International Comparative Literature

VOL.3 NO.2 (2020): 289– 300

DOI: 10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.2020325
Copyright © Shanghai Normal University

From Monroe to Mishima: Gender and Cultural Identity in

Yasumasa Morimura’s Performance and Photography*
从玛丽莲 · 梦露到三岛由纪夫
——森村泰昌的表演和摄影艺术中的性别与文化身份
黄碧赫 海德堡大学
HUANG Bihe Heidelberg University
b.huang@stud.uni-heidelberg.de

Abstract: Japanese contemporary artist Yasumasa Morimura is renowned for

his parodies of female characters in Western paintings and film stars in Western
mainstream movies through performance and photography. In this essay, through
an analysis of Morimura’s Marilyn Series (1996) and“Seasons of Passion”
(2006), the first chapter of his recent project, A Requiem, I will investigate
Morimura’s performance and photography from a gendered perspective. With
a comparison between Monroe’s image in the film still of The Seven Year Itch
(1955) and Morimura’s Self-Portrait (Actress) / White Marilyn and Self-Portrait
(Actress) / White Marilyn, this essay will also examine how Morimura challenges
the male gaze of the heterosexual male and fixed gender identity with his male
body. By contextualizing his works in the US-Japan relations in the postwar
period, I will also explore the connections between the two appropriated figures,
Marilyn Monroe and Yukio Mishima, and see how Morimura intersects gender
identity of the self with the cultural gender of a nation. By making comparisons
between the original images of Mishima in Eikoh Hosoe’s photo album Ordeal
by Roses and Morimura’s appropriations in“Seasons of Passion,”this essay
will show how Japan’s cultural gender identity is addressed in Morimura’s
appropriation practices.
Keywords:Yasumasa Morimura; Yukio Mishima; Marilyn Monroe; gender;
cultural identity
Notes on Author: HUANG Bihe is currently a PhD candidate in the
Institute of East Asian Art History, Center for Asian and Transcultural Studies,
Heidelberg University, Germany, after she gained her BA and MA in art history
from China Central Academy of Fine Arts. Her research interest includes the
history of modern and contemporary art, art criticism, and transcultural visual
studies.

* Submitted Date: Jan. 12, 2020; Accepted Date: Apr. 10, 2020.
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J apanese contemporary artist Yasumasa Morimura ( 森村泰昌，b. 1951) is best known for
his appropriations of female characters in canonical Western paintings and famous actresses
in Western mainstream movies. As an Asian male, Morimura’s parodies of Western females
not only engage with gender issues but also generate discussions on the cultural identity of
the Japanese as a whole. In Self-Portrait as Actress series (1996), first displayed in his solo
exhibition The Sickness unto Beauty: Self-Portrait as Actress in the Yokohama Museum of Art,
Morimura performed well-known actresses with erotic poses, among which are three large-
scale pieces regarding the American film star Marilyn Monroe, respectively Self-Portrait
(Actress) /Red Marilyn, Self-Portrait (Actress) / Black Marilyn, and Self-Portrait (Actress) /
White Marilyn. Besides photographic appropriations, in 1995, Morimura, masquerading as
Marilyn Monroe, did an unexpected performance at Building 900, University of Tokyo. (Fig.
1) The location where Morimura’s performance event took place caught my attention, as 25
years before Morimura’s performance, in the same lecture room, Yukio Mishima ( 三 岛 由 纪
夫，1925–1970), one of the most celebrated novelists of postwar Japan, held a heated debate
with leftist students during the peak of the student movement in the late 1960s. (Fig. 2) Why did
Morimura choose this particular place? What is the link between Marilyn Monroe and Yukio
Mishima?
With these questions in mind, I will examine a recent project by Morimura, entitled A
Requiem (2006), in which Morimura parodies historical and cultural icons of the twentieth
century. In the first chapter of this project, Morimura appropriates Ordeal by Roses, a series of eight
images of Yukio Mishima (first published in 1963), made by photographer Eikoh Hosoe (细江英公，
b. 1933), an essential figure in the avant-garde art movement of postwar Japan. Why did Morimura
perform Mishima as well as Monroe? One is an American sex symbol; the other is a Japanese
male writer—although both are cultural icons in their respective countries. In this essay, with an
analysis of the Marilyn Series and the first chapter of A Requiem, I will investigate the connection
between these two appropriated figures from a gender perspective. In addition, by contextualizing
the works within the political and cultural relationship between the United States and Japan in the
postwar period, I will explore how the cultural identity of Japan is addressed in Morimura’s artistic
practices.

Fig. 1: Yukio Mishima debating at the student movement Fig. 2: Yasumasa Morimura, Marilyn in
meeting at Building 900, The University of Tokyo, 1969. Komaba, performance at Building 900. The
University of Tokyo, Komaba Campus, 1995.

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Regarding Morimura’s early works, such as the actress series, there is already plentiful
research in the English-speaking world. For example, Japanese art historian Kaori Chino’s essay
“A Man Pretending to Be a Woman: On Yasumasa Morimura’s Actresses”(translated by Reiko
Tomii) for the catalogue of Morimura’s solo exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art discusses
how Morimura’s cross-dressing photographs nullify the violent masculine gaze with his exposed
male body. By making comparisons between Morimura and American artist Cindy Sherman, who
is also famous for posing as charming actresses in popular film stills, Kaori Chino argues that
as a male, Morimura’s transvestite images accomplish what female artists could not.1 Included
in the same catalogue, American art historian Norman Bryson’s article“Morimura: 3 Readings”
interprets Morimura’s works from a transcultural perspective, which inspires my main arguments
in this essay. Taking Morimura’s parody of Manet’s Olympia (1865) as an example, Norman
Bryson analyses the undertone of Morimura’s cross-dressing performance—the different gender
roles of Asia and Europe and how Asian males are feminized by the European imaginary. 2 A more
recent article entitled“Understanding through the Body: The Masquerades of Yukio Mishima and
Yasumasa Morimura,”written by Australian scholar Vera Mackie, is more relevant to the questions
I raised above. In her essay, by comparing Morimura’s and Mishima’s displays of their bodies,
Vera Mackie argues that though both are engaged in transcultural or transgendered masquerades,
Morimura’s masquerade is mainly a critique of fetishistic anxiety of image production in this male-
dominated society. In contrast, Mishima’s exhibiting of his body is more about self-obsession and
his ideal masculine body. Although Vera Mackie investigates the connections between Morimura
and Mishima from the perspective of gender theory and points out a similar question regarding
Morimura’s performance at the University of Tokyo, she does not analyze the works in their
own historical and cultural contexts. Furthermore, she fails to examine Morimura’s performing
as Mishima based on the Ordeal by Roses photographs created by Hosoe Eikoh.3 Apart from
research by art historians and critics, as a productive writer, Morimura interprets his own works
comprehensively in books, interviews, and speeches, which provide significant references for my
investigation of his artistic practice.

Performing Monroe
In Self-Portrait (Actress) / White Marilyn (Fig. 3), a piece in his Marilyn Series, Morimura
wears a white dress and poses as Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch (1955) directed by Billy
Wilder. In the film, a middle-aged married man becomes obsessed with his new neighbor, a sexy
young actress played by Marilyn Monroe. Morimura appropriates the most famous and erotic
scene in this film, in which Monroe’s dress is blown upwards by the wind from a subway gate.
Typecast as an innocent dumb blonde, Monroe enjoys the cool breeze without noticing the gaze of
the married man in the dark who is attracted to her (Fig. 4). As one of the best-known sex symbols
of 1950s America, Marilyn Monroe is a successful product of the mainstream film industry, being

1 Kaori Chino,“A Man Pretending to Be a Woman: On Yasumasa Morimura’s Actresses,”in Morimura Yasumasa:

The Sickness unto Beauty — Self-Portrait as Actress, ed. Yokohama Museum of Art (Yokohama: Yokohama Museum of Art,
1996), 157–62.
2 Norman Bryson,“Morimura: 3 Readings,”in Morimura Yasumasa: The Sickness unto Beauty Self-Portrait as
—
Actress (Yokohama: Yokohama Museum of Art, 1996), 74–79.
3 Vera C. Mackie,“Understanding through the Body: The Masquerades of Mishima Yukio and Morimura

Yasumasa,”in Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan, eds. Mark McLelland and Romit Dasgupta (New York:
Routledge, 2005), 126–44.

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Fig. 3: Yasumasa Morimura, Self-Portrait (Actress) / White Marilyn, Fig. 4: The Seven Year Itch, directed by
1996 Billy Wilder, starring Marilyn Monroe
and Tom Ewell, stage photo, 1955.

the erotic object of the male gaze of the film audience. However, when heterosexual viewers look
at Self-Portrait (Actress) / White Marilyn, they probably become excited at the first glimpse but
immediately feel annoyed or startled by Morimura’s unlovely, middle-aged face, as well as the
muscular legs that reveal his male features.
In her essay“A Man Pretending to Be a Woman: On Yasumasa Morimura’s Actresses,”Kaori
Chino compares Morimura’s actress series with works by American female artist Cindy Sherman.
Both Morimura and Sherman make parodies of images of well-known actresses in Western film
stills as a way of questioning the objectification of the female body in consumer culture. What
marks the distinction between the two artists is not only their racial features, one being Western,
the other Asian, but also their sexual difference. Thus, Morimura’s appropriation of female
sex stars has an effect on the viewer contradistinctive from Sherman’s work. As Kaori Chino
puts it:

No one can stop the process of commodity consumption. As long as one tries to critique the
female stereotype by using the female body, the work falls prey to the violent“masculine
gaze”of heterosexual men in the consumerist society, offering them a“pleasure of seeing”…
one’s work, whatever representation one seeks to produce, is bound to become an object of
heterosexual male desire—as long as one uses the flesh of the female body.4

Kaori Chino interrogates the validity of female artists’ use of their own bodies to challenge male
dominance because they are ultimately betrayed by their female characteristics and become
trophies of what they protest against. In contrast, with his sexed male body, Morimura invalidates
the masculine gaze of the heterosexual male. Thus, Morimura’s parody of Monroe manages to
free the actress, and, to a broader extent, the female in general from the power of the male gaze.
Furthermore, with his transvestite performance, Morimura downplays the rigid binary of gender

4 Chino,“A Man Pretending to Be a Woman: On Yasumasa Morimura’s Actresses,”161.

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and sexual identity by placing himself in an ambiguous realm of neither-male-nor-female. By

performing a female role in a male body, he crosses the gendered boundary and produces a
bewildering effect on not only the heterosexual male but also the viewer as a whole. In this sense,
his drag act illustrates Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. As Bulter argues, gender is
constituted through performative acts. Gender identity is a compelling illusion.5
The second piece in the Marilyn Series, entitled Self-Portrait (Actress) / Black Marilyn,
is quite different from Marilyn’s original film still. The direction of Monroe’s pose is changed.
In the film still, Marilyn looks over her left shoulder, while in Morimura’s parody, he gazes over
his right shoulder, which seems more provocative. Besides, Morimura also changes the color
of Monroe’s dress, from the white one that indicates purity and innocence to a black one that
suggests viciousness and hidden power. In this way, the imagery of the ideal female in Western
norms exemplified by Monroe, which is aesthetically characterized as pleasing and sublime, is
deconstructed. What is more, in the film still, when Monroe puts her hands on her billowing dress
to prevent it from being blown up by the wind, this act does not stop but stimulates the male sexual
fantasies. By contrast, in Morimura’s parody, he boldly lifts up his black dress with his right hand
and shows his male sex organ, which is definitely the most radical aspect of Morimura’s piece.
Compared to Monroe’s hidden secret private parts in the film still, Morimura unmasks Monroe’s
sex, which disappointingly turns out to be a male one. As Baudrillard points out, the unveiled
obscene body has no secret and is not seductive, because“there is nothing seductive about bodies
traversed by a gaze literally sucked in by a vacuum of transparency.”6 In this way, the obscene
exposure of Morimura’s sex organ undoes the desire and fantasy of the heterosexual male viewer.
It is not only because the genitalia is a male rather than a female one, but also because the exposed
genitalia dispels seduction and voyeurism.
To further interpret the exposure of the male sex organ in Morimura’s appropriation, I intend
to use psychoanalytic film theories proposed by British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, which
is deeply indebted to theories of Sigmund Freud (1856—1939) and Jacques Lacan (1901—1981). In
her groundbreaking essay,“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”(1975), Laura Mulvey argues
that the female figure’s lack of penis always implies“a threat of castration and hence unpleasure,”
and“thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers
of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified.”7 Mulvey also points
out that in mainstream Hollywood films there are two avenues to escape from castration anxiety
caused by the female figure: one is“complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a
fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring
rather than dangerous.”8 The typical strategy is to create“the cult of the female star”by“building
up the physical beauty of the object and transforming it into something satisfying in itself.”9 To
this extent, the cult of Marilyn Monroe as a superstar is a typical result of getting rid of the male
audience’s castration anxiety, and the fact that she lacks a penis makes the actress a fetish. If
building up the cult of a female film star is a way of fetishizing an actress, then what Morimura

5 Judith Butler,“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,”
Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519—20.
6 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1990), 34—35.
7 Laura Mulvey,“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,”in Film Theory and Criticism: Introduction Readings, eds.

Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 840.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.

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does in Self-Portrait (Actress) / Black Marilyn can be seen as a process of de-fetishization. The
exposure of Morimura’s penis overcomes the castration anxiety of the male viewer, making
the fetishization of the female figure meaningless. This piece, like Self-Portrait (Actress) /
White Marilyn discussed above, also frees the female character from being the object of male
pleasure.
What makes Self-Portrait (Actress) / Black Marilyn even more unexpected is that Morimura
does not expose his own penis; instead, he covers his penis with an artificial one. Why does
Morimura put double phalluses instead of merely showing his penis? By situating the two pieces
in Marilyn Series within larger contexts, especially the relationship between the United States
and Japan in the postwar period, the two artworks can also be interpreted from a transcultural and
gendered perspective. After World War II, Japan, as a defeated country, was occupied by the Allied
Powers, and its armed forces were abolished. At the same time, American culture increasingly
became the world’s dominant culture, spreading its popular-cultural production, represented by
Hollywood movies, to every corner of the world. As a country occupied by the US army and
financially dependent on the US, Japan was a target of American popular culture. To address the
gender and transcultural issues in Morimura’s Marilyn Series, I will first divide the two countries’
populations into four groups, respectively: the American male, the American female, the Japanese
male, and the Japanese female. In the patriarchal social system, the female in both countries is
dominated by the male. However, the interrelation between the Japanese male and the American
female is a bit more complicated. There exists a two-way tension between these two groups.
Take Monroe as an example: on the one hand, as a successful production of the Hollywood film
industry, she is consumed by the heterosexual male in Japan as an object of sexual fantasies. On
the other hand, as an American cultural icon, Monroe is like a soft weapon helping the dominant
American culture conquer the world and serving as a tool of cultural propaganda. In this sense,
Japanese males, with Morimura as a representative, are not only consumers but also targets of the
dominant American culture.
Besides the political and cultural relations between postwar Japan and the US, which helps
contextualize Morimura’s posing as Monroe, in his article,“Morimura: 3 Readings,”American art
historian Norman Bryson traces back to the nineteenth century when Japan was forced to open to
the West. He argues that there has been a Western stereotype of“Japan-as-woman”since the mid-
nineteenth century. Bryson writes:

A forcible entry at gunpoint, followed by the humiliating Unequal Trades Treaties. The West
thinks of itself as masculine—big guns, big industry, big money—so the East is feminine—
weak, delicate, poor—but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom—the feminine mystique.
Morimura’s cross-dressing in fact brings into view two different Eurocentric constructions of
Asia. The first is Asia as feminine. The second concerns the European imaginary’s feminization
of the Asian male.10

Bryson’s analysis associates Morimura’s masquerades with the gender role of Japan or broadly
speaking, Asia, in contrast with the West. Therefore, Morimura’s posing as Monroe is a
bidirectional crossing of sexuality, gender, and race. In terms of sexuality, Monroe’s female body
is substituted by Morimura’s male body; in terms of cultural gender of a nation, the Western
masculinity is replaced by the Japanese femininity. The“Japan-as-woman,”which is presented

10 Bryson,“Morimura: 3 Readings,”163—64.

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by a Japanese male, is exposed to the Western masculine gaze. In this sense, Morimura queers the
power relationship between the viewer and the performer by celebrating hybridity of femininity
and masculinity, male and female, West and East, all of which are intertwined in one drag act.
Regarding the extra artificial penis displayed in Self-Portrait (Actress) / Black Marilyn, Asian men
are often seen as undersexed from the racialized perspective of Western masculinity. As Richard
Fung argues, in the eyes of Westerners, Americans in particular, compared to the black man who
11
is turned into a penis,“the Asian man is defined by a striking absence down there.” It is tempting
to interpret the extra artificial penis as adding masculinity to the feminized Japanese male as well
as Japanese culture. However, as the extra penis is a fake one, Morimura’s display of masculine
potency does not reject the Western stereotypes of Asian men’s lack of masculinity; instead, it
can be interpreted as a self-mockery, since the overplay of the double penises, in a way, ironically
reinforces the stereotypes.

Performing Mishima
As discussed earlier, Japan’s cultural gender role does not stay the same. Kaori Chino, in her
influential essay“Gender in Japanese Art,”investigates the change of Japan’s cultural gender over
art history. Compared to the masculine Kara (China), femininity is the culturally and artistically
dominant mode in Japan before the Meiji period,
and“it does not at all mean‘female’but rather
the‘feminine’embodied by‘men,’which is
also what the emperor signifies as a system.”12 In
the modern era,“the Japanese sought to imitate
the‘West,’in place of Kara, and to assume the
opposite gender role of‘masculine’.”13 During
this time, Japan attempted to colonize various Asian
countries, Korea, in particular, by imprisoning these
countries“in a‘feminine’role in relation to Japan’s
‘masculine’identity.”14 However, after being
defeated during the Second World War, Japan’s
gender role sharply changed.
Morimura once used two pictures to make a
comparison between the Meiji period and postwar
Japan. He showed a portrait of the Meiji Emperor
in 1868, the year when the Tokugawa Shogunate
was overthrown, and the Meiji Restoration took
place, and a picture of Emperor Hirohito and US Fig. 5: Japanese Emperor Hirohito and US General
General Douglas MacArthur taken in 1945, shortly Douglas MacArthur at their first meeting. The US
after Japan’s surrender in World War II. (Fig. 5) Embassy, Tokyo, September 27, 1945.

11 Richard Fung,“Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn,”in A Companion to Asian

American Studies, ed. Kent A. Ono (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 237.
12 Kaori Chino,“Gender in Japanese Art,”in Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field, eds. Joshua S. Mostow,

Norman Bryson, and Maribeth Graybill (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), 32.
13 Ibid., 33.
14 Ibid.

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In the first picture, wearing a military uniform, the Meiji Emperor looks like a powerful man.
He also has an impressive mustache, which is a primary symbol of masculinity.15 As Morimura
argues,“［i］n this way, as the Tokugawa Shogunate transitioned into the Meiji era, the emperor
changed his political gender from female to male.”16 In the picture taken seventy-seven years
later, however, compared to the tall General MacArthur in a relaxed posture, Hirohito looks small
and humiliated, due not only to the height difference between the two but also his country being
defeated and occupied. In Morimura’s eyes, it is like a wedding picture, General MacArthur being
the husband and Hirohito, the wife. The historical fact behind this visual contrast is that“Japan, as
a nation, survived after the war because the country accepted this perceived‘feminization,’and its
dependency on the United States.”17
Morimura recalled that he was shocked by Mishima’s suicide after his failed coup at the
headquarters of the Self-Defense Forces in Tokyo in 1970 and continuously thought about the link
between Mishima’s unexpected act and Japan’s gender role in the postwar US-Japan relations. In
2006, Morimura began a major project entitled A Requiem. In this project, which consists of four
chapters, Morimura parodies images of cultural and historical icons of the twentieth century. In
the first chapter,“Seasons of Passion,”Morimura poses as Yukio Mishima based on the Ordeal
by Roses photographs. In Hosoe’s photo album, Mishima presents himself as various highly
masculinized personae, such as boxer, soldier, and samurai. In some of the photographs, his
muscular body is juxtaposed with images of Italian Renaissance paintings, for example, Sandro
Botticelli’s (1445—1510) Birth of Venus (ca.1486) and Givanni Antonio Boltraffio’s (1467—1516)
The Virgin and Child (ca.1493), which are selected from Mishima’s collection of Western art
reproductions. In some other pieces, Mishima is situated in his residence, surrounded by his
collections of European artifacts.18 In homage to Mishima, Morimura entitles his series Beyond
Ordeal by Roses, in which Morimura shows his understandings of cultural gender issues in
Mishima’s display of his body in the original photo album.
In his writings and speeches, Mishima constantly expresses his concerns about the fading
masculinity of Japanese culture. For instance, in an interview with Philip Shabecoff, a journalist
from The New York Times, Mishima says,

Since World War II, the feminine tradition has been emphasized to the exclusion of the
masculine. We wanted to cover our consciences. So we gave great publicity to the fact that
we are peace-loving people who love flower-arranging and gardens and that sort of thing. It
was purposely done. The Government wanted to cover our masculine tradition from the eyes
of foreigners as a kind of protection. It worked. The wives of American occupation officers
became enchanted with the flower-arranging and the rest of“Japanese culture.”But we have

15 For a comprehensive analysis of the constitution of masculinities and nationalism in Meiji Japan, see Jason G.

Karlin,“The Gender of Nationalism: Competing Masculinities in Meiji Japan,”Journal of Japanese Studies 28, no.1
(2002): 41—77.
16 Yasumasa Morimura,“Why I Posed as Yukio Mishima, Or, The Relationship of 3 M’s: MacArthur, Mishima,

Morimura,”a speech at Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture, Columbia University, NY, April 14, 2010, http://www.
keenecenter.org/download_files/MorimuraSpeech.pdf［December 27, 2019］.
17 Ibid.
18 For a detailed investigation of Hosoe’s Ordeal by Roses, see Yayoi Shionoiri,“Nihilist Nationalist or Syncretic

Hybridist: A Visual Analysis of the Representations of Mishima Yukio in the 1985 Edition of Barakei,”in Beyond
Boundaries: East and West Cross-Cultural Encounters, ed. Michelle Ying Ling Huang (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2011), 170—91.

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Fig. 6: Yasumasa Morimura, Beyond Ordeal Fig. 7: Yukio Mishima, photographed by

by Roses: the Black Lizard IS Lodged in My Eikoh Hosoe for Ordeal by Roses, 1961.
Brain, in“Seasons of Passion,”Chapter
One of A Requiem, 2006.

also hidden this“rough-soul”tradition from ourselves.19

While Mishima on his own could not change the cultural gender of his country as a whole,
he successfully turned himself from a delicate literary youth to a muscular man. In the 1950s,
Mishima started boxing training and bodybuilding, both of which were practiced for the rest of
his life.20 In Morimura’s words, Mishima’s body training is not only about a physical change in
appearance, but also“a spiritual sex change from female to male.”21 When Mishima performed
in Ordeal by Roses in the early 1960s, his suntanned skin and well-developed muscles are
highlighted in almost every piece in the photo album. Take Beyond Ordeal by Roses: the Black
Lizard is Lodged in My Brain (Fig. 6) as an example: in the original work (Fig. 7), Mishima stares
determinedly into the camera, with a hammer in his right hand toward his head and a pipe wrapped
around his neck. His masculinity is emphasized by the determined eyes and clenched fist. The
pipe and the iron hammer indicate Mishima’s fantasies of violence and Sadomasochist practices,
which can be easily associated with his brutal suicide seven years after the photo was taken. He,
like a Japanese Samurai, committed Seppuku (ritual disembowelment) and was beheaded by an
attendant.
At first glimpse, the viewer probably could not find much difference between the original
and the parody; thus, making a visual comparison between the original image of Mishima and
Morimura’s new version is much harder than that between Monroe and Morimura. In the latter
case, the difference between the two is obvious—a Western female versus a Japanese male—

19 Philip Shabecoff,“Everyone in Japan Has Heard of Him,”The New York Times, August 2, 1970.
20 Henry Scott Stokes, The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima (New York: Cooper Square, 2000), 183—84.
21 Morimura,“Why I Posed as Yukio Mishima, Or, The Relationship of 3 M’s: MacArthur, Mishima, Morimura.”

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while in the former one, both are Japanese males. Also, Morimura’s postures and the settings are
almost the same as those in Mishima’s original photos. Even though Morimura’s series is mainly
considered as a homage, he indeed offers a critical reading of Mishima’s performative photographs
by selecting and renaming certain works from the original photo album. In this work, Beyond
Ordeal by Roses: the Black Lizard IS Lodged in My Brain, there exist hints in the new title, in
which“Black Lizard”are the keywords. Black Lizard (1968) is a detective movie based on a
novel of the same name by Japanese writer Edogawa Rampo ( 江户川乱步，1894—1965), adapted
to the stage by Yukio Mishima. In the film, Black Lizard is a powerful woman, the leader of a
criminal gang. She is obsessed with beautiful bodies and has her own private museum displaying
perfect female and male bodies. Yukio Mishima plays a man who is killed by Black Lizard’s
criminal gang, made into a specimen, and exhibited in her body museum, representing the perfect
muscular male body. While the photo album Ordeal by Roses documents the body of Mishima
in its best shape, preserving his body in the museum accords with what Eikoh Hosoe says in the
photographer’s notes on Ordeal by Roses,“Mishima never admitted the decay of the flesh.”22
However, in Morimura’s parodical piece, the title, Black Lizard IS in My Brain, subtly mocks
Mishima’s self-obsession and the imaged identity of masculinity stuck in his head. It is also closely
related to Mishima’s ultranationalist attempts to rebel against Japan’s postwar pacifist constitution
in defense of the authority of the Japanese Emperor. While the muscled man Mishima plays in the
film is killed by the powerful woman Black Lizard, in reality, Mishima destroyed his own body
after his radical masculinization project, for the country was proved a total failure due to a lack of
support from his people. The Black Lizard in Morimura’s piece not only refers to the woman gang
leader in the film, but also ironically suggests feminized Japan as a nation. In another similar piece
called Beyond Ordeal by Roses: The Black Lizard Is Still Alive! (Fig. 8), Morimura (Mishima) is
lying on the ground, also with a pipe wrapped around his body. In the parodical work, Morimura
changes the Japanese ornamental sculptures of the original piece (Fig. 9) into Western ones. The
two ancient Greek statues, representing the most beautiful male bodies in Western norms, are
confronted with Morimura’s Asian body. The title, The Black Lizard Is Still Alive, seems to remind
the Japanese that even though Mishima’s postwar time has gone, the cultural gender of Japan has
not changed. There still exists a dual affliction. They are tortured by the masculine West as well as
feminine Japan.

Fig. 8: Yasumasa Morimura, Beyond Ordeal by Roses: Fig. 9: Yukio Mishima, photographed by Eikoh Hosoe
The Black Lizard Is Still Alive!, in“Seasons of Passion,” for Ordeal by Roses, 1961.
Chapter One of A Requiem, 2006.

22 Eikoh Hosoe, Barakei: Ordeal by Roses: Photographs of Yukio Mishima (New York: Aperture, 1985), unpaginated.

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 从玛丽莲·梦露到三岛由纪夫 299
From Monroe to Mishima

Conclusion
As mentioned at the beginning of this essay, Morimura’s performance Marilyn in Komaba at
Building 900, The University of Tokyo, makes a connection between Monroe and Mishima, the
two cultural icons in postwar US and Japan respectively, as the building is also where Mishima
delivered a speech at the peak of the student turbulence provoked by Japan’s subordination to
American security policies. With his male body, Morimura’s performance of Monroe invalidates
the male gaze and the objectification of the female body in consumer culture. His transvestite
masquerades challenge the fixed gender identity by situating the viewer in a hybrid realm of
gender and sexual ambiguity. By intersecting the gender identity of an individual with the
metaphorical cultural identity of a nation, Morimura contextualizes his performance of Monroe,
a representative of the American cultural hegemony, in the Japan-US relations, and interrogates
the feminized gender role of Japan in the postwar period. Morimura’s performance of Mishima
is not simply a homage to Mishima’s masculinization project of his own body and his martyrial
attempts to change Japan’s gender role. It also thwarts Mishima’s obsession with the hyper-
masculinized persona and his adhesion to the bygone masculine identity of Japan. Morimura’s
play with the gendered identity of the self and the nation can be considered as a good illustration
of José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of gendered disidentification. As Muñoz puts it,“Disidentification
is a performative mode of tactical recognition that various minoritarian subjects employ
in an effort to resist the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology. It is a
reformatting of self within the social. It is a third term that resists the binary of identification and
counteridentification.”23

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Butler, Judith.“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.”Theatre
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University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 97.

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INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

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摘要：日本当代艺术家森村泰昌以他戏仿西方经典绘画和电影剧照中的女性形象的表演和摄影闻
名。本文以森村泰昌戏仿美国电影明星玛丽莲·梦露的《玛丽莲系列》 （1996）和近期完成的项目《安
魂曲》中挪用日本作家三岛由纪夫形象的“烈火的季节”一章（2006）为例，从性别研究的角度分析森
村泰昌的表演和摄影作品。通过比较玛丽莲·梦露在《七年之痒》剧照中的形象与森村泰昌的《自画
像（女演员）/ 白色玛丽莲》和《自画像（女演员）/ 黑色玛丽莲》，考察艺术家如何通过自己的男性身体
挑战异性恋男性的凝视和固化的性别身份。同时，作者将艺术家的作品放置在战后美日关系的语境之
中，分析两位被挪用对象玛丽莲·梦露和三岛由纪夫之间的联系。通过比较三岛由纪夫在《蔷薇刑》
（细江英公 摄）中的形象和森村泰昌在“烈火的季节”中的戏仿，探寻森村泰昌如何由个体的性别展演
透视国家的文化性别。
关键词：森村泰昌；三岛由纪夫；玛丽莲·梦露；性别；文化身份
作者简介：黄碧赫，德国海德堡大学跨文化研究中心东亚艺术史研究所博士候选人。2009 —2016
年在中央美术学院学习，获美术史本科、艺术学硕士学位。研究兴趣主要包括现当代艺术史、艺术批
评、跨文化视觉研究。

2020 年第  3  卷第  2  期