Author: -

Abstract: »In the text that follows, the consistent sexual violence in the works of Japanese manga artist Maruo Suehiro (active since 1980) is argued to be his primary vector for emblematizing the traumatic nature of much of Japanese historical memory during Imperial Japan's immediate prewar and wartime saga--roughly 1926-1945. The meaning of sexual violence in Maruo's works is best understood by way of the artist's early-career adaptation of German film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in which the artists appropriates the original film's narrative so that an act of sexual assault constitutes the ultimate realization of power which the titular villain commands after hypnotizing a somnambulist to commit indiscriminate crime. Calling upon Siegfried Kracauer's interpretation of the film's villain as a premonition of the rise of Adolf Hitler, I suggest that in Maruo's adaptation Caligari is paradigmatically coded as the Emperor of Japan. Invoking the imperial era's state-sponsored religious concept of the kokutai, I suggest that Caligari becomes in Maruo the 'face' of the Japanese nation, the story's somnambulist becoming the nation's subordinate 'body.' The unification of the two characters is realized via sacrifice, the adaptation's rape victim becoming the necessary condition for maintaining the societal body. In the Imperial Japanese context, the rape symbolizes both the suffering of East Asian peoples under Japanese colonial rule and sociopolitical opponents of the fascist regime. As in the Weimar cinema, the motif of the Caligari-esque tyrant recurs throughout Maruo, as the syntagmatic configuration of 'Caligari/somnambulist/rape victim' and 'tyrant/national body/bottom rung of imperial society' is transferentially replicated time and again. I identify different figures from Maruo's base of recurring characters (or star system) with each of the three paradigmatic figures of the configuration, establishing an extensive semiotic chain in Maruo's oeuvre. I later observe how the artist draws himself into that chain, cast within perpetrator roles, which I read as a transferential implication of the artist in his representations of traumatic historical memory. I attempt to determine through this transference whether Maruo's manga work through traumatic historical memory or merely act it out, further traumatizing his readers and the memories of the past which his works have sought to interpret. This thesis posits that sexual violence is characteristic of imperial Japanese tyranny because of the industrial role that wartime sexual abuse played in the expansion and maintenance of the colonial Japanese empire. It also argues that comics possess a unique formal affordance for the representation of the 'narrative discontinuity' of trauma as they distill temporality by splaying separate moments and spaces across a single page, approximating the way that a trauma victim might engage with traumatic memory. Maruo's exploration of the theme of sexual violence through the language of comics is primarily motivated, I will suggest, by Maruo's near-paranoia that a sort of 'postwar kokutai' may be able to rise once again in Japan, as militant nationalism had begun to resurface in the decades since the war.« (Source: MOspace Institutional Repository)

Contents:

	Acknowledgments (p. ii)
	List of Illustrations (p. v)
	A Note on Language, Translation, and Formatting (p. vi)
	Epigraph (p. ix)
	Abstract (p. x)
	Introduction (p. 1)
		Maruo no Jigoku e Youkoso (p. 6)
		The Kokutai in the Imperial Period (p. 13)
		Nightmares of the Tyrant (p. 16)
		Chapter Survey (p. 19)
	1. No Senrei Without Pain (p. 29)
		Maruo’s Stories of the Eye (p. 32)
		Bataille and Religious Eroticism (p. 36)
		Trauma in Comics (p. 40)
		Historical Trauma (p. 53)
	2. The Fiend with Many Faces (p. 66)
		The Return of Dr. Caligari (p. 68)
		The Man in the Bowler Hat (p. 73)
		Caligari as the Clock (p. 82)
		The Sense of Tyranny (p. 91)
	3. I Must Become Caligari (p. 103)
		Working Through or Acting Out (p. 104)
		Michio, the Somnambulist (p. 106)
		It Came from the Imperial Sewer (p. 110)
		Up from the Gutters (p. 115)
		LaCapra (p. 119)
		The Middle Voice and the Trial of Maruo Suehiro (p. 123)
		“The Gold Notebook” (p. 134)
		“The Sleeping Man” (p. 139)
		The Rape of the Camellia Girl, or the Dream of the Burning Child (p. 152)
	Conclusion (p. 162)
	Works Cited (p. 173)

Wikipedia: History of Asia: History of Japan | Comics: Manga / Suehiro Maruo | Sex and the law: Rape / Gang rape