Ambiguous Bodies is a highly informative study on the Japanese tales in which bodies, both human and nonhuman and both whole and dismembered, are projected to signify socio-political environments of the Heian (794–1192) and Kamakura (1192–1333) periods. In Ambiguous Bodies, Michelle Osterfeld Li has invested an enormous amount of work to help open up the rich world of the fantastic in premodern Japan.
The book consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 gives comprehensible explanations of the term setsuwa, how it was used in the premodern times, and how the new meanings emerged during the Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishô (1912–1926) periods as part of defining national literature. Li draws on various sources from Japanese and English-speaking scholars; her study thus represents a very useful summary of how the term setsuwa has been used in Japanese literature and folklore. While there are a number of interpretations of setsuwa, Li understands the term in her Ambiguous Bodies as “short Japanese tales that depict extraordinary events, illustrate basic Buddhist principles or, less frequently, other Asian religious and philosophical teachings, and transmit cultural and historical knowledge. These narratives were compiled from roughly the ninth through mid-fourteenth centuries in collections such as Konjaku monogatari shû (Tales of Times Now Past, ca. 1120)” (1). Indeed, Konjaku monogatari shû is her main source for the study. The summary of setsuwa is followed by the survey of various theories of “grotesque” that emerged in the West, and the explication of her position to apply the theories, mostly from Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World. Based upon “Setsuwa and the Grotesque” of chapter 1, specific tales of diverse representations of the grotesque are examined in detail from chapters 2 through 6. Chapter 2, “Fantastic Detached Body Parts,” examines three tales, “Battling Heads,” “The Beckoning Hand,” and “Disappearing Penises,” that illustrate social and political struggles between men. Chapter 3, “Curious Sexual Encounters,” studies stories of the female body, a site of copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth that functions to debase or undermine authority. In chapters 4, “Who Eats Whom? Flesh-Eating Demons and Political Power Struggles,” and 5, “The Feminization of Demons,” Li demonstrates through the tales of flesh-eating demons the fears, aspirations, and political intrigues of the Japanese during the classical and early medieval periods. The final chapter, “Animal Spirits,” examines the spirits of animals such as foxes, monkeys, and wild boars to decode their implications in setsuwa in relation to the human world and the audience perception of the given stories.
As Li demonstrates throughout her book, the grotesque described in setsuwa is a significant trope in Japanese culture. The study of the fantastic in Japan has increasingly become an object of scholarly attention in recent decades. Li’s Ambiguous Bodies is a welcome contribution to the scholarship of the fantastic that plays a major role in both high and low culture. Li’s analysis of the tales of the grotesque, utilizing scholarly research of historical and biographical information, gives insight into what the particular setsuwa tell us about then-contemporary political changes and/or shifts. These tales of the grotesque, often in the author’s own entertaining translation, are not only fascinating in themselves but also reveal how the Japanese and their society at large engaged with the fantastic in the Heian and Kamakura periods.
--------
[Review length: 549 words • Review posted on February 16, 2011]