Channels, Fall 2016

Page 144 Parson • Drawing Is Where the Joy Is monstrous fantastic is unexplained within the characters’ world, and yet the fantastic elements appear exactly as real as the characters themselves and often interact physically with them. In these instances, the fantastic is too far-fetched to be understood as an aspect of literal reality but is not explicitly attributed either to the characters’ subconscious imaginations or to their artistic creations. Loss of Community and Identity Ishii’s use of the monstrous fantastic at the literal, individual, artistic, and structural levels of the film shows clear continuity with Japanese tradition. The quantity and pervasiveness of fantastic elements in the plot resonates with the traditional Japanese focus on the supernatural in literature, while the juxtaposition of the monstrous with contemporary Japanese life identifies The Taste of Tea with other contemporary stories that comment on Japanese culture through the lens of the fantastic. Further, Ishii’s monstrous fantastic matches sociologists’ descriptions of contemporary Japanese anxiety over the loss of community and identity. Marilyn Ivy defines “modernity” in the context of Japanese sociological studies as a state of lost or vanishing identity. She says, “What I mean by ‘modern’…indicates the problem of the nation-state and its correlation with a capitalist colonialism that ensured Japan would be pulled into a global geopolitical matrix from the mid-nineteenth-century on.” Further, she argues that this implies the rise of emphasis on the individual and “new modes of interiority” (11). Ivy identifies the center of this shift in the representation of Japan in art and literature, pointing out the tendency of postmodern stories to reinvent traditional narratives of home and country with “paradoxical inversions” (99). The appearance of an inverted, nostalgic, or otherwise creatively modified notion of nationality or home in art suggests a new shift in the concept of furusato , which spans a range of meanings including “home,” “historic ruins” and “ancient capital” and encompasses both personal memories of place and shared notions of origin that have historically defined Japanese culture. (Ivy 103, Jisho). The idea that contemporary literature about Japan both seeks to recover and attempts to reinvent the homeland resonates with the ideas behind Napier and Yamanaka. By connecting the idea of a lost or changing home with the urge to represent elements of past eras in art and literature, Ivy offers a sociological basis for nostalgic reinventions of Japanese culture in art and predicts the isolation and loss of identity described by Napier and Foster. According to monster theory, the monstrous fantastic in The Taste of Tea ought to reflect and comment on this anxiety over the loss of place and origin. In fact, several of Ishii’s monsters do directly accompany the characters’ individual struggles with uncertainty, change, and the passage of time. Sachiko’s giant double appears in moments of solitude and confronts her with herself, a perfect image for self-doubt. It vanishes only after Sachiko has grown more at peace with herself through hours of practice and finally a successful backflip. The backflip itself cannot simply have been the magical incantation to dispel a haunting apparition because Sachiko chose it after hearing the story of Ayano’s ghost. In Ayano’s case, however, the narrator steps in to inform viewers that the backflip itself simply coincided with the final investigation and interment of the yakuza’s bones. This indicates that the backflip itself has no inherent power except as an activity through which