海角社区

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• 鈥淲eeping for 鈥榯he Person Outside鈥欌��: Lamenting Their Husbands鈥� Death

Lingheng He, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of East Asian Studies, 海角社区

For married women in historical China, losing their husbands referred to losing their primary identities of wives in the Confucian patriarchal society, concomitant with a series of problems including emotional breakdowns, moral dilemmas, and disorders in domestic lives. By focusing on Ming-Qing women鈥檚 poetry mourning their husbands, this study investigates women鈥檚 literary representation of grief and conjugal relationships at the loss of their husbands and discusses how, through these representations, women expressed their emotional struggles regarding marital lives and discovered selfhoods in tension with the Confucian gender norms.

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• State Critique and Lyric Horror in听The Deserted City听by Obayashi Nobuhiko

Marianne Tarcov,听Assistant Professor, Department of East Asian Studies, 海角社区

In 1911, the Japanese poet Kitahara Hakush奴 (1885-1942) published the collection听Memories听about his childhood in the small town of Yanagawa, a town he calls "the deserted city." Kitahara critiques听the Japanese state's efforts to bring Western-style modernity to his hometown, commenting on everything from the Meiji state's imposition of modern clock time, to public health, to increasing censorship and surveillance.听In 1984, horror director Obayashi Nobuhiko (1938-2020), famous for his 1977 masterpiece听House, revisited听Memories听in his film听The Deserted City.听The town of Yanagawa, crisscrossed with a decaying, polluted canal system dating to the Tokugawa Period, becomes a reminder of a recent yet premodern past, reminiscent of Freud's notion of the uncanny as the return of the repressed, a hallmark of the horror genre.

Why would a horror filmmaker known for his wild, over-the-top style revisit a decades-old poetry collection characterized by subtlety and restraint? I suggest that it is Kitahara Hakush奴's critique of the Japanese state's coercive imposition of modernity that draws Obayashi to his work. Obayashi provides a transtemporal critique of capitalistic modernity and its obsession with productivity and speed during the 1980s, Japan's period of high economic growth.听

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