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Abjection of Horror in Cynthia Kadohata's The Floating World
Published in Tinker Bell (JSCLE) 53.
Introduction
Cynthia Kadohata's The Floating World (1989), published during the Asian-American Renaissance, is a postmodern1 and picaresque2 coming-of-age story narrated by a twelve-year-old Japanese American girl, Olivia Osaka. She describes how her family drifted on the road from Oregon through California to Arkansas searching for a home and economic security in post-World War II America. Her quest for female identity is triggered by the death of her grandmother, called “Obāsan,” who has often told Olivia stories of her difficult life in “ukiyo,” a Japanese word literally meaning “the floating world.” In the original Japanese, the word “ukiyo” has two different spellings that represent quite opposite meanings: the Buddhist view of mutability in one case, and earthly pleasures in the other. But in Olivia's understanding at the start of the novel, “The floating world was the gas station attendants, restaurants, and jobs we depended on, the motel towns floating in the middle of fields and mountains” (Kadohata Floating 2) 3. Olivia comes to deepen her understanding of its meanings through her quest for female identity. Many critics have already discussed the significance of the “floating world” or “ukiyo” in this novel4. I would rather focus on the fear and horror of those who are floating in the aftermath of the internment of Japanese Americans. Therefore, I employ Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection and analyze the female protagonist’s fear and her transformation in a hostile environment from the viewpoint of “ukiyo” as embodied by her grandmother.
Two Meanings of “ukiyo”
Probably one of the most unexpected elements in the novel is its depiction of the grandmother, who does not conform to the stereotypical image of an old Japanese woman 5. As Olivia says: “My grandmother has always been my tormentor. My mother said she'd been a young woman of spirit; but she was an old woman of fire. In her day it had been considered scandalous for young Japanese women to smoke, but she smoked cigars” (1). Obāsan abuses her grandchildren by pushing or boxing them when she loses her temper. Because of her evil and angry face she is called “unhappy, cruel, the nemesis” (10) or “Cyclops” (21), or “Pincher Obāsan” (22).
In the meantime, Obāsan loves to tell her grandchildren stories of her life, which are equivalent to her property. In one of these stories, she portrays herself as a special woman whose “birth had been marked by seven moons floating across the summer sky” (10), a woman who has had three husbands and seven lovers in her life, which she describes as “a string of pearls and rocks” (24).
One night, when Olivia happens to see Obāsan sleeping, she observes that Obāsan’s breast is white and smooth, a contrast to her ravaged and red face. Olivia hardly understands how the special baby girl has grown up to be the person who is “unhappy, cruel, the nemesis of her grandchildren” (10). The culmination of the absurdity is her sudden death – as if she had “punched the clock” (91) – in a motel bathroom just before the family settles in Arkansas. Such an ending to her grandmother's life eventually causes Olivia to harbor a strong sense of the mutability and emptiness of life.
In his study of the ideological background of Bunraku (Japanese traditional puppet theater) and Kabuki (Japanese traditional theater), Kawatake Toshio explains that the term “ukiyo” came to be widely used, especially among the aristocracy, in medieval Japan to denote the world filled with grief and hardship. The term reflects the Buddhist view that earthly life is transient and empty (19-20). Kawatake maintains: “[From the viewpoint of this ‘ukiyo,’] people had anxieties about the future and took a pessimistic view of earthly life. As a result, they sought salvation by faith in the supernatural power of the Buddha” (20, trans. is mine).
The medieval concept of “ukiyo” underwent a change in the latter half of the Muromachi period (roughly from the mid 15th to the mid 16th century). Kawatake maintains that those who had survived the disturbances of wars could not believe in the supernatural power of Amida Buddha, and came to harbor an early-modern concept of “ukiyo” that celebrates earthly pleasures. According to Kawatake,
The pessimistic view represented by ‘ukiyo” gradually changed into a transient, pleasure-seeking, and
secular worldview, although it also retained the original meaning. People believed that it would be
better to enjoy their day-to-day lives rather than spend dreary lives in this world in order to commit
themselves to the unreliable hereafter. (24)
Inheritance from the Grandmother
After Obāsan’s death, Olivia realizes that her life is entwined with that of her grandmother in the sense that she has inherited something from her – namely, the power of narrative, Obāsan’s soul – along with her journals and “magic purse.” Asked by her brothers, Olivia tells them the stories of her grandmother, replacing the old woman. Later, Olivia starts to narrate her own stories in which she herself appears as a “bad girl.” Since a purse or bag symbolizes a “womb” in the Japanese language, Olivia metaphorically has inherited abundant and deviant sexuality from her grandmother. The diaries are filled with Obāsan’s voice narrating her sexual adventures with her boyfriends. Olivia thinks, “My grandmother’s diaries were a revelation to me” (Kadohata Floating 95), and listens to her voice in order to fill the empty “purse” she has inherited. Thus, both the purse and the journals steer her to explore her life as a sixteen-year-old girl, one that departs from the norm for Japanese women.
Olivia's encounter with Tan at a hatchery where life and death, or birth, occur daily suggests that the place is associated with sexuality. Olivia says, “The hatchery was a noisy, ugly place, but . . . because the place felt so real—so close—it possessed a sort of mean sexuality. . . Tan and I first decided to sleep together” (94). They indulge in teen sexuality as though they were enjoying a “prodigious adventure” (112) in Tan's parents’ absence. Inspired by her grandmother's voice in the diaries, Olivia deviates from her parents’ ideal image of a good daughter, the proper Nisei (a second-generation Japanese American) girl. She cannot match the expectations of her elegant and intellectual mother or her affectionate, hardworking, and highly moral father. Obviously, Olivia is not on the “right” track to grow into a woman who will represent the model minority 6, in its assimilation or Americanization.
It is through her quest for female identity that Olivia actually learns the deeper meanings of “ukiyo.” As mentioned above, Olivia as a child understood “ukiyo” to mean the changing scenery of gas stations, restaurants, fields, and mountains, but as an adolescent she recognizes that the word has two meanings: mutability and the sensual pleasures of earthly life.
Abjection and Carnival Square
It might be worthwhile to consider what has made Olivia transform into a “bad daughter.” Obāsan who is called “unhappy, cruel, the nemesis” (10) or “Cyclops” (21), or “Pincher Obāsan” (22), who has had seven lovers in addition to three husbands, embodies what Kristeva calls “the abject.” In her book Powers of Horror, Kristeva defines the abject as something improper and unclean which is positioned outside the patriarchal Symbolic Order, but also as “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, position, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4). In this sense, this deviant old woman, Obāsan, is the abject or the horror that disturbs the order of the Symbolic or represents those rejected as a danger and feared by American society at the time. In order to attain one's subjectivity and enter the Symbolic, one must undergo abjection or confront the abject, which is basically maternal and feminine (58-59).
More significant is that Olivia finds the possibilities for “bad” in herself at the critical moment when Obāsan is on the border between life and death. As she is dying, Obāsan asks Olivia to get her mother for help. But Olivia neglects to help her grandmother by falling asleep after leaving the bathroom. And the next morning she wakes up to find Obāsan dead on the bathroom floor. This episode suggests to the reader how the girl first recognizes the possibilities for bad in her. In this sense Obāsan's death opens Pandora's box for Olivia. After this incident, she starts to transform and experience a different aspect of “ukiyo,” witnessing the horror and fear of the floating world.
Kadohata sets the novel mainly in the three locales where the protagonist undergoes abjection: a poultry town, Gibson, Arkansas; a dream city, Los Angeles; and somewhere in Arizona. The locales are significant in that they function as a Bakhtinian “carnival square” where medieval people lived two-leveled and ambivalent lives, or as an artistic site where artists subvert social and cultural norms to present deeper layers of life. Bakhtin maintains that carnivalization is “an extraordinarily flexible form of artistic visualization, a peculiar sort of heuristic principle making possible the discovery of new and as yet unseen things” (166). Thus, the three locales in The Floating World function as a “carnival square” where Olivia faces the abjected beings.
Gibson
Let us examine the first locale, Gibson, as a place for abjection that has created duality and marginality for the protagonist. In Gibson Olivia’s father, Charlie-O, has started to run a small garage, and most of the Japanese American residents work for the hatchery as chicken sexers. Therefore, the town seems to provide them with economic security and peace. However, it is in this place that Olivia first witnesses the representation of various fears. First, the mask of Olivia’s good mother is dropped when Olivia observes her mother meeting with the man with whom she has earlier had an affair. Then, confounded by his marriage Charlie-O gets involved with card games and finally is arrested by the police for gambling and reported in the newspaper. Thus, Olivia describes the fear of her family falling apart.
Second, Olivia narrates the disappearance of Collie Asano, one of her father's card mates, who loses his house in repaying a gambling debt. Before his disappearance, Collie points at his house and whispers, “It’s an illusion. It’s not really there” (Kadohata The Floating 84). To Olivia’s mind, however, the house is not an illusion but Collie himself is. She says, “The funny thing was how after Collie faded, I could see his house, as if he himself were the illusion” (58). Though Gibson at first seems to be a peaceful and safe place for her, Olivia soon discovers that the Japanese community is permeated with the fears and horrors of “ukiyo.”
Third, Olivia portrays the fearful and strained reality of the working conditions of chicken sexers at the hatchery where she starts to work part time. Since all the sexers have jobs at other hatcheries, they often work as long as thirty or forty hours straight, and take Dexedrine to stay awake. In addition, the company hires and fires sexers as a group not as individuals, which imposes severe stress on individuals because “When one person did bad work, that put everyone's job in jeopardy” (101). This system victimizes Mr. Tanizaki who has been in his group for twenty years. When Olivia first meets him, she is impressed by the fact that he can jump very high, but she comes to learn the reason for his jumping:
I think Mr. Tanizaki liked to jump around so he could work off some energy and be calm enough for
his job. He was usually feeling more restrained by the time we reached the hatchery. He always waited
a moment before going inside. He would take a big breath, almost as if he were about to jump into a
pool, before he went through the door. (99)
Overdosing on Dexedrine has caused him to lose his appetite for work. And his group members finally fire him.
Lastly, Olivia witnesses her father's fear presented as his perfectionism. Taking his job at the garage as an example, he explains:
“I try to be exact. I don't want to use any more movement than I have to when I’m fixing a car. I look
at it and make my decision as quickly as possible, then do everything I have to do –get my tools and
so forth –with the least possible movement. I want to be perfect.” (120)
He wants to be perfect because he is terrified of making mistakes. He says he has learned a trick to let his hands feel the fear, so that his heart does not have to feel anything. Olivia senses that the fear is deeply rooted, inevitable, and comes from the past. Before leaving Gibson for Los Angeles, Olivia concludes that her parents have unconsciously taught her many things, one of which is fear, “their first big fear during the war” (121).
In Gibson, Olivia's encounter with Tan brings her sexual pleasures on the one hand. On the other, she is full of inevitable fears when she sees other people’s suffering. She thinks Arkansas is the most beautiful place she and her family have visited, but she terribly wants to leave this ambivalent place because of her confrontation with the abject.
Los Angeles
After moving to Los Angeles, Olivia lives, in her words, a “disorderly life” (125) still reading her grandmother's diaries. In other words, she is still “floating.” In the city of dreams and opportunities for economic security, Olivia again finds the familiar fears, especially through her boyfriend, Andy Chin. In contrast to her father, who does a perfect job repairing cars, Andy is paid to wreck cars by insurance cheats. Olivia’s feelings toward Andy are ambivalent:
All this was very amazing, even funny, to me. It's like when you go to an aquarium and marvel at the
strangest fish. I like knowing about this secret world. It was sort of like knowing about the hatchery.
Hanging around with Andy was probably a bad choice, but I really liked him. (129, the emphasis is
mine)
Interestingly, her life with Andy is compared to the hatchery in Gibson, which is associated with the sexual pleasures with Tan. Olivia is fascinated with Andy's curious but deviant life. But the ambivalent view of her life in L.A. undergoes a rapid deterioration when she happens to be an eyewitness at one of Andy's violent car wrecks. His job is weird and crazy, and he looks unhappy and tense, filled with “evil spirits” (132). Following the incident comes the horror: Roger, his client, has beaten Andy up. Looking at his frightened and swollen face, Olivia feels fear:
I felt sick with hate of Roger, and of all the owners of cars who hired Andy. . . . The street was barren.
Somewhere dogs were barking, and an ambulance sounded. I felt really scared, not exactly of what
had happened but of the scope of the world, the violence. (136-37)
Olivia, thus, understands the double meaning of “ukiyo” inherited from Obāsan.
Out-of-the-way Place in Arizona
Engaging with abjection in the first two locales does not seem to give Olivia enough catharsis because she further narrates the episode of meeting the ghost of her deceased biological father, Jack. She has hated Jack for being the cause of Charlie-O's unhappy marriage. She is traveling in Arizona on a vending-machine route taking over from her deceased father temporarily, and meets his ghost “at one of those out-of-the-way places [she]’d considered not serving” (158).
Eating a candy-bar from the vending-machine with Jack, she vents her anger and hatred on him. But then a realization comes:
He tore the wrapper on his candy bar lower and wiped his mouth with his shirt. It seemed like such a
lonely life suddenly: before he died he used to do exactly what he was doing now that he was dead,
again and again for twenty years. He did it so many times he still couldn’t break the habit. (159)
For the first time in her life, Olivia can sympathize with Jack, who could not help leading such a lonely and dreary life. Then she notices that Jack has transformed into a young man about her age. At this point, Olivia is ready to accept herself as the daughter of Jack and recognize loneliness, fear, and pleasure in the life of Jack. As she has once learned from letting her grandmother die about the possibilities for “bad” within herself, she is finally ready to abject the horror in her life. The abject is experienced when she finds out that she is nothing but the abject herself. Kristeva writes:
If it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject, one can understand that
it is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with
something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very
being, that it is none other than abject. (5)
In other words, after the fruitless confrontations with the abject on the outside, finally with Jack's ghost, she eventually comes to reconcile with him, which brings her an epiphany about her fear. The last two sentences of the novel are metaphorical. “I tried to calculate from the night sky what time it was, but then I gave up. It didn’t matter, it was high time I left” (Kadohata 161). Olivia is ready to go into the real world, leaving the “out-of-the-way place” (158) of abjection.
Conclusion
Instead of depicting Japanese American internment during World War II, The Floating World represents various kinds of horror of “floating” experienced by Japanese Americans in the postwar years. Earlier critics often focused on the topic of the “floating world,” but this paper’s focus is rather on the horror Olivia witnesses in other Asian Americans’ lives. In this sense, Kristeva’s theory of abjection is relevant for discussing the horror in the text. Moreover, the horror is tinted with a Japanese and unique worldview called “ukiyo.” On the one hand, ironically as well as significantly, the deviant old woman, Obāsan, appears as a key person who embodies the abject that disturbs the order of the Symbolic or represents those rejected as threatening by American society at the time. On the other hand, she leaves her granddaughter her diaries and “magic purse”: voice and sexuality. Important from a feminist viewpoint is that these two types of female power eventually empower Olivia to confront and abject the horror on her way to attaining womanhood in postwar American society. In the process she deepens her understanding of the double meaning of “ukiyo.” However, the intensity of her fear is so great in a hostile social environment that Olivia has to undergo recurrent abjection in the three “carnival squares” before reaching catharsis and entering the Symbolic or American society.
[This article is based on a presentation given at the 34th Annual International Conference of Children’s Literature Association held at Christopher Newport University, Newport News, Virginia, U.S.A., on June 14, 2007.]
Notes
1. King-Kok Cheung categorizes Kadohata’s The Floating World as postmodern Japanese American literature: “Although writing from a sense of Japanese American experience and history, postmodern Japanese American writers explore other identities and sympathies that may have little or no overt connection with Japanese American culture or communities. These authors may write from a variety of identities and places or with a sense of rootlessness that characterizes postmodernism in general” (147).
2. Robert Lee writes, “Cynthia Kadohata’s The Floating World gives a new turn to American picaresque,” comparing the novel with The Catcher in the Rye and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (274). Also, Cheung maintains, “[Kadohata’s] works convey a sense of rootlessness and randomness. Narrated by a precocious adolescent, The Floating World is a picaresque novel chronicling the experiences of Olivia Osaka” (147).
3. Hihara Mie points out three meanings of “ukiyo” expressed in the novel: first, daily phenomena for those who move from state to state, being always on the road, which is represented by Olivia’s aforementioned words; second, earthly pleasures represented as brothels in the Edo era; third, the Buddhist view of mutability (34).
4. To give a few examples: Konoshita Yuki discusses two major opposing forces in the novel: floating and stability; Hiraishi Taeko also discusses the sense of floating represented in the relationships among the members of the Osaka family; and Hihara Mie focuses on the depiction of “ukiyo” experienced by various characters in the novel.
5. Interviewed by Mickey Pearlman, Kadohata strongly resists being pigeonholed as a “Japanese American writer,” saying, “I get mad because [people] are always very dogmatic about it” (Pearlman 115). Often asked questions about the untypical image of the grandmother, Kadohata writes in American Eyes, “There is no subject that is off-limit for an Asian writer, just as there is no subject that is off-limit to a writer of any race” (xv). Shirley Geok-lin Lim, like many other critics, notes that in the portrayal of the grandmother “there is little of the sentimentality associated with the stereotypical American portrayals of the Asian family” (20).
6. Sociologist William Peterson wrote about the concept of model minority as early as 1960 in his article, “Success Story: Japanese American Style,” in The New York Times Magazine. He argues that Japanese culture, with its emphasis on strong family ties and the work ethic, prevents Japanese-Americans from becoming a “problem minority” (20-43). But it was in the 1980s that the term “model minority” became widely circulated through the mass media. Articles on the model minority like Newsweek’s “The Drive to Excel” in 1984, Fortune’s “America’s Super Minority” in 1986, and Time’s “The New Whiz Kids” in 1987 are good examples. Also President Ronald Reagan, in his speech addressed to Asian and Pacific Americans in the chief executive’s mansion in 1984, praised their values and work ethic. However, Ronald Takaki argues, “in their celebration of this ‘model minority,’ the pundits and the politicians have exaggerated Asian-American ‘success’ and have created a new myth” (475). Also, see the article, “Myth of Model Minority Haunts Asian Americans” that The Washington Post published in 1992.
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