Channels, Fall 2016

Channels • 2016 • Volume 1 • Number 1 Page 139 “Drawing Is Where the Joy Is”: Cultural Anxiety, the Monstrous Fantastic, and the Artist as Mediator in Katsuhito Ishii’s The Taste of Tea Elise M. Parsons English, Literature, and Modern Languages — Cedarville University Introduction n his 1962 paper Monstrosity and the Monstrou s, George Canguilhem suggested that images of the monstrous in art and literature offer a lens which identifies the objects of fear and uncertainty in culture, because images of the monstrous suggest an underlying concern that the world may not actually be as we perceive and rationalize it. As he put it, “the existence of monsters throws doubt on the ability of life to teach us order” (1). By questioning the rationality or comprehensibility of life, monsters betray the underlying fear of the uncontrollable unknown. Jeffery Jerome Cohen explains that images of the monstrous are a crystalized form of cultural anxiety portrayed back to culture by its artists and writers. “The monstrous body is pure culture,” he explains, “the monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place” (4). According to Cohen, the monstrous exists as a placeholder to fill an epistemological gap between our knowledge of the present and uncertainty of the future. It embodies a shared sense of unease at something we know we do not know. This makes monster theory a powerful tool for discussing the collective unease of a particular culture at a particular time and has made it, as Lisa Grumbach points out, an increasingly popular method of analysis among sociologists in the last decade. Grumbach identifies the monstrous as a hybrid “other” who delivers criticism of culture by threatening both society and the individual. Further, the monstrous is always associated with unhealthy exaggeration, perversion, deformity, and cruelty (95). In The Taste of Tea , Katsuhito Ishii combines the sinister connotations of the monstrous with the lively tradition of the fantastic in Japanese popular culture to create a broad and varied category of exaggerated and improbable events that both reference past images of the monstrous and threaten contemporary society in new ways. In this paper, I refer to the cross section of events and characters that exaggerate, hybridize, or defy realistic depiction and pose some threat to the individual or the society as the “monstrous fantastic” and seek to demonstrate that understanding the role of the monstrous fantastic is key to understanding the social message of the film. Unlike the work of contemporary dystopian and pulp writers, however, Ishii defies explanation purely through an understanding of his perception of culture. Instead, his work demands that the reader understand culture as he sees it in order to grasp his view of the responsibility and impact of the individual. In The Taste of Tea , Ishii I