile, visual and auditory. It merges senses that are experienced
by any given subject. Thus, T’ai Smith observes in her essay on Bauhaus photo-
graphic representation of fabric:
133 Jean Arnaud and Molly Stevens, “Touching to See,” October 114 (Fall 2005): 12.
134 Duras, Practicalities, 89.
135 Kobayashi Yasuo, “Shashin-teki keiken to wa nani ka 2: Sekai no busshitsu, sekai no jōtai”
(What Is Photographic Experience? 2: The Material of the World, the State of the World),
déjà-vu 8 (April 1992): 120–21.
136 Theresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, 26.
When hung against a window, spacing between the threads allows light
to shine through, emphasizing the light-reflective quality of the rayon. As
drapery, the material works with the optical effects of light, but these
effects do not always appeal to vision’s sense of recognition; rather they
function within the space to let light in or to protect the inhabitant from
being seen from outside. [. . .] Thus, even the effect of light through the
fabric is registered or experienced haptically. [. . .] [A]ll textiles occupying
the interior spaces [. . .] are grasped by the subject through a combination
of touch, movement, and vision.137
Smith suggests that tactility and vision are not separate from each other
as commonly perceived but merge in the experience of fabric. If so, would
textual and visual representation of such experience arouse haptic sensation
in the viewer? It is not as though the haptic experience of fabric would neces-
sarily replace the cognitive operation known as analysis, which is most closely
associated with the optic function. While the polarity involving subject and
object, or mind and body, is dissolved in the haptic, subjectivity itself, though
ambiguated, is not lost. For the viewer of photographs that visually represent
fabric to feel the fabric’s texture synesthetically, memory of comparable fabric
is necessary.
In “Tekusuto to tekusuchuā,” Kanai offers a detailed observation of the
texture of the curtain that covers the window in the frontispiece of Barthes’s
Camera Lucida.
The last book by Barthes, Camera Lucida, employs a color photograph

(a Polaroid picture by Daniel Boudinet)138 as a sort of epigraph, and this
photograph is indeed a picture of drapery fabric. The overall tone being
in blue, there is a fluffed cushion, apparently made of the same fabric as
the chaise or bed that it sits on, which is placed in the foreground of the
picture, and behind it a curtained window through which bright daylight
seeps in. The blue curtain, its fabric worn out and porous to the extent
that it is ripped in one place, shows the seams and folds in navy blue, and
137 T’ai Smith, “Limits of the Tactile and the Optical: Bauhaus Fabric in the Frame of
Photography,” Grey Room 25 (Fall 2006): 20–21.
138 Diana Knight suggests that Barthes saw this photograph by Boudinet while in the process
of writing La Chambre claire. She claims that the color scheme of the photograph, which
partly determines the nature of the light in the room, is reflected in Barthes’s descrip-
tion of the image of his mother. See Knight, “Roland Barthes, or The Woman without a
Shadow,” 138.
216 CHAPTER 4
the overlap slightly ajar in a thin, small triangle. The fabric of the curtain
could be either merino wool or cotton, woven coarsely with tightly spun
yarn. The room with light. This room is simultaneously shattered from
and soaked in the dazzlingly white sunshine that must be abundant out-
side. The bright light dyes the upper part of the window, like “the blaze
through the gap wherein the textures intersect” (Antonin Artaud) with
the fabric like an osmotic membrane letting the liquefied light permeate
[the space]. One can judge from the way the folds and seams are subtly
askew and puffed that this window is open and lets breezes into the
room. It is also possible to recognize the railing of the terrace outside
the window, which appears in the picture as a horizontal line or a long
stain-like portion in a darker hue that crosses the curtain horizontally.139
To further advance Kanai’s observation, the room featured in Boudinet’s pic-

ture is not filled with light; it is a rather somber room because of the dark
blue curtains that let in just a sliver of light.140 In contrast, the photograph by
Watanabe Kanendo (whom we discussed earlier) that constitutes the entire
dust jacket of Kanai’s Akarui heya no naka de presents a room that receives
light from outside (Fig. 36). There are blue curtains as well as lace curtains,
which are drawn aside to reveal what lies outside the big windows to the floor/
glass doors, namely, more windows of the building opposite, probably across a
courtyard. However, the overall impression is that despite the exposure to the
exterior, the room is not shimmering bright as it is cloudy outside. Boudinet’s
photograph, on the other hand, suggests an abundance of light that both pen-
etrates and is blocked by the curtains, as Kanai closely observes in the pas-
sage quoted above. There we feel anticipation of light, perhaps accompanied
by a hesitation to welcome it, whereas Watanabe incites anxiety, or unfulfilled
desire for more light that should have filled the room and appears never to
do so, as the best concerted efforts have already been made by drawing the
curtains aside, to a less than desired effect. The room in Watanabe’s picture
looks unfulfilled for another reason: it is sparsely furnished. There is a blue sofa
that is reminiscent of “the chaise or bed”141 in Boudinet’s photograph as well
as some kind of makeshift table and a framed photographic print on the wall,
hung slightly askew to suggest neglectful maintenance. One might speculate
139 Kanai, “Tekusuto to tekusuchuā,” 168–69.

140 The dust jacket of the first Japanese translation uses the same image by Boudinet and
can be viewed on the publisher’s homepage: www.msz.co.jp/book/detail/04905.html
(accessed May 31, 2015).
141 Kanai, “Tekusuto to tekusuchuā,” 168.
FIGure 36 The dust jacket of Kanai Mieko, Akarui heya no naka de (Tokyo: Fukutake shoten,
1986).
Photograph by Watanabe Kanendo. Design by Kanai Kumiko.
Reprinted with the permissions by Watanabe Kanendo and Kanai Kumiko.
that this is a room left vacant, with only items unneeded by or not belonging
to the previous resident left behind. The sense of barrenness forms a striking
contrast with Boudinet’s image, whose dominant ambience is hopefulness.
Thus the two photographs are invested with opposite temporal and spatial tra-
jectories in terms of light, which corresponds to the comparable passages from
Barthes’s and Kanai’s texts that we examined from Kanai’s point of view.
It is significant that the texts by Barthes that Kanai keeps quoting after
the publication of Akarui heya no naka de—not only Camera Lucida but also
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes—are photographic narratives. Photographic
images can never be one with the represented objects—they need to reveal
dissonance with their objects to claim any critical value. As Milan Kundera
points out, “A person may conceal himself behind his image, he can disappear
forever behind his image, he can be completely separated from his image: a
person can never be his image.”142 The declination—différance—is also the
only tie between an image and its original. To recall Tisseron, “Photography
142 Kundera, Immortality, trans. Peter Kussi (New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 1999), 316–17.
218 CHAPTER 4
evidences less ‘what was there’ than ‘what was lived’ by the photographer,” who
“is breathed into the world the moment he breathes it in.” Photography mate-
rializes “the reality of the continuity of existence and the world,” which comes
across through “terminal separation” and “reconnection” of the object and
image.143 As the photographer’s body is alive at the moment that he takes the
picture, the photographer becomes aware of non-visual effects, such as physi-
cal sensations, aromas and tastes, and a sense of the air, which return to him
later when he views the pictures.
This role of the photographer is comparable to that of the reader-turned-
writer that Kanai is. She “lives” Barthes’s text by leafing through and fondling
the book, exerting her fingers as well as her eye/mind, and while dwelling on
passages that captivate her, she departs from them at a tangent that compels
“terminal separation” from Barthes and yet “reconnects” her with him as well.
A point of contact with another is not only where one meets the other but also
where one separates oneself from the other. Textual parody is thus comparable
to photographic presentation, in the double-edged interface of two subjectivi-
ties that possess disparate temporalities.
Instead of complying with chronology, hierarchy and distinction between
acts or subjectivities of the photographer, object and viewer, photography
reconfigures the temporality and spatiality that surround the subject and
object of representation. Thus photography is inherently, and markedly, an
art of parody, showing us relationships that are not limited to the linear but
instead are expansive; not static but, rather, dynamic; and not unilateral
but reciprocal. The adjacency of textual spaces, recognized horizontally rather
than vertically/hierarchically, as is often seen in genealogical studies of “liter-
ary influence,” are not unlike the horizontal motion of the breezes through
adjacent rooms. Kanai’s collision with Barthes’s photographic texts was not
accidental, though it was not intentional either; it was meant to be—for good
reason and to great effect.
The Incongruity of Memory and Document: Karui memai
Kanai says she describes things not for the sake of mimetic representation but
to “accentuate the amorphous nature” of the object of description.144 The way
she presents material goods—or, to put it more precisely, the relations between
143 Tisseron, Le Mystère de la chambre claire, 1986, 60. English translation is mine. I consulted
Serge Tisseron, Akarui heya no nazo: Shashin to muishiki, 67.
144 Kanai and Kidono 156.
human beings and objects of their attention—does not confirm or expand our
knowledge of the things but complicates our understanding of space and time
in much the same way as in the semiology of space (Jean Baudrillard), the the-
ory of memory (Henri Bergson) or phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty).
A proliferation of materiality in her fiction does not define, let alone derogate,
her work as materialist but suggests that our intellectual faculty is inevitably
formed in its relation to the material and physical environment.
Here I will identify and foreground some of the moments in the novel
entitled Karui memai (Vague Vertigoes, 1997)145 when the materiality of pho-
tographs inspires philosophical reflection on temporality. The story evolves
around the household of Natsumi, a full-time mother and housewife of a fam-
ily of four, living in an apartment complex in a residential area in a suburb of
Tokyo. As is typical with Kanai’s other novels of manners and customs, this
novel is deceptively accessible—an impression generated by a vocabulary with
little hint of pedantry, ordinary people’s everyday life being the main focus of
the story. None of the episodes change the direction of the main story line (to
the extent that there is one), and each fades out as imperceptibly as it fades
in. Despite the appearance of a loose structure, however, Kanai herself calls
this piece a full-length novel (“chōhen shōsetsu”). She states in the postscript
that all the segments that had been previously published—two-page monthly
installments of the narrative in Katei gahō (Home Illustrated), a glossy maga-
zine devoted to bourgeois homemaking, and two reviews of photography exhi-
bitions—were intended to be put together for this novel at a later stage.146
Kanai articulates her desire to write of the “moments” in which such
housewives, who have never experienced any dramatic turn of events in their
lives, “abruptly feel their existence and their memory as unmanageable and
indefinable.”147 The author’s keen sensitivity to the irregularity, ambiguity
and precariousness of everyday life, which otherwise appears to be humdrum,
simple and stable, is revealed in the way that the past, ostensibly deposited in
oblivion, is found protruding into the present. An unexpected foregrounding
145 This translation of the title is in part a tribute to the film Vertigo, which Kanai references
elsewhere, and to Barthes, who also uses the term, as we shall see later.
146 See “Atogaki” (Postscript), Kanai, Karui memai (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1997), 208. The serial-
ized story shares the title, major characters and some of the passages with the novel, but
each installment focuses sharply on one topic and varies in content from its equivalent in
the novel. The magazine is not a literary journal, possibly another instance of the trans-
gression of the boundary between material and intellectual. For the two reviews by Kanai,
see n. 12.
147 Kanai, Karui memai, 207, also Kanai, “Karui memai to nichijō seikatsu,” Hon 22, no. 4
(April 1997): 4.
220 CHAPTER 4
of a thing that references a past incident brings the messiness of the “here and
now” to the front of one’s consciousness. Many textual moments in this novel
trigger a movement of thought that disturbs the characters’ sense of time.
The unplanned realization of the incongruity and incoherence of existence
that Kanai depicts can be easily translated into theoretical language. Merleau-
Ponty would call it “leakage,” and Barthes terms it “punctum” as opposed to
“studium,” while it is known as “fossil” in the terminology of Gilles Deleuze.
Variably defined, these terms share in common the concept of the sudden dis-
closure of a perceivable element that until that point has gone unnoticed or
less recognized within the whole present-ness, which consequently forms a
blow to the perceiving subject—so much so that he or she feels the urge to
reclaim his/her temporal location.148 When this shock materializes in Kanai’s
novel, the focalizing character (usually Natsumi) experiences a strange feeling
(“fushigina kimochi”) or an episode of nausea (“hakike”) or vertigo (“memai”),
as in the title. Reproduction of an inconsequential detail leads Natsumi to a
review and reassessment of her life in the past and present, complicating the
concept of the transparent, even-paced and geometrical model of time that we
are accustomed to in the structuralist paradigm. It is often at such moments
that the author employs a long and complex sentence, in which the flow of
the story-time (the temporal order in which the narrated events occur) is dis-
turbed by changes in its pace, density and distance from the discourse-time
(the temporal order in which the act of narration takes place). An effective tool
Kanai often puts to use is a liberal use of “free direct speech,” or unannounced
slippage from the third person, past-tense narration into dialogues between
characters without quotation marks or tag clauses (e.g., “she said that”) that
would ordinarily demarcate the characters’ speech or thoughts from the
narration.149 The premise of the narrative—the presence of story, dictated by
chronology and causality, and formed by the narrator, who exercises author-
ity over the narrative structure—is considerably qualified if not renounced
on such occasions. Seen this way, Karui memai is not a mediocre specimen
of the conventional narrative that tends to digress into meaningless details,
but a metacritical novel that rewrites narratology; rather than telling a coher-
ent story consistently and clearly, the novel demonstrates a complexity of
148 I have argued the same regarding space in “Materializing Narratology: Kanai Mieko’s
Corporeal Narrative,” Michael Marra, ed., Hermaneutical Strategies: Methods of
Interpretation in the Study of Japanese Literature, PAJLS 5 (2004): 212–26, spatiality and
temporality are not distinct templates but irrevocably help form (or erode) each other.
149 Yoshikawa Yasuhisa notes Kanai’s use of free direct speech as “interesting,” though
without elaborating the impression. See Kanai, Takahashi and Yoshikawa 359.
narration that materializes at moments of encountering matters that were not

expected to matter.
Passages that concern photography most eloquently illustrate the tempo-
rality of this novel, as I have described above. The leitmotif of photography
manifests itself in two instances of old family photos that have unexpect-
edly resurfaced, and in references to exhibitions by Kuwabara Kineo and
Araki Nobuyoshi, photographers of contemporary Japan who are also critics
of photography encountered earlier in this chapter. The two cases are drawn
together by reflections on the effect of the photographed on the viewers of the
photographs.
In the case of unexpected discoveries of family photos, characters are
similarly taken by surprise that they do not remember having ever seen them
before. While in Kishi no machi an unspecified landscape appears familiar and
provokes the feeling of ‘having-seen-ness,’ here in Karui memai moments from
characters’ own personal histories evoke the sense of ‘not-having-seen-ness.’
Their surprise stems from their faith in photographs as scientific and iner-
rant testaments of what ‘has been,’ a belief that implies that it must be the
viewers’ fault if they cannot remember the scene represented. This lack of
memory is twofold. First, given their size and portability, photographs are
prone to slipping away, falling out of sight and being forgotten, and then show-
ing up unpredictably to threaten one’s status quo in the present. In “The Cult of
Unity and Cultivated Differences,” Pierre Bourdieu characterizes the function
of “the family album,” which arranges “images of the past” “in chronological
order, the logical order of social memory” while selecting particular moments
worthy of “preserv[ation]” for the purpose of the “unification” of the family
and “confirm[ation]” of the continuity between “past” and “present.” Then he
adds a remark on those pictures that do not make the entry into the album:
“[A]ll the unique experiences that give the individual memory the particular-
ity of a secret are banished from it, and the common past, or, perhaps, the
highest common denominator of the past, has all the clarity of a faithfully vis-
ited gravestone.”150 While photos may be collected to form the family album
that Bourdieu argues is an essential foundation of the social memory of private
life, they can also remain loose prints or “leaves” as in the Japanese counter
of photographs—“ichi-yō no shashin” or “a leaf of photograph”—which may
scatter without being arranged in chronological order or framed for reminders
of special moments or as representative portraits. By the time they are found,
it may become difficult for the viewers to restore the exact location of the pho-
tographs in a family chronicle. Each of those photos begs an annotation for its
context. In Japan, where the conspicuous display of framed family photos in
150 Bourdieu, Photography, 31. See Hirsch on this subject, too.

222 CHAPTER 4
the home and the carrying of tiny portraits close to one’s heart are not firmly
established practices (we may recall instances of displaying family photos only
in the Buddhist alcove and bedrooms, and still they disturb viewers’ peace of
mind in Tanizaki’s fiction), photos may even more easily fall in and out of pos-
session. In contrast to photographs arranged in chronological order or sorted
in thematic groups and pasted into family albums, or individually framed and
protected under glass, isolated pictures are particularly prone to being dissoci-
ated from family history and deprived of narrative.
In the first instance of the two chance encounters with forgotten photo-
graphs in Karui memai, the discovery comes about while Natsumi and her
parents sort out the deceased grandmother’s belongings. Different items draw
their attention and trigger reflections on the past in distinct ways. Whereas
Natsumi’s mother becomes nostalgic over the picture her brother painted as a
boy, Natsumi’s father is engrossed in reading the old newspaper in which the
painting was wrapped (a hint of the materiality of printed texts, which can
be used for purposes other than documenting facts and telling stories) and is
surprised to find many historical facts that he did not know or cannot remem-
ber, repeatedly saying to himself, “Can that be?” These contrastive responses
to the historical past anticipate the ambiguity with which photography
projects the image of the past into the present. Encountering a trace of a
time that has passed may trigger nostalgia, but when the moment or event in
question has been forgotten or was never known, the effect may be one of sur-
prise. This sense of disconnect is predominant in Natsumi and her mother’s
reaction to a newly found photograph:
Natsumi was less taken by the Fauvist watercolor that Uncle-in-Yukigaya

had drawn than by the quarter-plate photograph, aged and discolored,
found stored with the painting. Obviously taken by an amateur, the pho-
tograph was distinctly different from the formal family portraits in her
parents’ albums, with each member properly stationed, which were evi-
dently the work of a professional photographer regardless of whether
they were taken in a studio or in their own home. Her mother, in tears,
said that she didn’t remember who had taken the photo—that she hadn’t
even known such a picture had existed. The quarter-plate landscape-
format photograph showed the wooden terrace off the ground floor of
the now-gone family house in Ueno, with a boy about ten years old, his
head shaven, wearing light-colored short trousers and a short-sleeved
shirt, leaning against the glass pane on his side, with only his face straight
toward the camera; the little bob-cut girl with a frilled apron, squatting
with both hands on her lap and looking down at the ground—ants, that’s
what I was looking at . . . there was a huge ants’ nest there, and I had
placed some sugar there, though Mother gave me a hard time about it;
their father, only half-visible behind the sliding reed doors between the
terrace and parlor, in the midst of reading the newspaper on the tatami
mat, with his legs crossed on it, head lowered, his body slightly leaning
forward; and the children’s mother with a white blouse and semi-flared
gray skirt on, her face slightly downcast as though she were about to
make some movement, on the other side of the terrace from where the
boy was. The only person who looked at the camera was Uncle-in-Yukigaya,
still an elementary school pupil, and everyone else—the little girl
engrossed in ants, Grandpa, whose face Natsumi didn’t remember well,
or Grandma, who may have been younger than Natsumi now was—was
not paying attention to the camera, each facing a different direction,
minding their own business in the shady house or in the garden under
the strong afternoon sun, on an ordinary day during a summer vacation.
As Natsumi thought of the fact that all but her mother, who may have been
younger in the photo than her younger son, were deceased and no longer
with her, she felt very strange. “Who took this picture? Uncle-in-Yukigaya’s
looking at the person”—as Natsumi addressed the question, her mother
said in a vacant tone of voice, “I have no idea.”151
The above quotation forms only one sentence in the original, which I have
broken up into many for the sake of readability in English. Within the origi-
nal sentence, tense, personal pronouns (and thus, perspectives from which
individuals are identified) and modes of speech (direct or indirect) change
frequently and without notice, complicating the flow of time, in terms of its
pace, direction and density. Thus, both Natsumi’s mother and her own mother
(Natsumi’s grandmother) are referred to as “mother” (“hahaoya”), which sug-
gests that though the viewpoint consistently rests upon Natsumi, she observes
both as a distanced spectator of the photograph (in which case the narrator,
speaking from Natsumi’s viewpoint, refers to Natsumi’s grandmother as “the
mother” as she is the only maternal figure in the picture of a family) and as a
family member who, standing by her mother, tries to restore the family history
(in which case the narrator refers to Natsumi’s mother as “mother,” as Natsumi
would in her present life outside the photograph). Accordingly, Natsumi’s
mother is referred to as “a little girl” in the former case as she appears as
such in the picture, while Natsumi’s grandmother is referred to as “Grandma”
(“obāchan”) in the latter case, where a given person’s identity is determined by
151 Kanai, Karui memai, 63–65. Emphasis added.

224 CHAPTER 4
his/her interpersonal relationship with the viewer of the photograph, which

lies beyond the frame of the picture. The passage quoted above thus presents
the narrative as not linear but amorphous, by constantly shifting the location
of the observer in time and space. The discursive complexity corresponds to a
destabilizing effect of the sudden appearance of the photograph, which makes
Natsumi feel “very strange.”
To recall Marguerite Duras’s statement once again, photography helps us to
forget rather than to remember, an observation that stems from the fact that a
photographed image can obliterate images recorded only in our memory.152 In
this case with Natsumi, however, the forgetting has taken place not through
repeated viewing of a photograph but during the disappearance of a photo-
graph of a moment has since vanished from the family’s memory archive. The
photograph, upon its resurfacing, reminds the viewers of just how much they
have lost—in this case not just what was beyond the viewfinder of the cam-
era but the taking of the photograph itself. The viewers are disconnected not
just from the unrepresented images of things past but from the printed image
before them. The photograph has not violated the viewers’ memory but reveals
how much the viewers have let their memories be violated since the photo-
taking. The incongruity between memory and photographic documentation
that Kanai points to stems from the elusiveness of the photograph in question
as a material being (or, potentially, photographs in general, as things).
In a similarly lengthy sentence, of which the passage below is only a part,
another family photo is first mentioned and then presented. As Natsumi stays
overnight with her father during her mother’s hospitalization, he remembers
something that is only loosely related to what they have been talking about
(“sō ieba” or “speaking of which”), again revealing the incidentality or involun-
tariness of remembrance:153
152 Practicalities, 89. Cited and discussed in Hirsch, Family Frames, 199–204.
153 References to forgetting recur in Kanai’s novel, reminding us that often we begin to think
about or talk about something not entirely intentionally but incidentally. As memories
arrive in consciousness involuntarily in Proust, they depart from it involuntarily in Kanai.
When Natsumi’s friend produces from her purse a copy of two articles on photography
(to be discussed shortly) at the classmates’ reunion, she says “wasurenai uchi ni” (“lest I
forget”) (Kanai, Karui memai, 145). Then we are told that after the party, Natsumi “had for-
gotten about [the articles] and had not read them until much later” (Kanai, Karui memai,
148). While the fear of forgetting dictates the order of acts in the former case, the occur-
rence of forgetting affects the order of acts in the latter. In both cases, individuals’ acts are
susceptible to the effect of forgetting, either imagined or materialized—just as memory
interferes with the order of acts, which complicates our notion of temporality.
“I almost forgot. We found a photograph of you amongst Grandma’s

belongings in Yukigaya. Your mother was saying we should let you have
it.” So saying, Natsumi’s father produced from a drawer of the cupboard in
the living room a photograph enclosed in a document envelope. “What?
I haven’t heard anything about it,” said Natsumi and took a look at the
quarter-plate black-and-white photo. She had no recollection whatsoever
of it, but it didn’t take her long to figure out that it must have been taken
when she was in her second year of kindergarten; she was shown wearing
the sleeveless white dress with red polka-dots, one sewn for her that year.
The year after, as she was admitted to elementary school, she had grown
in height and size so quickly that she couldn’t wear that dress Grandma
had made for her a year earlier; even with the hem down, the waistband
was over two inches higher than where it was supposed to be, which
didn’t look sharp, not to mention the sleeves had become too tight to
wear. Natsumi remembered her mother saying in astonishment that she
had grown like summer grass, just as they say.
The picture presented Natsumi and her younger brother, still very
much a baby, asleep on the straw mat under the jujube tree in the garden
of the family’s residence in Yukigaya, with Uncle-in-Yukigaya, seated with
his straw hat on and his legs crossed in a wicker chair nearby, gently smil-
ing toward the camera. Peacefully sleeping with her brother, a stuffed
bear (Uncle had kept it since his childhood) and Mimi the white cat with
eyes of different colors, Natsumi had obviously forgotten all about the
scene. “How could your grandma forget to give us such a rare photo-
graph?” wondered her father [. . .] Natsumi heard him say that it had been
twenty years since her death, which left her with a very strange feeling.154
In this sequence time is again felt to be heterogeneous. The sentence beginning

with “Peacefully” first describes the infant Natsumi in slumber within the pho-
tograph and then, with a continuative/gerund particle of “te” (as in “nemutte i
te”), switches to Natsumi’s present state of mind in which she does not remem-
ber anything, as if there were no temporal gap between the two clauses. The
visit to and return from the image of the past yields only fragmentary recol-
lections that Natsumi must identify on her own terms. That, combined with
the realization that the photograph has resurfaced out of her grandmother’s
belongings twenty years after her death, makes Natsumi lose her bearings in
time, and again she experiences “a very strange feeling.”
154 Kanai, Karui memai, 190–92. Emphasis added.

226 CHAPTER 4
These forgotten photographs do not evoke nostalgic, sweet sentiment in

the characters toward a fondly remembered past to which they have always
belonged; rather, the characters experience difficulties in establishing stable
relationships between themselves and the people represented in the photo-
graphs, even though they are recognized as family members photographed
in their earlier days (or while they were still alive). Natsumi’s mother and
Natsumi in these two instances have trouble determining the exact circum-
stances under which the photos were taken. Even though a careful collation of
known facts about clothes and other items represented in the pictures enables
them to locate the approximate times when the photos were taken, they still
remain unable to identify the photographers of the two pictures in ques-
tion. The lack of knowledge surrounding the portraits—their existence, the
“stories” around them—does not help Kanai’s characters restore a part of
the family history as something dear and intimate to them, but instead
makes them realize the foreignness of their “own” past, a past that they in fact
do not own. Autonomous of the family album that Bourdieu characterizes
as designed for social memory, loose photographs destabilize rather than
confirm and commemorate family history.
The whole process in which family photos are discovered, viewed and
reflected upon reveals distinct resemblance to the trajectory of Barthes’s medi-
tations on the “Winter Garden Photograph,” one that represents his mother in
a way that he has never known her, as presented in his Camera Lucida. As is
well known, Barthes came across the portrait by chance as he went through
things in his mother’s possession after her passing.155 As we saw earlier, photo-
graphs of family members and others whom one believes to have known well
can threaten one with the realization of how porous and intangible a person’s
own history could be. In fact this uncertainty may be extended to the viewer’s
own portraits. Barthes writes of the effect on him of an unfamiliar photograph
of himself or someone close to him as follows:
The Photograph does not call up the past (nothing Proustian in a photo-
graph). The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been
abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed
existed. Now, this is a strictly scandalous effect. Always the Photograph
astonishes me, with an astonishment which endures and renews itself,
inexhaustibly.156
155 See my aforementioned “The Photographs, Lost, Found and Fabricated,” 267.
156 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 82. Italics appear in the original.
The above general statement echoes the surprise Natsumi and her mother
experience as they see themselves in photographs that they do not remem-
ber being taken. The correspondence between Kanai and Barthes, which is not
unexpected given her intimacy with his books discussed earlier, intensifies as
Barthes recounts an encounter with a photograph of himself that corroborates
well with Natsumi’s sentiment that seen above:
One day I received from a photographer a picture of myself which I could

not remember being taken, for all my efforts; I inspected the tie, the
sweater, to discover in what circumstances I had worn them; to no avail.
And yet, because it was a photograph I could not deny that I had been
there (even if I did not know where). This distortion between certainty
and oblivion gave me a kind of vertigo, something of a “detective”
anguish . . .157
This “vertigo” is comparable to Natsumi’s (in the previous quotation) or by

extension that of Kanai herself (as in the title of her novel). Like Natsumi,
Barthes feels disoriented in space-time between the indisputable certitude of
photography as a scientific medium on the one hand, and on the other his lack
of a corresponding personal memory. As both the subject in the picture and
the viewer of it, Barthes seems to be troubled by the implication that since the
photograph must be authentic, his memory and perhaps the man himself may
in some way not be. The photographs evoke not nostalgia that would authen-
ticate the heuristic continuity and coherence of one’s life story (narrative, in
other words, backed up with solid chronology and causality surrounding the
person whose identity cannot be questioned), but the overwhelming present-
ness of the past. There is the “here and now” of the people who we know are
deceased in the present, for example, who nonetheless may be very much pres-
ent in an image of the past in a way that is new to us. Since the photographed
people are in the present, regardless of the frame of the photograph and of
the photographer’s authorial/authoritative intent, they succeed in resisting the
master narrative that attempts to encapsulate them in nostalgia.
It is noteworthy that only one person in each of the two photographs—
Natsumi’s uncle in his childhood who, we are told elsewhere in the novel,
was mentally challenged and died prematurely—gazes straight back at the
camera. The others are seen minding their own business without paying any
attention to the person behind the camera; they are disconnected from the
photographer and neither collaborate nor contend with him/her. We might
157 Ibid., 85. Italics in original.

228 CHAPTER 4
recall here Gilles Deleuze’s words: “It is in the present that we make a memory,
in order to make use of it in the future when the present will be past.”158 If it
was the photographer’s intent to “make a memory, to make use of it in the
future when the present will be past,” then Natsumi’s uncle is the only person
who acknowledged the idea, whether he consented to it or not; the others,
engrossed in what matters to them in the (then) present, are indifferent to the
archiving of the scene for the future. The uncle then passed away long before
the time when Natsumi looks at these photos. As he looks straight into the
camera, his gaze gives the impression of looking at the viewer—a deception
that haunts Barthes at the beginning of Camera Lucida. Natsumi’s uncle may
have remembered who had taken the photos and on what occasions, like a
Barthesian “detective” in the above quotation, and might have ascertained the
time, space and agency of the photographs. Without him, they remain opaque
and continue to cause a strange feeling (“punctum”) within Natsumi as she is
mesmerized by the slipperiness of her location in time—as she sees familiar
people framed by an unidentifiable photographer, people senior to herself
as younger than she now is, and people who are deceased as still alive in the
photos. She is no longer securely anchored in a unidirectional, even-paced,
chronological time but released into an amorphous temporality, deprived of
the bearings with which to orient herself to time. Here, once again, Barthes
becomes proximate to Kanai, in reference to the projected future death antici-
pated in a photograph, which was taken in the past and is being looked at in
the present—a theme of death and complex temporality in photography that
he elaborates through Camera Lucida.
In addition to these episodes of unfamiliar old photographs of familiar
people, discovered out of context, two reviews by Kanai of photographic
exhibitions—“Kussetsu to rinri” (Inflection and Ethics) and “Hikari no ima”
(The Light of the Present), which we examined earlier in another context—
are embedded in the text of Karui memai. They arrive in the narrative space
of the novel as found and copied for Natsumi to read by one of her old friends
who has remembered she used to like the author Kanai Mieko. It is through
Natsumi’s reading that the two pieces of writing are introduced. While the con-
text leading up to her encounter with the embedded texts is well explained,
her response to them is mute in the narrative. As we shall see, however, she
negotiates with family photographs much the same way that Kanai does with
Kuwabara’s pictures, thus demonstrating the relevance of the embedded nar-
ratives (reviews) for the rest of the novel.
158 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V.
Boundas (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1990), 52.
In this context it would be productive to recall that Kanai deems Kuwabara’s

photography “ethical” because it does not project “the photographer’s autho-
rial consciousness” and remains a “corporeal” collaboration between “the eye
and the finger.”159 In other words, his photos (as well as some of the family por-
traits mentioned above) do not purport to tell a coherent story dictated by a
photographer with an agenda. Kuwabara “does not photograph the narrative,”
as Kanai’s character declares, and instead “gently exfoliates the surface of the
present moment of light.”160 The verb “exfoliate” (“hagi-toru”) is a familiar one
for us, echoing a passage in “Mado” in which the photographer recalls how he
as a boy with his first camera in hand felt he would “exfoliat[e] a flake of light
from the world of matter and time,”161 and another in the postscript to Kishi
no machi, “desire only the surface and exfoliate the [object’s] thin skin with
the camera.”162 The recurrence of this expression testifies to the importance
of the corporeal (finger-oriented) nature of photo-taking, as well as the multi-
layered and thus three-dimensional photographic capture of space-time. As
for Kanai’s persistence on fingers and surfaces in photographic operation, the
following observation made by Jean-Luc Nancy offers us a means to situate it
conceptually:
A photograph is a rubbing or rubbing away of a body. [. . .] It is the

body, its thin surface, chemistry of the instant, the force of gravity of
the click [. . .]. The contact and the tact of the photographic click detaches
a new body each time, an instantaneous body, unstable and fixed in
its instability [. . .]. We others, we difficult bodies, delicate bodies and
exposed skins obscured by their own clarity, bodies gently pressed
and released by another body, by its eye, its finger, its uncertain thought
of being and appearing, which suddenly comes to take its place in us
(others), as in the cavernous recesses in which it will carry on its
rumination.163
Kuwabara’s view of photography as a coordination of eye, finger and feet, and

thus not only visual but also tactile and peripatetic, in part articulated by the
159 Kanai, Karui memai, 167, in the embedded essay “Hikari no ima.” See n. 12 above.
160 Ibid., 167. Same as above.
161 Kanai, “Mado,” 39. In McCarthy, 18. See n. 25.
162 Kanai, “Atogaki,” in Kishi no machi (1980), 148.
163 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Nous Autres” in his The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (Bronx, NY:
Fordham University Press, 2005) originally Au fond des images (Paris: Éditions Galilée,
2003), 107.
230 CHAPTER 4
photographer himself and in part elaborated by Kanai, seems to reveal affin-

ity with Nancy’s. The French philosopher defines photography as “rubbing”
of the body, as a trace of the outer layer of the surface of the model captured
by the camera that is touched by the fingertips of the photographer, while the
Japanese photographer stresses the importance of the surface and touch in
photography in the passage above.
Kuwabara does not take photos to verify a master narrative.164 Thus, his
photography does not “flatten” the photographed, as Araki’s does, Kanai argues.
As we have seen earlier, Kanai characterizes Kuwabara as “a cameraman,”
while Araki in her view is “a journalist” who catalogues and exhibits images of
historical society—images of death’s platitudes.165 To explicate the same pas-
sage, now lifted out of the original context of an exhibition review for a pho-
tographic journal and placed in a novel, in terms of temporality rather than
relation between the viewer and the viewed, Kuwabara’s photography mani-
fests the same philosophy as Kanai’s. Through a physical maneuver of the eye
and finger, as his photography clearly reveals he has a body of his own in the
space he shares with his objects, as we confirmed earlier, Kuwabara material-
izes a dialogue between “the viewer’s time that is alive” (“miru mono no ikita
jikan”) and the photographed people “who live in the moment and place that
are nothing but here/now” (“koko de shika nai shunkan to kūkan ni ikiteiru
mono”)—from which they declare they shall not be “flattened.”166 The irre-
placeability (rather than homogeneity, commonality or banality) of space-
time lived by people photographed by Kuwabara, which is experienced by the
viewers in the space-time they live in, elevates photography from its common
relegation to the status of a vernacular visual register that “flatten[s]” and
places images in putatively transparent chronological order. Thus, the effects
of Kuwabara’s photography are not ‘nostalgia,’ a sense of belonging to the
historical past, imagined to be shared with anyone—any anonymous being,
that is—unless one limits one’s attention to the references to the past that
one remembers personally. These photographs evoke within the spectators
“a strange silence and astonishment”167—feelings not dissimilar to those
164 Kuwabara Kineo’s expressed preference for the Benjaminian “flâneur” who has “not
formed a self-consciousness as a photographer,” and for Garry Winogrand’s words,
“Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame,” suggests the lack of a
preordained scheme in his photographs. See Kuwabara, “Hashigaki” (Preface), in a collec-
tion of his works cited in Kanai’s novel.
165 Kanai, Karui memai, 158.
166 Ibid., 159.
167 Ibid., 165.
Natsumi experiences in Karui memai. Kanai goes on to say, “[T]he rustle of

strangers, who must have lived personal histories from which they are disori-
ented, whose lives are not unimaginable, stirs within the spectator a sensation
that resembles vertigo.”168 Once again the key word “vertigo” (“memai”) appears
to signal the correlative of the experience of Natsumi and that of viewers of
Kuwabara’s photographs. We can sense an ambiguous relationship between
photography and narrative here: the former disrupts the narrative of the
photographed people, and yet, in Kuwabara’s case, hints at its (albeit absent)
existence, without imposing another, preordained, authoritarian narrative on
it. The narrativity of the photographed moment thus warps the template with
which to measure the duration of time. Meanwhile the present-ness of the past
that confronts the spectator accustomed to living his/her life in the present
disturbs the distinction between the past and now, as well as that between
representation (the image) and reality (experience). The whole complication
of temporality triggers an episode of “vertigo.”
“Vertigo” revisits Natsumi whenever something anomalous about time
materializes in the form of an ordinary thing in her everyday life. The novel
ends with one such occurrence, and in the present tense. Without any conclud-
ing incident, the ending alerts the reader to the fact that an irregularity of time
will present itself at any moment in the days to come, again causing Natsumi
this “vertigo”—not coincidentally symptomatic of a state of mind and body
that is opposite to clarity, an essential asset for conventional story-telling. One
may complacently tell stories when the past is safely anchored in the horizon-
tal and even-paced chain of events that we might call history. Natsumi’s physi-
cal response to the realization of the potentially hazardous nature of memory
undoes the boundaries between the body and its environment, the past and
the present, and the cognitive and the physical. The susceptibility of the dia-
lectics to a model of disruption, distortion and displacement is thus effectively
showcased in Kanai Mieko’s material narrative.
Photographic Publicity and Privacy: Uwasa no musume
Uwasa no musume (The Girl in the Rumor, 2002), whose title has been bor-
rowed from the 1935 film (also known as The Girl on Everyone’s Lips) by Naruse
Mikio, one of Kanai’s favorite directors, pays tribute to both cinema and chil-
dren’s literature (in the latter genre, particularly Frances Hodgson Burnett’s
The Secret Garden [1911]), in terms of their penetration into the memories
168 Ibid., 165. Emphasis added.

232 CHAPTER 4
and everyday lives of spectators and readers. The novel’s primary observer is
not the eponymous character but a little girl who is temporarily entrusted
with the household of a beauty salon owner when her mother visits the girl’s
ailing father, who lives out of town—a plot familiar to readers of Kishi no machi
among other works of Kanai. Soon this girl herself becomes bedridden with
a high fever, and her experience of dreams, musings, memories and words
spoken around her in the cacophonous environment constitutes the poly-
phonic and disjunctive narrative. The predominant aspect of it is the child’s
view of the intricacies of the adult world, and especially of adulterous relation-
ships that the girl may have witnessed, imagined, seen in movies or read about.
Photographs may serve as “fossils” (Deleuze)—as we saw earlier in Karui
memai—of incidents that could otherwise be obliterated, misinterpreted or
extended imaginatively. However, photographs may also engender other lines
of thought that weave their own stories, which may not reflect actual events.
Indeed, photographs, with their tangential references to familial histories, can
mislead despite their witnessing and registering of what “has been” there, in
Barthesian terms. Rather than establishing one specific story line as accurate
over others, as one might expect from a scientific technology oft-employed
for documentary purposes, a photograph may embody an intersection of a
number of possible narrative paths, down which the viewer can head in any
direction.
One of the story lines in the novel follows one of the three characters who
fit the bill of the “girl in the rumor,” the now-deceased Kinuko, who had an
enduring relationship with a man she could not marry. In the multivalent
narrative, denizens of the beauty parlor, including not only the family of the
owner/manager but also employees and occasional visitors, discuss her life six
years after her passing:
He was the youngest child, so had he insisted on marrying Kinuko no

matter what, he could have had his way. [. . .] He didn’t have any job
because of his tuberculosis and indulged in photography as a hobby, rely-
ing on his parents to buy expensive German cameras for him, many of
them. So when he was told he would be disowned, he burst into tears,
saying, I’m sorry, I will part with her, I will never see her again, please
forgive me—I was just seduced, I don’t know what I was thinking.169
169 Kanai Mieko, Uwasa no musume (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2002), 278–79.

The human relationships presented here appear to be a chiasmic adaptation

from Sasameyuki by Tanizaki, wherein a younger son of a well-to-do family,
Okuhata, cannot marry his childhood sweetheart Taeko because of the family’s
opposition; eventually she forges a relationship with a photographer (Itakura)
who can support himself thanks to his Leica camera and the professional pho-
tographic skills that he has acquired with the financial support of Okuhata’s
family. As we saw in Chapter 1, Okuhata also owns an expensive camera, pos-
sibly a Leica, though only as a fashion article. In the midst of the description
of general familial conditions, “German cameras” are singled out as prized pos-
sessions that characterize the owner’s social status as well as his reliance on his
family’s fortune.
While we are not told whether or not a portrait exists of Kinuko by her
amateur-photographer lover, a picture of someone else is described several
times throughout the novel in proximity to narrative references to her. The sick
girl confuses the identity of Kinuko, whom the family visited once as she was
put in a sanatorium for tuberculosis, and that of a “typist” who was at a com-
pany in Taiwan that the sick girl’s father worked for, before her family moved
to Beijing. Or so the girl is told by her mother, who, she vaguely suspects, might
be covering up an incident of her father’s infidelity by declaring that the girl is
confusing the “typist” with Kinuko. Her mother recalls the “typist” as follows:
We left everything in Beijing when we came back to Japan, so we have no

picture of her any longer. Still I remember a photo of her with her col-
leagues that she had gone to the trouble of sending to Beijing. She also
sent us another one, a portrait that an amateur photographer among her
peers took rather successfully and enlarged into cabinet-size. She wore a
whitish silk Chinese dress, in white high heels, holding a large Chinese fan in
a [theatrical] pose. Without makeup she might not be the equal of [ famed
actress] Li Xianglan, but then the comparison itself is a testament to her
beauty—so said my mother, in a slightly tense tone.170
Kinuko’s story is soon dissolved into that of another girl in the neighborhood
of the beauty salon, Masumi, who chose to end her life after a complicated
relationship with a young man in the community. Her portrait displayed at
her funeral enhances the narrative without contributing to the plot, reinforc-
ing the thematic association. The eldest daughter of the beauty salon owner
reflects on the picture after attending the first night of mourning for Masumi.
170 Ibid., 264. Emphasis added. “Cabinet-size” has the dimensions 120 mm × 165 mm.
234 CHAPTER 4
It is hard not to notice similarities of clothing, accessories and pose in this

photograph and the one previously discussed:
Masumi’s portrait is beautiful, says the eldest daughter. I don’t know who
took it, but it’s not one of those artificial, rigid studio pictures. It’s an
enlargement of a snapshot. She’s wearing a white, Chinese-collared sleeve-
less blouse and holding a little whitish straw hat as if using it for a fan, her
hair a little disheveled, perhaps by the wind. Her hair seems vaguely
backlit, so the photograph must have been taken against the light. But
then, the face is properly lighted, so it may have been the work of a pro-
fessional photographer after all. Either way, she is smiling naturally and
happily, so I welled up as I looked at the photograph. Normally we
wouldn’t choose a smiling photo for a funeral, but Yumi insisted on this
picture and had it enlarged at Saeki’s shop.171
Studio photos, with their professional handling of light and their artificial poses
and gestures, staged according to the grammar of portrait photography, may
look similar from one person to the next. Thus, it is understandable that the
sick girl recalls the eldest daughter’s description of Masumi’s funeral portrait
(which the sick girl has not seen herself) as she remembers the photograph of
the “typist,” to which her thoughts return immediately after the description
of Masumi’s. Without any transition or even a line break, a slightly more
detailed description of the portrait of the “typist” follows, as the girl remem-
bers it. Entirely unrelated, the two photographs, juxtaposed in narrative space,
manifest recognizable similarities in visual rhetorical terms, which must
underlie the association:
The cabinet-size photograph emerged between pages of the Sino-

Japanese dictionary as I dropped it from my father’s desk while looking
for a knife to sharpen a pencil. At the very first glance, it was obvious that
the picture was of the “typist” whom he must have left behind in Beijing
with other belongings. She is wearing a white, pink, light blue or perhaps
cream—anyway, whitish—satin Chinese dress and holds a little sandal-
wood fan with thin fretworked panels as she leans against a pillar with
dragon engravings.172

172 Ibid., 267–68. Emphasis added.
Indeed, it seems likely that the sick girl is developing an imaginative extension
of the photograph in her memory based on the description of the other pic-
ture, the portrait of Masumi. Rather than attesting to the substance of either
photograph, Kanai may be suggesting the amorphous and varying nature
of visual memory, which compromises the perceived scientific accuracy
commonly attributed to photography. The girl herself seems to be aware that
memory does not unfold linearly and that memories can be triggered by each
other, without one knowing the order in which they have come to mind. In the
girl’s recollection, the woman known to the girl as “the typist” speaks to her
father, with whom she is having a tryst at her request:
Someone is arranging a marriage for me, with a man who lost his wife
about a year ago. He has a daughter about the same age as yours—so said
the lady who, in the cabinet-size, slightly discolored photo, wore a white or
light-colored Chinese dress, her jaw slightly lifted as she looked up, smil-
ing. Or, should I put it this way instead: “When a cabinet-size photograph,
taken in Taiwan a long time ago, dropped with a thud out of a big diction-
ary [. . .], I remembered the lady in a tailored suit with gray collars and
purple plastic buttons saying this”?173
As the reader is told in the last few lines of the novel, the sick girl is not narrat-
ing as she lies in bed with a fever; the narrative authority rests with her now
grown-up self, recollecting her memories. This explains to an extent the com-
plex and self-reflexive nature of the above pondering and the level of articula-
tion of the complex web of thought. However, the confusion belongs not to
the grown woman but to the girl, whose memory confounds the imprinting
of two images on her mind and who now questions her knowledge of which
came first.
The uncertainty about the chronological order of the photo viewings can
be traced to a general proclivity of photographs for disconnection from linear
temporality. Photographs can be lost or found at any moment, and even these
events may not be placeable, afterward, within the regulated flow of time. We
may encounter a particular photograph at any moment, anywhere. The unex-
pected discovery of the “typist” photo, hidden or forgotten between the pages
of a dictionary, disturbs the everyday life of the girl’s family, just as in Tanizaki’s
Kagi. The passage quoted below follows the girl’s description of this picture:

236 CHAPTER 4
It’s not as if I had been looking at the photo for a long time. As I hurried
to put it back, it occurred to me it may have been used as a bookmark. If
so, then my father would notice its misplacement, surmise it was my
mother who found the photo and reinserted it in the wrong place, and be
convinced that she was keeping silent about what she found—as he
would then keep silent about discovering what she had done. With that
thought, I felt nauseated—my heart burning, fingers and arms trem-
bling—and then I felt chilled.174
In Tanizaki’s Kagi, the novel we saw in Chapter 1, Ikuko and her husband main-
tain silence about stealthily reading each other’s secret diaries. They learn of
each other’s intrusions there by slight alterations to pages of the journals, just
as feared by the little girl in this novel by Kanai. Meanwhile, Ikuko’s nude pho-
tographs that her husband has commissioned Kimura to develop are inserted
into a book he lends to Ikuko’s daughter, which triggers the daughter’s involve-
ment in her father’s voyeuristic scheme. In both instances, in Tanizaki and
Kanai, photographs are not merely images but things that exist in the same
space-time as other things and people who touch and look at them. The physi-
cal need to contend with photographic prints that characters come across
incidentally propels further action and thought to complicate the plot. The
girl’s physical reaction described in the last sentence of the above quotation
reveals the corporeality of her experience of the photograph discovered by
chance, an experience not simply of viewing but of touching and handling.
While photographs as things share their viewers’ space-time, the things that
have left traces in photographs come from another space-time. The existential
distance between these two locations becomes most evident in two kinds of
photographs: those of the dead and those of film stars.
Let us return to the earlier description of Masumi’s funeral portrait. While
the occasion calls for a solemn expression on the face of the deceased, no por-
trait has been taken specifically for the funeral. That all such photos are by
necessity taken out of context accentuates their incongruity with the space-
time of their viewing. The corpse is present and on display in the coffin, wait-
ing to be cremated, and yet during the ceremony the attendees look up at the
displayed photographic portrait from the deceased’s life instead of gazing
upon the dead face. The boundary between life and death is problematized by
the co-presence of two faces, including the one in the mediated image, which
is naturally out of place and usually blown up bigger than life.

As the sick girl is laid out in the beauty salon matron’s room, her senses
scour the space, registering a few observations in particular. There is a refer-
ence to the scent of incense—or, precisely speaking, the matron’s recollec-
tion that during the war, to make up for the lack of incense in the market, she
burned the panels of a sandalwood fan, bit by bit. This specific kind of fan is
mentioned as being held by the “typist” only in the third of three references to
the photo, a detail whose addition may be attributable to the intrusion of one
memory into another in the narrator’s confused mind.
The olfactory sense stimulated by the incense or the scent of sandalwood
leads the girl’s vision into another case of anachronistic representation of the
dead in photographs—photographs taken while the model was alive, which
the viewer now looks at, knowing that the person is deceased. As we saw
Barthes explicate, the viewer knows of and anticipates the death to occur
in the life of the person in the image, which complicates the trajectories of
temporality between three moments: those of the taking of the photograph,
the death of the person in the portrait and the viewing of the photograph.
In this novel by Kanai, the photographs in the matron’s room catch the sick
girl’s attention:
Hung on the grainy wall of the niche, shining in wavering gold and silver
light reflecting off mica in the plaster, are the framed and glass-topped
photographs of the deceased that could not have been displayed within
the limited space of the Buddhist alcove. The young man in white mili-
tary uniform, seen slightly from the side, standing in front of a Greek-
style round pillar as in an ancient ruin, with vines painted on it, looks like
a movie actor. But his features—the nose, whose becoming height is
accentuated by the angle, the masculine, thick and yet neatly defined
eyebrows, and long, distinctly visible eyelashes—have not been
retouched by the photographer but left just as they were. He was an uncle
of ours, who died in the war, explains the eldest daughter.175
175 Ibid., 40–41. The portraits of the fallen soldiers in the family, specifically “uncles,” placed
in the Buddhist alcove may echo Mishima Yukio’s Haru no yuki (1968; trans., Spring Snow),
in which the protagonist Matsugae Kiyoaki fails to feel connected to his two uncles lost in
the Russo-Japanese War. For more on this, see my “Reading the Radial in Yukio Mishima’s
Spring Snow after Jeff Wall,” forthcoming in Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual
Enquiry.
238 CHAPTER 4
We might recall here the scene in Tanizaki’s Sasameyuki, in which one of

Yukiko’s suitors is faulted for his inconsiderateness in showing photographs
of his deceased wife and children in his home’s Buddhist alcove. In the pres-
ent context, the photographs of the deceased are deprived of their legitimate
territory of the Buddhist alcove and have ended up intruding into the niche,
or toko no ma, an architectural element long adopted into ordinary Japanese
homes within the secular, scholarly and aesthetic environments of a room of
shoin zukuri (a traditional Japanese architectural style inspired by the study-
cum-drawing rooms of medieval Japan that were designed for warlords and
aristocrats) and chashitsu (rooms in which to practice the tea ceremony).
The boundary between the living and the dead is blurred in this intrusion of
photographs of the dead into the space meant for objects of art and flower
arrangement. Furthermore, multiple recollections of light—photographs as
products of the art of light, mica in the plaster sparkling with light and glass
also refracting light—confuse the boundaries between inside and out, original
and image thereof. This particular picture is evidently posed and staged with
props, and yet, according to one of the model’s nieces, offers an unmodified
image of what the deceased was like in life (in contrast to the picture of the
mother in Tanizaki’s “Yume no ukihashi,” which was unsatisfactorily retouched
by the photographer and which the mother subsequently destroyed). The
description of the photograph and remarks on it remind us of the precarious-
ness of the boundary between natural and artificial, real and fake. Photography
exists at the border of these distinctions, which we might normally take for
granted, establishing its existence only on that suspicious and elusive ground.
Photographs are neither real nor fake, neither natural nor artificial, exclusively.
They are always both, as we have learned from Horie in the previous chapter.
The other example of bordering happens when pictures of film stars are
printed and distributed through mass media to typical viewers. Popular maga-
zines are readily found in beauty salons, where (mostly female) clients spend
time leafing through them while awaiting or receiving services. Promotional
photos of famous or aspiring actors and actresses are viewed in everyday life
and begin to enter the spectator’s mind as well as body in ways that are often
moderated according to the stylistic standards of the film and magazine indus-
tries. Thus, young females in Kanai’s novel imitate Audrey Hepburn’s hairdo
and makeup, and consider having plastic surgeries to enhance the effect of the
simulation.176 Spectators compare their looks with film stars’ and border
the world of cinema and their quotidian existence. Indeed, their everyday life
176 Ibid., 195–96.

is in part defined by its exposure to cinema and cinema-related photographs.

It is no longer the case that cinema and the everyday form spaces that are
distinct from each other; spectators and spectacles now join in the same flux
of images and their three-dimensional reenactments. It is meaningful that
changes made via plastic surgeries to facial curvature are spoken of, as they
are precisely intersections of object and subject of the gaze, image and body,
and of the media and everyday life. The example of a neighborhood girl who
“improved” her appearance by such a procedure to successfully become an
actress serves as an illustration of bordering between what might normally be
conceived as distinct milieux.
Then a new boundary is drawn instead between cinema and popular maga-
zines, as the sick girl (or her grown-up version) observes:
Of course, in movies the “daring gaze” and smile are cast on a middle-
aged or aging man of wealth and substance, whom the woman will either
abandon or betray, or a man who pretends not to be interested in her.
Either way, the man eventually falls in love with her. But it’s unclear who
the model on the front cover of the fashion magazine is looking at, so her
“daring gaze” seems foolish. [. . .] Photographs printed on those pages,
which rustle as they are turned, are all boring, and those stern-looking
cover girls with thin, long limbs wouldn’t run or move like Audrey
Hepburn. Nor do they let their smiles develop gradually in ripples, as in
slow motion, around their high cheekbones or fleshy lips, as Ava Gardner
does.177
Kanai’s observer reveals her criticism of “models,” who seek only to copy cin-
ema actresses and lack agency of their own. They are deprived of narrative
and movement, and thus the images they create are dull, hollow and discon-
nected from any relationship with the audience within or across the printed
pages. Their existence is verified only through the material effects that those
photograph-covered pages make, such as the rustling sound mentioned above
and the stickiness to the touch that we saw in Chapter 2, with reference to Abe’s
publication in magazines. It appears that in contrast to the parasitic world of
mass-media photographs, Kanai favors the dynamism in cinema.
Photographs printed in the mass media can be as harmless and point-
less as those models posing for the camera, but they can also be perilous to
the well-being of citizens whose status is turned from viewer to viewed.
177 Ibid., 193–94.

240 CHAPTER 4
An “incident” retold by Kanai vaguely recalls, again, Tanizaki’s Sasameyuki,

in which Taeko’s elopement with Okuhata was reported in the news
paper, creating a scandal that has stained her reputation since. In Kanai’s
novel a photograph with a film star whom Kinuko visited in his studio during
a school trip to Kyoto is printed in the newspaper in such a way that she can
be identified, which is deemed sufficiently inappropriate by the prewar ethi-
cal standard for Kinuko to be expelled from school. Her exposure to the visual
media and her mingling with the cinema industry were both considered digres-
sions from the norm. “Proper” daughters had to be protected from the public
gaze and from the world of cinema, considered immoral in prewar Japan (and
even more so during World War II, when austerity was tightly imposed upon
the nation). In the book there is a noticeable confusion about the ethical stan-
dard, however, evident in the reaction of Kinuko’s parents, who initially were
thrilled to see their daughter in the publicity picture and proud to see that
her gift for the cinema star (a bouquet of flowers) didn’t look shabby, which
contrasts with the response from the family’s neighbors, who were concerned
about the possible consequences of the exposure.
In the real world of the time in which the story is set, the striated space
in which individuals were defined and placed in their positions in society
was constantly challenged, if not always successfully, by the flux of mediated,
printed images that intruded into the visible world of ordinary people, whose
own images must not be exposed to the general public’s gaze. In the prolifera-
tion of the gaze across the board of various visual media—cinema, magazines,
newspapers—one was increasingly accustomed to looking at others’ images
while still being required to be discreet about allowing oneself to be looked at.
The ubiquity of photographic prints in the ‘society of spectacle’ was double-
edged, creating the illusion of permeability of the barrier between spectator
and spectacle while simultaneously constructing the panoptic system of vigi-
lance as theorized by Michel Foucault. Kanai’s novel encapsulates the ambigu-
ity and ambivalence of the historical condition of the period as it transitions
from regulation of the gaze to its release, from striated space to smooth, and
depicts in the multivalent narration how people of the time struggled with the
slipperiness and stickiness of their social positions as they assumed a specta-
tor’s viewpoint and yet could quickly become spectacles themselves, with or
without their consent.
Conclusion
As I declared in this book’s Introduction and demonstrated through close read-

ing of narrative texts in the four chapters, each of the four authors selected
for this study manifests a distinct focus—Tanizaki on the family, Abe on the
city, Horie on the community of connoisseurship and Kanai incorporating
all of these—in each case a focus that also dictates that their central char-
acters’ relationships to photography must vary from one another. Viewers of
and models for photographs hold prominent roles in Tanizaki, the photogra-
pher and the photo critic occupy central positions in Abe, Horie’s narratives
portray the connoisseur and the collector, and Kanai encompasses all these
roles in her fiction. It is also possible to categorize the four authors in terms of
the prominent types of photographs featured in their narratives: portraits for
Tanizaki, landscape (specifically cityscape) for Abe, still life for Horie and all
of the above for Kanai.
Though the four authors’ distinctions can be thus drawn, in many ways
their narratives present similar encounters between humans and photography,
which effectively delineate their own stances vis-à-vis photography’s functions
and effects. In this conclusion I shall traverse the four chapters to find compa-
rable instances that encapsulate significant issues surrounding photography,
disband them from the respective authors’ stakes and reassemble these textual
moments according to the problems they embody.
Among the bodies of work addressed in this book, photographic portraits
for the affirmative documentation of family history and anticipated future
remembrance of “the good old days” appear most prominently in Tanizaki
and Kanai. Significantly, the episodes in the latter author’s Karui memai might
be seen as almost negative prints of scenes from the former’s Sasameyuki.
Tanizaki shows the act of family photo-taking as public, visible and memo-
rable, with each participant’s role (including, importantly, the photographer’s)
clearly defined, seamlessly coordinated and religiously reiterated to become a
part of the spectacle and the ritual. In contrast, the two photographs in Kanai’s
novel that present most of the protagonist’s family members together have
been remarkably forgotten, and upon emerging out of the depths of quotidian
sediment (rather than neatly fixed on the surface of a photo-album page), they
cannot be traced to any specific occasion or attributed to any specific photog-
rapher; thus they fail to contribute to the authentication of the family’s history,
an important function of photography as defined by Bourdieu.
Portrait photographs fail in their purpose of commemorating a deceased
person or identifying a living person in both Tanizaki (“Shunkinshō,” “Yume no

242 Conclusion
ukihashi,” “Tomoda to Matsunaga no hanashi”) and Kanai (“Mado,” Uwasa no

musume). The image remembered does not match the image photographed,
perhaps in part precisely because the portraits have been properly preserved
behind glass and within a frame, to the ironic effect of distancing the images
from the viewers. These episodes are not to be taken as singular or exceptional.
Rather, they should be understood as alerts to the fact that in the viewer’s mind
the memory of any person cannot be reduced to a discrete image because it is
in fact a jumble of multiple images—directly remembered, restored via pho-
tographs, imagined, forgotten and then recalled, prioritized over and merged
with one another, all to variable effects on the viewer’s mental archive.
Tanizaki and Kanai’s serious interest in cinema may account for com-
parisons of characters with stars on the silver screen, in the former’s Chijin
no ai and the latter’s Uwasa no musume, likened to or posing like actresses
whose promotional photographs they have seen printed and distributed in
mass-reproduced magazines. Thus, these characters’ portraits are not repre-
sentative of their own essences but acted out and staged as they “become” sim-
ulacra of cultural icons. The interference of celebrity pictures from the mass
media complicates the function, placement and effect of personal portraits
that are supposed to be certified as authentic by the inerrant technology of
photography.
Indeed, as the narratives of the four authors discussed in this book describe
photographs not only as images but also—and perhaps even primarily—as
things, it is crucial to acknowledge the photographs in their body of work that
are printed on the published page and are thus directly presented to the reader/
viewer. All of the authors have participated in photographic books—Tanizaki
in the limited edition of Yoshinokuzu with photographs by Kitao Ryōnosuke,
Abe in Hako otoko, Toshi o toru and Toshi e no kairo with his own photographs
and Kanai in Kishi no machi with Watanabe Kanendo’s photographs. In the
case of Horie Toshiyuki this interaction with actual photographs lies in con-
tributions to exhibition catalogues and books by a number of photographers
including himself, and, as I highlighted in Chapter 3, in his productive engage-
ment with a photograph by Hervé Guibert for a dust jacket design. As I have
discussed in the four previous chapters, the relationship between photographs
and texts in these authors’ works cannot be reduced to a straightforward col-
laboration of the two media for the production of a single narrative. In fact the
relationship is subtly nuanced and effectively resists the prevailing assump-
tion of print culture that casts photography and vernacular narrative as neu-
tral instruments for signification. Their books alert us to the thingness of both
image and text as well as the ambiguity of their coexistence in the material
environment in which we live and corporeally experience their effects.
Conclusion 243
The quintessential explorer of that material environment, the figure of the

flâneur, occupies center stage in Abe’s Hako otoko (as in all his photographic
writings) and Kanai’s Kishi no machi. In these novels, the narrator-protagonist
is anonymous and amorphous, with an identity that is indefinable and elu-
sive. In both works the role is ambiguous enough that it might be assumed by
multiple personas. Such characterization of the central figure is starkly con-
trastive with Tanizaki’s fleshed out and discrete characters. Horie’s “I” make
another strong contrast, being a constant presence not only as a mind but as
a body; though not firmly connected to a family or a society, he lives his own
life in physical terms. As I noted in Chapters 2 and 4, both Hako otoko and Kishi
no machi feature printed photographs that are at best only loosely connected
to the narratives that embed them. Furthermore, these photographs have not
necessarily been taken by the narrator-protagonist (Kanai’s is not even defined
as a photographer). In both works the cityscape is not only perceived by the
observer’s eye but explored by the observer’s body, suggesting that street
photography is a practice with effects that are well beyond the concrete and
evidential presentation of its outcomes.
The dynamics between the photographer and the photographed is another
recurring theme of this book. In Tanizaki’s Chijin no ai, Sasameyuki and Kagi,
we saw significant physical involvement of photographers in relation to their
cameras and models, with the consistent result of their becoming spectacles
themselves to a varied degree. Abe’s novel Hako otoko features a voyeuristic
street photographer “box man” and details the dangers he is exposed to in his
unpredictable encounters with hostile forces. Horie is ethically and aestheti-
cally invested in the dialogue between the various photographers his narrator-
protagonists admire and those presenting themselves in front of their cameras,
explicitly preferring to see visible traces of the photographer as a moving body.
And Kanai, in Tama-ya, also draws her narrator-protagonist as a photographer,
one whose photographic activities with the camera and in the darkroom are
described in physical and phenomenological detail.
Indeed, the importance of film developing in the darkroom does not elude
any of the four authors. In Tanizaki’s fiction we are explicitly told that Jōji in
Chijin no ai and Kimura in Kagi develop negative films at home, though their
reactions to the process remain untold. Abe’s box man is more vocal, imagin-
ing the sensation he would feel if a nude picture of his object of desire materi-
alized before his eyes from the liquid solution. Horie translates Guibert’s story
about failed film development, signaling his awareness of this crucial stage in
the process of photographic reproduction. And in her novel Tama-ya Kanai
materializes the act of film development that the other authors only imply,
imagine or mediate, as the narrator-protagonist Natsuyuki develops Anna
244 Conclusion
Karina’s portraits and experiences a hallucinatory sensation. That moment is

definitive not only of this particular narrative but of all four authors’ defini-
tion of photography as a manual process that brings physical sensations to
the agent. Blurry, indeterminate and imperfect pictures that trouble Tanizaki’s
characters and fascinate Horie’s narrator-protagonists are brought to life in
Kanai’s fiction, not as failures of technology, but as a testament to photography
as a physical procedure, a procedure that is not an instrument of scientific
precision but rather an interface between natural elements of light and water
and human touch.
Facing Fallacies
There are five issues that the authors I have selected address in photographic
terms in their texts: issues related to time, space, subjectivity, objecthood and
the senses. While these may seem to correspond to the essential properties
of putative truth-making—when, where, who, what and how—the authors
effectively engage photography to present non-chronological temporality,
non-geometrical spatiality, non-transcendental subjectivity, non-transparent
objecthood and non-ocular-centric sensitivity.
Time
The instantaneousness of photo-shooting has long been promoted and
accepted, especially since the invention of the automatic camera. At the
same time we have often been told that photographs “freeze” a given moment
for eternity. We are accustomed to believing in the placidity of photographs
and the immortality that they confer on their “contents.” Between their pur-
ported instantaneity and eternity, photographs seem deprived of temporality.
Photography, however, does not capture (“freeze”) a moment for archival pur-
poses, reducing an incident to a static and timeless image/representation, as
has conventionally been conceived. The temporalities that surround the pro-
duction and reproduction of images are imbued in their prints as outcomes
of those procedures. After they are printed, photographs subsequently endure
physical and metaphysical transformation through the process of their recep-
tion and consumption. Thus, photographs integrate time in multiple ways. The
photographic camera does capture a passage of time within the frame, among
other incidental elements coming from beyond the photographer’s intention
(such as the passing of a wind, the trembling of the photographer’s hand,
or a blink of the eyes of a person photographed). Rather than being static
and stabilizing, as might be expected, photography is invested with various
temporalities—of the event of photographing and of the time from then
Conclusion 245
till the most recent moment of viewing. The duration of time is essential
in the processing of photographic images, not only in the hands of the pho-
tographer/developer but also before the eyes of viewers, as over time they
may fade, grow wrinkled and even disappear; with enough time their meaning
and even their existence will almost certainly be forgotten.
Yes, forgotten. Photographs may not always evoke remembrance. Rather,
they may make the viewer realize how much has been lost to him/her, to the
point of oblivion—how distant he/she has grown from his/her own past.
Memory is not an inventory of things past, as if one can reclaim or revisit
those times from a position of neutrality. Remembering is always an act/event
in the present, evolving each time it happens, and thus variable. Single rec
ollections, whether in our self-history or collective history, do not neatly cor-
respond to discrete pieces of information. Our sometimes futile efforts to
remember, rather than resurrecting evidence that we were once alive in what
is now the past, may instead serve to remind us that we live in the present.
Memory does not stabilize our life in the present. Rather, it shakes us—and
we shake it.
Space
The four authors effectively challenge a standard spatial misperception when
it comes to photographs: that the photographed image is autonomous of its
surroundings, both at the time of photo-taking and at the time of viewing. We
may not consciously think that, but we may fail to question how the space was
delineated by the photographer and what relation it had to its surroundings.
The writers remind us that the camera was situated in the space that it shared
with the object, and that there was also a space beyond the scope represented.
If a viewer wishes to re-establish any sense of reality based on a photograph,
the eliminated “space-off” (Teresa de Lauretis) must be imagined. The frame
should not be considered absolute, natural or neutral as it is contingent upon
the genre’s conventions dictating its shape (e.g., rectangular) and size (e.g.,
quarter), the photographer’s intent (e.g., what should be included/excluded)
and physical and material conditions (e.g., the photographer’s possible access
to a footing). The various acts of editing after the negative film is developed—
focusing, cropping, enlargement—further determine what is to be included
within the print and in what relation to the frame. With these maneuvers in
the process of image-making in mind, it is clear that the space represented in a
given photograph is by no means unmediated. It is determined by both intent
and chance.
Another spatial aspect of a photograph that needs to be stressed is that it
is three-dimensional—both in itself and in what it represents. A photograph
exists as a thing in a space and thus has substance rather than being truly flat,
246 Conclusion
a geometrical plane, and therefore immaterial. What it captures is a result of

light contacting a series of surfaces—the object, the lens, the negative film,
the contact sheet and the paper—and thus it is layered with residues of three-
dimensional entities.
Subjectivity
Photographs are always incidental and inflected with material, technical
and human conditions. The four authors lift the shroud of the spontaneity of
camerawork arising from the relative transferability and manageability of the
machine and the perceived instantaneity of its operation. Photographs are
products of the context in which they are conceived, taken, developed, edited
(e.g., cropped, enlarged), printed (on surfaces that they may share with other
articles) and placed in relation to other materials and in an environment that
they share with their viewers. As such, the making of photographs is always
deliberate. They are susceptible to human design, to material conditions of the
equipment, to the physical coordinates of the person who handles it and to
the environment in which the relevant actions take place. As a thing, a photo-
graphic print may be touched, seen, handled, framed, affixed to other surfaces,
lost, found, damaged, restored, kept in private or distributed, either to a select
circle or to the general public.
Objecthood
All four authors are keenly opposed to the purported neutrality of the camera
deriving from the machine’s scientific technology, commonly presumed to nul-
lify human subjectivity. They renounce a blind faith in the machine’s ability
to ensure scientific objectivity in the images it reproduces, setting a standard
above the human eye, which by comparison is considered imperfect, biased
and delimited. While Benjamin is right to point out that photography provides
a means to probe humans up close or blown up beyond the naked eye’s capabil-
ity, in a manner comparable to psychoanalysis, the limitations of this observa-
tion’s validity should also be recognized. Photography does not offer ultimate
and uncontestable evidence of a person’s identity, an object’s existence or an
event’s occurrence. Rather, it provides traces of corporeal, mechanical and
chemical operations that were made by the human body of the photographer
with technical devices as its prostheses—things in themselves—on material
surfaces that have their own specific qualities (textures).
The four authors contest both the authenticity of the image as a repre-
sentation of the object photographed and the mechanical reproducibility of
the likeness in photographs. A photograph is not an icon but an index of the
Conclusion 247
photographed object. Rather than as a representation, it should be understood

as a trace of the person, thing, place or event, left via reactions to the object
made by light, chemicals and water on negative film and paper. It does not copy
the object but offers what was contiguous with the space-time the object once
occupied. As such, no photograph can be either authentic or inauthentic. The
photograph simply exists in relation to the object. What must be challenged
here is the notion of photography’s documentary truthfulness and archival
function. The accuracy attributed to photography will be compromised as we
take into consideration photography’s material limitations, manifested both in
the contingency of apparatuses (e.g., camera) and resources (e.g., fixing solu-
tion) for production and the susceptibility of the products (prints) to the pass-
ing of time and subsequent changes in the environment (e.g., temperature,
humidity).
The Senses
The four authors effectively make us realize that the art of photography is not
entirely visual. Much like cinema it has recourse to other senses of the human
body. Photographs may be looked at not only as two-dimensional images but
also as things that share space-time with the viewer, things to be touched and
felt. They are created by manual as well as visual acts that affect tactile sensa-
tion in the process. Even in the act of viewing, the hypothetical fragmentation
of experiences into discrete senses and the privileging of vision can collapse
when “haptic visibility” as opposed to “optic visibility” materializes.1
1 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
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Index of Names
Abe, Kōbō 11, 13–14, 15, 16, 17, 57–101, 125, 157, Benjamin, Walter 7, 10–11, 25, 26n, 31, 49, 64,
169–70, 177, 184, 239, 241, 242, 243 77, 77n, 84, 118, 127, 139, 151, 164, 189, 193,
“Aregorī o koete” 75n 246
The Ark Sakura 66, 66n Bergson, Henri 219
“Berunāru Fōkon no sekai” 84–89 Bernardi, Joanne R. 21
Beyond the Curve 125 Bidaine, Philippe 122
Hako otoko [The Box Man] 54, 58n, 59, Bourdieu, Pierre 4, 12, 19, 64, 64n, 221, 226,
60, 62, 63, 67, 67n, 68, 71, 72, 73, 73n, 74, 241
75n, 83, 90–94, 94n, 98, 164, 195, 242, Boudinet, Daniel 85n, 215, 215n, 216–17, 226
243 Brandt, Bill 137–38, 138n
“Kamera ni yoru sōsaku nōto” 62n, 71, 97 Bresson, Robert 190–91
“Karutie Buresson sakuhin ni yosete” 81n Brunet, François 3, 88n
Moetsukita chizu [A Ruined Map] 58n, Bryson, Norman 3
67 Burgin, Victor 4–5, 5n, 11, 12–13, 19, 22, 164,
“Shingata 4-kishu o shindan: Ōto fōkasu 197
jidai no tōrai!” 66, 78n, 79n Burnett, Frances Hodgson 231
“Sokkuri ningyō” 88 Buse, Peter 55
Toshi e no kairo 63, 77, 98, 242
“Toshi e no kairo” 71, 80n, 93 Capa, Robert 90n, 146
Toshi o toru 62n, 63, 70, 75, 80, 81n, 94, Cartier-Bresson, Henri 61n, 63, 70n, 79, 80,
95, 96–100, 242 81, 81n, 82, 82n, 155, 157
“Watashi no Amerika” 71n, 97n Cazdyn, Eric 21
Abe, Neri 65n Cendrars, Blaise 109–11, 114, 119, 135, 136n,
Anderson, Leroy 115 143, 144
Araki, Nobuyoshi 154, 155, 161, 221, 230 Cixous, Hélène 128
Arbus, Diane 122, 144 Crary, Jonathan 6, 6n, 115
Atget, Eugène 77, 84, 156, 157, 161, 192–94
Auster, Paul 114–15 de Lauretis, Teresa 19, 19n, 197, 245
Debord, Guy 20
Bacon, Francis 82n, 138n Deleuze, Gilles 47, 189, 220, 228, 232
Bal, Mieke 3, 19, 31 Derrida, Jacques 62n, 102, 118–120, 138, 140, 180
Barnes, Julian 168 Copy, Archive, Signature 102, 118, 125n
Barthes, Roland 5, 11, 27, 50, 63, 64, 85, 88n, Doisneau, Robert 82n, 103, 109–11, 114, 119,
136n, 138n, 154, 161, 165, 180, 181, 187, 135–36, 136n, 144, 145, 145n
187n, 194, 205, 208, 209, 211–15, 215n, Doane, Mary Ann 148, 152–53
217, 218, 219n, 226–27, 237 Duras, Marguerite 24, 25, 27, 214, 224
Camera Lucida 11, 27, 50n, 85n 187, 194,
205, 207, 208, 210, 215, 217, 226, 228 Eliot, T.S. 190
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes 187n,
211, 213n, 217 Faucon, Bernard 62n, 63, 84–85, 85n, 86–89,
Baudrillard, Jean 14, 57, 62n, 64n, 65, 65n, 120, 177, 180, 210
66n, 71, 78, 79, 80–81, 94, 95, 165, 180, Flaubert, Gustave 151, 152n, 168, 168n
210, 219 Fournier, Alain 132
Bazin, André 43 Frank, Robert 155, 156, 156n
270 Index of Names
Frantz, Anaïk 144 “‘Kare’ to ‘watashi’ no monogatari” 115

Friis-Hansen, Dana 154n “Kassōro e” 142
Fujii, James A. 6, 6n Kōgai e 109–10, 121, 126, 136n, 143
“Kuma no shikiishi” 104–08, 129, 130, 196
Gardner, Ava 239 “Kyūsuitō e” 136n
Gochō Shigeo 142–43 Mezame te udedokei o miru to 103n, 120
Godard, Jean-Luc 153, 159 Mono no hazumi 119, 130
Golley, Greg L. 21, 33–34 “Reminton Pōtaburu” 109–10, 116
Guibert, Hervé 3, 63, 86, 86n, 88n, 103, 104, “Renzu no hankakokei de” 103
104n, 105–07, 111–14, 120, 121–22, 126, 129, “Rowashī Ekusupuresu” 143–44
131–33, 137–40, 242, 243 “Rusuban denwa no shijin” 118
L’Angleterre de Bille Brandt 137 “Shimunon tesei no arubamu” 116n–117n
Belours et Agneaudoux 104–05, “Sokubutsusei to nukumori no yūgō” 117
La Photo, inéluctablement 129n “Sonzai no ‘izari’ ni tsuite” 142
l’Homme au chapeau rouge [The Man in “Suichoku no shi” 109–11, 114, 135
the Red Hat] 121, 121n, 139 “Tanjīru kara Tanje e” 126
L’Image fantôme [Ghost Image] 104, 106, “Tashikana mono wa nani mo nai” 124
129n, 131, 139 “Uragoe de utae, kaba yo” 118
Photographies 86n, 104 Hosoe, Eikoh 192
“Sur une manipulation courante” 141
Ide, Magoroku 37
Hamilton, David 76 Imahashi, Eiko 66n, 81n, 155n, 193
Hanada, Kiyoteru 37 Ishii, Momoko 152, 212n
Hardin, Nancy Shields 63, 72, 92, 95 Iwaya, Kunio 172, 181, 182
Hayashi, Tadahiko 76
Hayter, Irena 115 Jacob, François 172
Hepburn, Audrey 238–39
Hirayama, Jōji 36, 37n Kajikawa, Yoshitomo 182
Hirsch, Marianne 19, 19n, 31, 46 Kanai, Kumiko 148
Hockney, David 10, 69, 88n Kanai, Mieko 11, 16–17, 92, 148–240, 241, 242,
Hocquard, Emmanuel 126, 126n 243
Horie, Toshiyuki 11, 14–16, 17, 102–47, 152, Akarui heya no naka de 216–17
170, 241, 242, 243 “Fotogurafu oboegaki” 151–53
“37-do 7-bu to 38-do 4-bu no aida de” “Han imēji ron” 148
[Between 37.7 and 38.4 Degrees] 137 “Hikari no ima” 154n, 228
“Gentō to bīdama” 130 Indian samā [Indian Summer] 149, 194,
“Fumeiryō na mama miru to iu 210
yume” 127 “Kairaku to kentai” 211, 211n, 213n
“Higasa o sashita onna tachi” 132 Karui memai 218–32, 219n, 224n, 241
“Honshitsu o kumidasu izumi” 102, 108, Kishi no machi 73, 149, 156n, 165–88, 221,
146n 232, 242, 243
“Horie Toshiyuki ga erabu Takiguchi “Kozaru no yōna kameraman no
Shūzō 19 no yume” 130n shōzō” 154n
“Ichiban hikui kumo” 121n “Kussetsu to rinri” 154 n, 228
Kagan bōjitsu shō 127, 129, 138 “Mado” [Windows] 149, 158, 163, 199, 210,
Kakareru te 133–34 229, 242
“Kakō suru inochi no yokan” 121, 121n “Pikunikku” [Picnic] 211n
Kanojo no iru sebyōshi 133 “Sakka no shōzō” 191n
Index Of Names 271
Tama-ya [Oh, Tama!] 54, 149, 188–207, Nietzsche, Friedrich 118

210, 243 Nishii, Kazuo 160–61
“Tekusuto to tekusuchuā” 207, 215 Nomura, Mikio 182
Uwasa no musume 149, 231–40, 242
Karatani, Kōjin 8 Okamura, Tamio 155–56
Karina, Anna 195–97, 203 Olin, Margaret 3, 194n
Kataoka, Yoshio 119 Onodera, Yuki 10, 130
Keaton, Buster 69, 69n, 150 Oplatka, Hans 116
Kertész, André 129, 129n Orbaugh, Sharalyn 188
Kitao, Ryōnosuke 36, 36n, 37, 116, 242 Ōtake, Akiko 124
Kittler, Friedrich 118n
Klein, William 157 Parker, Alan 192
Knight, Diana 215n Pickford, Mary 30, 32, 33n
Kobayashi, Yasuo 214 Posadas, Baryon Tensor 29
Komori, Yōichi 36, 38 Prévert, Jacques 102, 145, 145n
Kondō, Kazuya 58, 58n, 59, 60, 61, 61n, 62,
63, 70n Ricco, John Paul 85n
Kōno, Taeko 18 Rilke, Rainer Maria 127, 127n
Kundera, Milan 82n Robbe-Grillet, Alain 63, 75, 75n, 76, 77
Kuwabara, Kineo 44, 65, 65n, 68n, 94, 151, Rosler, Martha 154
154, 155–57, 156n, 160–63, 173, 221, 230 Rouaud, Jean 117, 117n–118n, 127
Rouxel-Chaurey, Nicolas 137
Lacarrière, Jacques 132 Ruben, Ernestine 10
LaMarre, Thomas 2, 2n, 19, 21,
Lartigue, Jacques-Henry 209n Sacks, Olivier 128
Le Goff, Hervé 111 Sallenave, Danièle 82n, 122–23
Lippit, Akira 21 Sand, Jordan 21
Long, Margherita 24 Sarkonak, Ralph 111
Sedgwick, Edward 150
Mallarmé, Stéphane 169 Shinoyama, Kishin 169
Marey, Étienne-Jules 152 Silverman, Kaja 5, 5n, 9, 58
Marks, Laura U. 212, 247 Simenon, Georges 36, 116–17
Masats, Ramón 146 Simon, Claude 152
Maspero, François 144–45 Sivak, Kristin 28–29
Mavor, Carol 120, 194n Smith, Eugene 157
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 57, 67, 69, 151, 160, Smith, T’ai 214–15
219, 220 Sontag, Susan 47, 64, 68, 108n, 150, 156n, 158,
Messer, Sam 114 181, 186
Metz, Christian 19, 32, 50, 55 Sotokubo, Keiko 184
Minato, Chihiro 22, 22n, 127n–128n Suzuki, Shiroyasu 161
Mishima, Yukio 237n Suzuki, Tomi 8n
Mitchell, W.J.T. 3
Miyakawa, Atsushi 163 Takanashi, Yutaka 130n, 191n
Motherwell, Robert 133 Taki, Kōji 65, 65n, 124, 149, 150, 160, 165
Talbott, William Fox 168n
Nancy, Jean-Luc 229–30 Tamura, Shigeru [Akihide] 68n, 162–63
Naruse, Mikio 148, 231 Tanemura, Suehiro 173
Natsume, Sōseki 191n
272 Index of Names
Tanizaki, Jun’ichirō 2, 11, 12–13, 15, 16, 17, Valéry, Juliette 126, 126n
18–56, 131, 149, 222, 233, 235, 238, 240, Vermeer, Johannes 152
241, 242, 243 Vieillard, Emile Maurice 138
Chijin no ai [Naomi] 21, 29–34, 49, 52, 53, Volkovich, Michel 136n
55, 127, 242, 243 Von Amelunxen, Hubertus 125
Kagi [The Key] 52–56, 125, 235–36, 243
Sasameyuki [The Makioka Sisters] 35, Wall, Jeff 79n, 88n
36n, 43–52, 115, 233, 238, 240, 241, 243 Watanabe, Kanendo 73, 88, 149, 165–88, 203,
“Shunkin shō” [A Portrait of 216, 242
Shunkin] 22–24, 46, 241 Watanabe, Yoshio 180
“Tomoda to Matsunaga no hanashi” 28, Watteau, Jean-Antoine 139–40
242 Weissberg, Liliane 3
“Yoshinokuzu” [Arrowroot] 34–43, 116 Winogrand, Garry 156n
“Yume no ukihashi” [The Bridge of
Dreams] 25–27, 119, 210, 238, 241–42 Yamada Kōichi 195, 197, 203
Tisseron, Serge 187, 217 Yanaihara, Isaku 126, 126n
Tōmatsu, Shōmei 63, 80, 82–83 Yoshikawa Yasuhisa 208n
Tournier, Michel 114, 114n
Trassard, Jean-Loup 114, 121 Zaborov, Boris 121–24, 139, 141
Truffaut, François 195
Index of Subjects
album 7, 9, 13, 35, 43, 45, 117, 145, 221–22, cinema/-tic/-tically 1, 2, 4, 5, 19–20, 21, 32,
226, 241 56, 57, 148, 149, 151–53, 168, 195, 231,
Angel Heart 191–92 238–40, 242, 247
anonymity 69, 69n, 70, 73, 144, 156, 172, 180, city 11, 17, 70, 143, 144, 155, 241 See also urban
183–84, 186 space
art photography 80, 83, 84, 88, 90n close-up 32, 33, 33n, 127
Asahi kamera [Asahi Camera] 64, 84, 148, contact sheet 114, 195, 201, 204n, 246
162, 169, 177n corporeal/-ity 8, 9, 13, 16, 19, 48, 49, 52, 56,
aura 4, 10, 25, 46, 50, 118–19, 164, 189 59, 60, 63, 68, 69, 77, 90, 92, 115–16, 129,
authenticity 6, 7–8, 9, 12, 18, 22, 26n, 28, 142, 151, 153, 154, 158, 164, 167, 175, 188,
38–39, 42–43, 50, 88, 191–92, 202, 204, 189, 195, 196, 197, 201, 205, 211n, 229, 236,
205, 246 242, 246
crop/-ped/-ping 33, 42, 245, 246 See also
blind/-ness 21, 22, 22n–23n, 24, 108, 126, 127, editing
128, 137, 142
body See also corporeal(ity) darkroom 53, 55, 65n, 92, 195, 197, 200, 243
author’s 108 “decisive moment” 45, 79, 80, 81n, 155, 155n
creator’s 151 develop/-er/-ing/-ment (of film) 9, 10, 14,
critic’s 196 33, 34, 53, 55, 63, 66, 92, 114, 125, 131, 149,
developer’s 92, 149 159, 174, 189, 195, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204,
observer’s 72, 115, 243 205, 236, 243, 245, 246
photographer’s 9, 10, 14, 30, 33, 47–48, dust jacket 14, 58n, 85, 85n, 88n, 104, 107, 116n,
49, 52, 68, 69, 90, 108, 141, 143, 149, 150, 126, 129n, 133, 202, 203, 216, 216n, 242
153, 155, 158, 160, 163, 164, 167, 176, 196,
218, 243 editing 10, 34, 245 See also cropping
reader’s 149, 167, 207 ekphrasis 3
spectator’s 187 everyday 7, 9, 16, 19, 149, 183, 184–85, 188,
subject’s 201 219, 231, 232, 235, 238–39 See also
traveler’s 176 quotidian
typist’s 109 exfoli-ate/-ating/-ation 159, 173–74, 178, 229
viewer’s 207
writer’s 108 family 7, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 19, 20, 35, 43–50, 145,
bourgeois 12, 19, 43, 44, 50, 56, 219 See also 149, 188, 189, 221–26, 228–29, 235, 237n,
middle-class 241
fetish/-ism/-ist/-istic 11, 13, 17, 19, 31, 32, 33,
camera 10, 11, 12, 13, 29–30, 31, 35, 37, 44, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 120, 130, 212
51, 78, 79n, 88, 90, 94, 103, 108, 111, 114, flâ-neur/-nerie 13, 149, 155, 156n, 157, 161, 182,
115, 118, 129, 130, 132, 142, 144, 145, 149, 230n, 243
150, 153, 154, 158, 159, 160, 161–62, 164, flat/-ness/-ten 9, 18, 25, 26, 45, 55, 56, 58, 60,
174, 182, 187, 191, 192, 196, 223, 225, 227, 82, 151, 158, 173, 175, 176, 177, 199, 201,
229, 233, 246 230, 245
camera-eye 32, 47, 127, 128, 163 fossil/-ized 7, 122, 123, 220, 232
The Cameraman 69, 150, 154, 154n “fourth look” 11, 22, 164, 197
caption (as a noun and as a verb) 60, 63, 64, frame (as a noun and a verb) 9, 10, 12, 14, 17,
67, 72–73, 73n, 74, 165, 213, 213n 18, 19, 26, 30, 34, 39, 42, 44, 45, 47, 48,
274 Index of Subjects
frame (as a noun and a verb) (cont.) middle-brow 4, 19, 43

49, 56, 58, 63, 67, 69, 74, 75, 77, 81, 88, middle-class 12, 15, 20, 46, 149, 188 See also
93, 93n, 94, 95, 104, 109, 122, 126, 130, 131, bourgeois
136n, 141, 144, 153, 159, 163, 174, 177, 178, Minolta 177n
180, 184, 198, 210, 214, 221–22, 224, 227, Morioka shoten 133
228, 230n, 237, 242, 244, 245, 246 myopi-a/-c 127, 128
Gallimard, Éditions 104n naked eye 14, 24, 31, 32, 49, 63, 79n, 93, 94,
Geijutsu Shinchō 64, 83n, 95, 95n, 98, 130n 127, 163, 174, 246
negative (film, photographic) 9, 10, 53, 54,
haptic/-al/-ally 60, 215, 247 60, 72, 74, 75n, 114, 117, 120, 184, 196, 201,
Hasselblad 88, 191 202, 241, 243, 245, 246, 247
Hermes (typewriter) 111, 114 New Wave 155, 195
“here and now” 25, 26n, 74, 82, 83, 150, 151,
220, 227 observer 4, 9, 13, 18, 34, 48, 49, 67, 72, 77,
83, 91, 92, 115, 141, 156, 161, 167, 186, 197,
identity 12, 18, 19, 27, 28, 56, 69, 70–71, 224, 232, 243 See also spectator,
171–72, 192, 202–03, 205, 213, 223, 227, viewer
233, 243, 246 Olympia (typewriter) 114
image and text 3, 6, 13, 19, 23, 36, 42, 56, 62, on-site 10, 34, 37, 43, 67, 108
73, 78, 98–99, 101, 103, 105, 118, 132, 139, original print 192–93, 193n, 194, 202
140, 151, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170–71, 174,
179, 182, 242 page 7, 8, 18, 30, 36, 42, 58n, 60, 61, 62n,
image-text 30, 63, 73, 74, 76n, 78, 106, 144, 64n–65n, 72, 73n, 74, 95, 96, 96n, 97, 98,
200, 209n 100, 104, 107, 109, 113, 132, 137, 144, 151,
index/-ical/-icality 74, 119, 124, 129n, 141, 148, 167, 170, 177, 178–79, 181, 211, 212–13, 234,
212, 246 235, 236, 239, 242
interface 26, 63, 91, 131, 164, 211n, 218, 244 painting 4–7, 79, 88, 102, 113–14, 115, 122, 124,
intima-cy/-te 5, 25, 31–32, 48, 53, 68, 103, 110, 138–41, 147, 151–52, 161, 163, 193n, 222
114, 115, 117, 118, 127, 142, 145, 194, 195, photo-book 76, 181 See also photographic
205, 207, 209, 211–12, 213, 226, 227 book
“involuntary memories” 7 photo-diary 29, 30 See also photographic
Iwanami bunko 42–43 diary
photo-essay 63, 98, 100, 116, 137, 165, 166
Kimura Ihei Shō (Prize) 64, 88, 169, 169n, photo-roman 73, 76, 76n, 149, 166
179, 182, 187 photo-shooting (as an act) 34, 53, 95, 244
Kodak 68, 75n, 128, 158, 195 See also photo-taking, photographing,
picture-taking
landscape (as a subject or a genre) 14, 17, 36, photo-taking (as an act) 10, 13, 16, 30, 33, 34,
70, 83, 93, 110, 117, 121, 135, 136n, 157, 158, 35, 45, 52, 55, 56, 82, 89, 92, 116, 152,
159, 173, 174, 184, 221, 241 155n, 158, 174, 224, 229, 241, 245 See also
landscape (as a layout format) 36, 42, 88, photographing, photo-shooting,
133, 222 picture-taking
Leica 37, 37n, 44, 47, 51, 52, 115, 233 photo-viewing (as an act) 13, 33, 34, 56
photographic book 1, 36, 86, 89, 144, 147,
map 101, 161, 171–72, 174–77 149, 190, 211, 242 See also photo-book
mechanical(ly) reproducibility/reproduction/ photographic diary 53 See also photo-diary
reproduced 16, 20, 25, 26, 29, 46, 55, photographie absolue 24
63, 103, 109, 117, 119, 147, 184, 188, 189, 246 “photographic evidence” 74, 77, 83–84, 90
Index Of Subjects 275
photographing (as an act) 7, 33, 34, 35, 44, 146, 151, 154, 163, 164, 173, 174, 181–82,
52, 53, 55, 56, 66, 67, 68, 74, 78, 80, 119, 186–87, 223, 230–31, 232, 238–39, 240
130, 131, 150, 153, 158, 163–64, 183, 187, See also observer, viewer
196, 244 See also photo-shooting, spectacle 5, 20, 34, 44, 51, 52, 57, 63, 67, 68,
photo-taking, picture-taking 69, 103, 150, 158, 164, 239, 240, 241, 243
picture-taking (as an act) 73 square (shape) 85n, 88–89, 177, 177n, 178–80
Polaroid 53, 54, 55, 85n, 129, 129n, 138, 215 still life 15, 17, 241
portrait/-ure (as a subject) 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, street photogra-phy/-pher 14, 91, 155, 176,
20, 22–23, 25, 26, 27n, 28, 33, 33n, 35, 43, 243
45, 46–47, 48, 50, 56, 70n, 82n, 86n, 95, striated 42, 48, 240
109, 117, 119, 122, 130n, 132, 138n, 139, 145, studio (for photo-shooting) 7, 13, 43, 46,
145n, 149, 150, 191, 191n, 192, 194, 195, 196, 222, 234
203–04, 207–08, 213, 221–22, 226, subject and object 53, 67, 70, 91, 95, 107, 162,
233–37, 237n, 241–42, 244 196, 215, 218
portrait (as a layout format) 42, 88 subject–object 69, 167, 196, 209
postcard 114, 117–18, 133, 139–40 surface 6, 9, 53, 57, 58, 62, 81, 129, 129n, 165,
print/-ed/-ing 7, 8, 10, 12, 16, 17, 18, 21, 42, 43, 167, 174, 180, 201, 229–30, 241, 246 See
52, 53, 72, 73, 95, 96, 98, 99, 104, 107, 114, also skin, texture
117, 122, 125, 130, 132, 137, 144, 147, 167,
178, 182, 190, 192, 198, 200, 201, 204, 205, tactile/tactility 14, 26, 57, 60, 62–63, 91,
216, 221, 222, 224, 238, 239, 240, 246, 247 107–08, 115, 117, 158, 167, 170, 177, 187,
print culture 14, 108, 115, 116, 151, 173, 184, 242 201, 211, 214–15, 229, 247 See also touch
punctum 80, 187, 220, 228 texture 31, 60, 107–08, 171, 201, 215–16, 246
See also skin, surface
quotidian 5, 7, 17, 19, 20, 31, 52, 136, 170, 188, thing/-ness 8, 15, 25, 44, 47, 68, 95, 116, 119,
238, 241 See also everyday 128, 130, 136n, 140–41, 174, 184, 194, 236,
245, 246, 247
rectangular 6, 39, 42, 88, 163, 177, 178, 178n, touch 9, 57, 69, 91, 107–08, 110, 115, 117, 119,
245 124, 128, 140, 146, 157, 160, 177, 192, 215,
Remington (typewriter) 109–11, 116, 119 230, 236, 239, 244, 246, 247 See also
ritual/-istic/-istically 7, 12, 20, 44, 45, 46, 241 tactile/-ity
Royal (typewriter) 111 trace 10, 14, 16, 33, 34, 35, 74, 84, 102, 108, 110,
113, 123, 124, 128, 129, 133, 136n, 138, 151,
seer and seen 9, 10, 69, 92, 164 196, 210, 222, 230, 236, 243, 246, 247
seer–seen 162 transparency 4, 8, 9, 34, 50, 60, 66, 93, 116,
Shinchōsha 58, 61n, 165 130, 153, 167, 188
silence 14, 57, 80, 88n, 89n, 140 typewriter 108–19, 125, 127, 143
skin 30, 31, 32, 52, 92, 157, 158, 174, 187, 229
See also surface, texture “unconscious optics” 31, 49, 127
slipcase 58, 58n, 59–62, 67, 169n, 180 Underwood (typewriter) 116
smooth (space) 42, 48, 240 urban space 13, 70, 156 See also city
snapshot 7, 14, 80, 81, 81n, 84, 88, 91, 162, 174,
195, 234 Vertigo 145n, 219n
Sōgensha 36, 39 viewer 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22,
“space-off” 19, 30, 48, 197, 214, 245 23, 26, 27, 29, 39, 45, 46, 47, 50, 58, 60,
space-time 25, 45, 74, 78, 82, 93, 123–24, 140, 61, 62, 67, 75, 82, 89, 93, 94n, 96, 99, 106,
151, 177, 183, 188, 200, 227, 229, 236, 247 107, 108, 115, 127, 128, 132, 136n, 137, 140,
spectator/-ship 5, 9, 12, 22, 22n, 23, 32, 34, 147, 149, 167, 173, 180, 181, 182, 184, 186,
47, 51, 53, 54–55, 56, 59, 63, 67, 103, 107, 207, 209, 210, 215, 218, 221, 224, 226, 227,
276 Index of Subjects
viewer (cont.)
228, 230, 231, 232, 236, 237, 238, 239, 241, “Winter Garden Photograph” 27, 194, 209n,
242, 245, 246, 247 See also observer, 226
spectator
“voluntary memories” 7 Zeiss-Ikon 55
voyeur/-ism/-istic 13, 19, 29, 31, 32, 43, 53, 54, Zoom (journal) 85, 88n, 202
55, 56, 60, 70, 71, 72, 90, 92, 161, 162, 186,
236, 243

The Rhetoric of Photography in Modern Japanese Literature

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The Rhetoric of Photography in Modern Japanese Literature

Joshua Mostow (Managing Editor)

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bjsl

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sakaki, Atsuko, 1963–

Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

1 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or Photography as Disturbance to Middle-Brow

2 Anonymously Yours: Abe Kōbō’s Engagement with Photography 57

3 Photography as an Intermediary Art in Horie Toshiyuki 102

4 Photography by Hands in Kanai Mieko’s Narratives 148

My affiliation with the Institute continued as I was invited to join one of

Giorgio Amitrano, Tomoko Aoyama, Reiko Abe Auestad, Anne Bayard-Sakai,

Mostow, who, as a series editor of Brill’s Japanese Studies Library, encouraged

1 Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Jun’ichirō Rokubushū: Yoshinokuzu (Osaka: Sōgensha,

19 The dust jacket of Horie Toshiyuki, Kuma no shikiishi (Tokyo: Kōdansha

AKZ Abe Kōbō. Abe Kōbō zenshū. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1997–2009.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004306998_002

of scholarly publications on Japanese photography and demand more work

focused critical studies of an established author or authors who have engaged

Photography’s Position in the History of Visual Art

Throughout its history photography has been defined in terms of what it is

What Burgin conceptualizes as the gratuitousness of photography is instru-

Each is somehow “distant” from the spectator in certain respects, and

While photographs make their viewers cognizant of a temporal distance from

5 Victor Burgin, “Looking at Photographs,” in Victor Burgin, ed., Thinking Photography

photography’s participation in the formation of subjectivity and communal-

with the quotation from Burgin, photographs’ greater reproducibility, transfer-

The focus of this study is not on books that incorporate photographs to

Our focus, then, is not on what is represented in photographs (as nothing

Against the Transparency of the Observer

This book will also investigate the inter-corporeal relationships between

13 Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, 125–61, 163–93.

What was inevitably felt to be inhuman—one might even say deadly—in

The Making of the Book

15 Victor Burgin, “Looking at Photographs,” in Thinking Photography, 148.

The first chapter investigates Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s effective use of photogra-

would describe the function of the medium, Tanizaki’s photograph viewers

vis-à-vis photography matches his professional repertoire, ranging from com-

written by characters, including but not limited to photographers. Regardless

Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, or Photography as Disturbance

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004306998_003

my engagement with photography focuses on various agents involved in the

Photography vis-à-vis Cinema

Limits of Photographic Authenticity: “Shunkin shō”

9 Tanizaki, “A Portrait of Shunkin,” 9. Tanizaki, “Shunkinshō,” 499.

Images That Blur Memory: “Yume no ukihashi”

I believe photographs promote forgetting. That’s how it tends to

The episode, recollected by the narrator-protagonist of “Yume no ukihashi”

photographer’s manual intervention in itself creates an interface of the

kioku” [not represented verbatim in the translation])—or by the photograph’s

20 Tanizaki, “Yume no ukihashi,” 159. In my own translation.

Identity Lost: “Tomoda to Matsunaga no hanashi”

Photography’s reliability as a scientific technology to enable humans to register

22 Chang Yongsun, “Shashin to monogatari: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō ‘Tomoda to Matsunaga no

them.23 Photography is revealed to be not transparent, but quite the opposite:

The Voyeur’s Body, the Viewer’s Hand: Chijin no ai

In the Pygmalion narrative of Chijin no ai, against the historical backdrop

purpose of photographing Naomi’s face. The description of this “image–text”

“The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis

The fundamental characteristic of photography is that the bond between

Jōji as the photographer acquires intimate knowledge of Naomi the object,

The photographic lexis, a silent rectangle of paper, is much smaller than

close-up portraits of film stars’ faces.33—Though Jōji as the narrator confesses

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/9789004306998_002

5 Victor Burgin, “Looking at Photographs,” in Victor Burgin, ed., Thinking Photography

13 Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, 125–61, 163–93.

15 Victor Burgin, “Looking at Photographs,” in Thinking Photography, 148.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/9789004306998_003

9 Tanizaki, “A Portrait of Shunkin,” 9. Tanizaki, “Shunkinshō,” 499.

20 Tanizaki, “Yume no ukihashi,” 159. In my own translation.

22 Chang Yongsun, “Shashin to monogatari: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō ‘Tomoda to Matsunaga no

51 Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters, 87. Sasameyuki, 141.

53 Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames, 17–40.

55 Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters, 148. Sasameyuki, 241.

63 Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters, 188. Sasameyuki, 309.

64 Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters, 189. Sasameyuki, 310–11.

77 Buse, 199.

1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge,

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/9789004306998_004

5 Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, 163–93.

37 Jean Baudrillard, “The Art of Disappearance,” 7.

54 Abe, “Shōko shashin,” AKZ 26: 448.

64 Toshi o toru, AKZ 26: 442.

66 Jean Baudrillard, “Photography, or Light-Writing Literalness of the Image,” 140.