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The time of the text is also foreign, both because of the foreign-made watch and the disjointed and interrupted time that the watch (and the dream) produces. It is a “colonial time” that breaks with the temporality of “imperial time” in which the nation of Japan is measured by the unbroken and continuous reign of emperors, and counted by eras (nengō) defined by the one-to-one relationship of emperor to era (issei ichigen).¹⁷⁷ Imperial time is further interrupted by the execution of emperor as well as the first in line to inherit the throne, the Crown Prince Akihito, severing the continuous reign of emperors. That a bus is able drive through the Sakurada Gate, up past the Nij bashi Bridge, and directly to the square of the Imperial Palace is pure violation of imperial space as well. As a sacred space, the access to which is tightly controlled and monitored, it is fitting for the carnivalesque inversions that the text performs.

176 Of course, it’s well known that the demands of this performance have, on multiple occasions, driven Michiko to depression and even aphasia.

177 It should be noted that this method of naming imperial reigns is an invention of the Meiji period, and retrospectively applied to time periods that preceded it.

Yet, the alternative to “imperial time” is not “revolutionary time” because the temporality of revolution assumes progress and development through stages until a climactic break point is reached; revolutionary temporality assumes a historical teleology. The interrupted and collapsed time of Fūryū Mutan eschews such history or purpose. There was no development that culminated with the events of the text, no past history to explain the state of the present, let alone a historical agent.

Watashi, perplexed that the military is fighting on the side of the protestors, asks a woman, “When was all of this decided?” She responds, “It’s not a question of anyone deciding. It just is that way.”¹⁷⁸ Her day had started as any normal day, with the quotidian humdrum of her commute, but now that a revolution was underway, she was participating. The events are just happening, without reason or meaning.

Revolution, in fact, is constantly parodied and subverted within the text. It’s never quite clear if what is occurring is mere violence, war, or revolution. Watashi asks, “Is it revolution? Is it the Left (sayoku 左欲)?” However, rather than use the kanji for Left-wing (sayoku 左翼), Fukazawa creates a pun, replacing “wing” with

“desire,” which could yield a reading such as “Is it revolution, the desire of the Left?”

It is also hardly clear what, if anything, is being overthrown. The Imperial Family is so trivialized that their decapitations have no particular significance. All of the fighting occurs at a slight distance from the Imperial Palace, in Ginza, but even there, the enemy is only described as “reactionary elements” whereas the protestors are

178 Ibid, pg. 331

backed by Japan’s Jieitai and with the help of foreign arms. The events bear no resemblance to the democratic movement to oppose the Ampo and Kishi’s police state; there is no sharp delineation of friend and enemy; there are no demands made by the protestors. In fact, Watashi is so busy discussing the death poems of the Imperial Family and fighting with the Dowager Empress that the “revolution” is inconsequential, a part of the scenery.

The author Takeda Taijun rejects the many critics who saw the texts as “not taking a position on the revolution.” He notes the pervasive anxiety of Watashi, who operates in a strange temporality established by his watch and dream state, and the very instability of events and images within it. Since the logic of the text operates according to a distorted sense of space and time, to critique it as if operated

according to the logic of historical progress (empty, homogeneous time) is mistaken.

He says,

There is a detachment from the type of formal logic required for the analysis of the revolution—or comparative revolutions of different countries—in which history is fated to move toward a certain direction. Space is

interrupted. In a Dali painting,¹⁷⁹ pocket watches are drawn in an exhaustedly warped state, like paper drenched with water. Time in this work, too, like the exhaustedly warped pocket watches, is not a continuation of the “punctual time” of the continuous everyday. The freedom within a dream after all is

179 The Persistence of Memory, 1931

liberation from the space and time of the everyday, and from within that, there could be no discourse capable of analyzing revolutionary history.

Rather, revolutionary history is unanalyzable, and the real value of the dream is its ability to leap over that type of method. Dreamers dream at a depth unknown to scholarly activities or the particularities of history, and therefore to critique it from those angles misses the mark.¹⁸⁰

The text is unanalyzable as critique precisely because it is not critique, and therefore cannot be forced to conform to its standard or “take a position” on the politics of the day. Many critics were not quite sure what to make of it, and at a loss, attempted to understand it not as text but as event. As I’ll show later, Nakano Shigeharu’s own uneasiness over the text is related to its subversion of proper method of resistance to the state, which in turn, he believes can play into the hands of state violence.