Torikaebaya Monogatari
Jun. 23rd, 2006 07:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snarpI finished Torikaebaya Monogatari/The Changelings/If Only I Could Exchange Them a while back. This is a book written during the Heian era about a brother and sister who are "by nature inclined to act as the opposite sex," and just happen to look exactly alike.
Guess what they do.
They eventually switch back, after several years, a lot of angst, and no actual, physical gay sex.
The author is unknown, and there's apparently a debate about his/her gender. I will now conclusively put an end to this debate through the application of my giant brain:
The author was a straight guy because the thwarted-buttsex was comedy and the lesbian stuff was completely serious.
You may now sit in silent awe of my brilliant and I'm sure completely original analysis. Tears may, if necessary, spring to your eyes; no sniffling.
Looking at it really scientifically, there's also numerically a lot more of the one than the other. The sister marries a woman and hits on three others, getting behind two of them's blinds to see their faces - sort of the Heian-era equivalent of looking up their skirts - and convincing her wife and one of the others that lying next to each other all night meant that they'd had sex.
The brother, on the other hand, has only two male suitors, doesn't know about one and doesn't want the other, and seduces a woman within twenty-five pages - just so the author can prove right off the bat that he ain't no faggot, I guess. This entire encounter takes two paragraphs, and having accomplished it, he disappears until more than halfway through the book.
The sister doesn't get involved with a man for another another fifty pages after that, and she doesn't, of course, initiate it.* She is, in fact, raped by her best friend when he finds out she's a woman, but that's what you call "a whole separate thing to be getting into" if you are like me and cannot talk.
* "Of course" because Heian women don't initiate sex with men - not even the ones who do sometimes initiate pseudo-sex with other women.
I'm having trouble thinking that it could have been written by a woman of any orientation, just because the author thinks that orgasm is impossible without a penis being somehow involved. (I have assumptions.) At one point, sitting with one of her girlfriends, the sister tells herself that the woman is "wasted on her," and thinks enviously of her penis-equipped friend, who would be able to take advantage of the situation. The siblings' gender identities - or, in the sister's mind, their "unusual bodies" - are repeatedly called "punishment for sins committed in past lives;" the author thinks the sister did something really bad.
In the translation, by Rosette Willig, the sister is called "he" and the brother "she" up until a little before the end of the novel. This means we get sentences like, "Large with child, he seemed to be feeling very oppressed and pained." Most of the reviews I've seen call this "an interesting interpretation" or a "strange/brilliant/adjective touch," which I guess means the people who wrote them didn't spend all last year banging their heads against untranslated Murakami trying to figure out whether the girl or the guy or the fork or the zombie was the subject of that sentence. Cough.
Japanese sentences are often all predicate - male and female pronouns do exist, but they aren't used much. The only gendered terms which the author would have had to attach to the siblings semi-regularly were the words "brother," "sister," "son," and "daughter," and their court titles ("Middle Counselor" and "Head Lady-in-Waiting"), which I'm assuming carry about the same amount weight in gender-baggage as words like "Baron" and "Duchess." (I need to ask Sensei about that.) I'm not clear whether the original text actually called the sister "brother" and the brother "sister," the way Willig does, but it did call the sister "Middle Counselor" and the brother "Head Lady-in-Waiting." That's more important, since titles are treated like names. A Japanese reader opening to the middle of the book would have read the sister as male because she was called "Chunagon." Willig's way is just the most reasonable way of dealing with the pronoun issue.
No one has ever heard of this book (Sensei hadn't - he stood there flipping through it looking bemused for a while when I showed it to him), and it's impossible to buy cheaply. My copy's from the library. I probably shouldn't put it to immoral internet purposes.
Guess what they do.
They eventually switch back, after several years, a lot of angst, and no actual, physical gay sex.
The author is unknown, and there's apparently a debate about his/her gender. I will now conclusively put an end to this debate through the application of my giant brain:
The author was a straight guy because the thwarted-buttsex was comedy and the lesbian stuff was completely serious.
You may now sit in silent awe of my brilliant and I'm sure completely original analysis. Tears may, if necessary, spring to your eyes; no sniffling.
Looking at it really scientifically, there's also numerically a lot more of the one than the other. The sister marries a woman and hits on three others, getting behind two of them's blinds to see their faces - sort of the Heian-era equivalent of looking up their skirts - and convincing her wife and one of the others that lying next to each other all night meant that they'd had sex.
The brother, on the other hand, has only two male suitors, doesn't know about one and doesn't want the other, and seduces a woman within twenty-five pages - just so the author can prove right off the bat that he ain't no faggot, I guess. This entire encounter takes two paragraphs, and having accomplished it, he disappears until more than halfway through the book.
The sister doesn't get involved with a man for another another fifty pages after that, and she doesn't, of course, initiate it.* She is, in fact, raped by her best friend when he finds out she's a woman, but that's what you call "a whole separate thing to be getting into" if you are like me and cannot talk.
* "Of course" because Heian women don't initiate sex with men - not even the ones who do sometimes initiate pseudo-sex with other women.
I'm having trouble thinking that it could have been written by a woman of any orientation, just because the author thinks that orgasm is impossible without a penis being somehow involved. (I have assumptions.) At one point, sitting with one of her girlfriends, the sister tells herself that the woman is "wasted on her," and thinks enviously of her penis-equipped friend, who would be able to take advantage of the situation. The siblings' gender identities - or, in the sister's mind, their "unusual bodies" - are repeatedly called "punishment for sins committed in past lives;" the author thinks the sister did something really bad.
In the translation, by Rosette Willig, the sister is called "he" and the brother "she" up until a little before the end of the novel. This means we get sentences like, "Large with child, he seemed to be feeling very oppressed and pained." Most of the reviews I've seen call this "an interesting interpretation" or a "strange/brilliant/adjective touch," which I guess means the people who wrote them didn't spend all last year banging their heads against untranslated Murakami trying to figure out whether the girl or the guy or the fork or the zombie was the subject of that sentence. Cough.
Japanese sentences are often all predicate - male and female pronouns do exist, but they aren't used much. The only gendered terms which the author would have had to attach to the siblings semi-regularly were the words "brother," "sister," "son," and "daughter," and their court titles ("Middle Counselor" and "Head Lady-in-Waiting"), which I'm assuming carry about the same amount weight in gender-baggage as words like "Baron" and "Duchess." (I need to ask Sensei about that.) I'm not clear whether the original text actually called the sister "brother" and the brother "sister," the way Willig does, but it did call the sister "Middle Counselor" and the brother "Head Lady-in-Waiting." That's more important, since titles are treated like names. A Japanese reader opening to the middle of the book would have read the sister as male because she was called "Chunagon." Willig's way is just the most reasonable way of dealing with the pronoun issue.
No one has ever heard of this book (Sensei hadn't - he stood there flipping through it looking bemused for a while when I showed it to him), and it's impossible to buy cheaply. My copy's from the library. I probably shouldn't put it to immoral internet purposes.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-24 04:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 02:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-24 11:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 02:46 am (UTC)I'll consider it.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-21 07:31 pm (UTC)If so, and I hope I'm not coming across as too creepy and presumptuous, I would be eternally grateful if maybe you could help my download along by seeding the complete file, please? :o I've been stuck at 11.6% for the past few weeks, because I guess no one with the complete file/torrent has been seeding it and I'm kind of despairing at this point that someone ever will. That's why, when I googled and saw this entry, I thought I might still have a chance.
If not, well, I'm sorry for bothering you, and thanks anyway for your time.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-21 10:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-22 03:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-22 12:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-22 10:57 pm (UTC)Is it true there is a manga series (or some kind of other genre dramatization) based on this story?
no subject
Date: 2008-09-23 05:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-24 04:23 pm (UTC)I bought it remaindered about six years ago. I think I paid about $4 for it. I haven't seen it for sale since, though.
(Here via a link on my friends list. Just in case you wondered.)
no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 02:57 am (UTC)My sensibilities got offended by it, I think. Which they shouldn't have been. I knew how it was going to end going in, but I didn't expect Chunagon to be written so sympathetically - *some* of the time. It really depressed me to see the book going through with a "happy ending" that the author knew was the worst possible thing that could happen to Chunagon. Hence the crankiness of the review - I liked the character too much.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 04:28 am (UTC)But for a deus ex machina to work, the audience has to believe in the god in question and accept that it has the power to fix things. To be honest, given the culture in which the story was written, I don't think there was a way that there could be a happy ending that modern readers in the United States would find believable and satisfying.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-29 03:15 pm (UTC)I kind of want to re-do it as manga, only with an ending I like better, and less socially sanctioned rape.
no subject
Date: 2006-07-01 01:43 am (UTC)I can't think the author was a woman because of how abruptly the focus drops away from Chuunagon when she becomes Naishi no Kami. She's just all of a sudden in the background, and the previous Naishi no Kami, whom the author hadn't cared about at all as a woman (my pronouns are causing me guilt and angst), is suddenly the protagonist. Chuunagon-as-Chuunagon made a lot of gloomy predictions of how much she'd despise having to live as a woman, but Chuunagon-as-Naishi no Kami never really gets the chance to say anything about it.
It feels to me like the author was able to get into Chuunagon's head only while she was taking the male role, and once that was gone, he couldn't relate any more, and was forced to move over to the shallower but more understandable characters of the brother and Saishou.
(Of course, the switch in tone could be part of the thing about the book having maybe been redacted after a few centuries, to make the ending behave itself? But that makes things all complicated, and I'm ignoring it.)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-20 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-23 12:54 pm (UTC)So this will be really random....
Date: 2008-11-16 10:20 pm (UTC)I liked your entry, since it provided a slightly different POV than the article had.
I also recommend reading the article if you ever get a chance, since it does provide a lot of insight on the meaning behind some things in the story. It's called "Strange Fates. Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Torikaebaya Monogatari" by Greogry M. Pflugfelder. It was published in the Monumenta Nipponica in Vol. 47, No. 3 (Autumn, 1992).
Re: So this will be really random....
Date: 2008-11-17 11:47 pm (UTC)I think I've read that before, but have no recollection of what was in it... woe!
Re: So this will be really random....
Date: 2008-11-18 12:11 am (UTC)If you do mind, then I won't.
The article is breaking down misconceptions about whether or not the main characters suffer from any sexual dysfunctions or the like, since those sorts of things didn't actually exist (so to speak) during the Heian period. It also talks about homosexuality (or lack thereof) in the story and just in general is a really awesome read, imo.
Re: So this will be really random....
Date: 2008-11-18 12:27 am (UTC)Next time I am able to access JSTOR, I'll look for it.
Re: So this will be really random....
Date: 2008-11-18 02:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-10 01:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-10 01:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-13 08:31 am (UTC)I'm trying to see if I can find a copy of the manga that won't cost me too much. I might have to do Amazon.co.jp anways and find a seller that ships overseas. :( That will be interesting *laughs*