Irrevocabilidad de la Oferta

The theme of possession permeates The Factory, a novel about a white Australian doctoral student who aspires to become Japanese. In this chapter I explore how anthropological, ontological, and spiritual possession characterise Hilda’s relationship with Japan. Hilda’s Orientalist investment in Japan represents a foil for the novel’s message about the dangers of such possessive investment. The dismantling of Hilda’s Orientalist tendencies signifies an ethical acknowledgement of the limits to cross-cultural identification. At the same time, the novel thoroughly troubles any easy East/West binary that might be ascribed to the dynamics in which Hilda finds herself. Reductive characterisations of East/West dynamics come under scrutiny through the cultural interactions of Japanese and Australian characters. Hilda becomes culturally mixed in her identifications with Japanese difference through her acting in noh theatre. However, like Japanese Story and Bondi Tsunami, the novel’s ending (where Hilda severs ties from Japan and leaves the country) retracts from the possibility of future engagement.

In the first chapter of The Factory (2005) the Australian protagonist Hilda, writing from a Japanese prison says,

I remember someone saying to me when I first came to this country, ‘You may speak perfect Japanese. You may live like the Japanese, sound like the Japanese, believe what the Japanese believe. But you will never be Japanese.’1

This statement provides the spur for the novel’s sustained engagement with the nature of national, cultural, and racial identity. It highlights a familiar attitude towards closed national identities that we can see in both Japan as well as Australia. This closedness reflects

Suvendrini Perera’s argument about Australia’s racial and geographical differentiation of itself from the continent of Asia.2

1 _{Paddy O'Reilly, The Factory (Thompson Walker, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2005), 2.} All subsequent references to this book will in in-text.

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The Factory problematises this border thinking with Hilda’s genuine desire to integrate with Asia, despite the ‘nationalising forces’ showcased above.3 _{The increase in rhetoric around}

the issue of Australia entering the so called ‘Asian Century’ and the various anxieties surrounding ‘Rising Asia,’4 _{highlight the topical nature of the novel’s attempts to become}

‘part of Asia.’5 _{O’Reilly wrote the novel with the help of an Asia-link writing in residence}

scholarship. Asia-link, an affiliate of the University of Melbourne, focuses on ‘public understanding of the countries of Asia and of Australia’s role in the region,’ something echoed in its tag-line ‘Building an Asia-capable Australia.’6 _{In addition, the novel clearly}

represents what is being termed the ‘transnational turn’ in Australian literature,7 _typifying

the urge to turn Australia’s gaze to areas ‘beyond the nation.’8

Through Hilda’s experiences in Japan, her authorial perspective – and her supposedly authoritative perspective as an academic studying the cultural commune Koba – undergoes a process of self-conscious questioning. She no longer maintains an authoritative Western gaze on Japan; her interactions with and inculcation within Koba undermine the Orientalist distinctions between East and West that motivated her initial PhD thesis. Hilda and Koba itself exhibit culturally hybrid sensibilities that intermingle with each other.

The novel’s parallels between nationalistic and transnational attitudes culminates, at its end, in Hilda’s retreat from Japan and the tacit acknowledgement that she will never, indeed, be Japanese. In many ways this represents an ethical acknowledgement of difference that undermines Orientalist tendencies in Western anthropological and

ontological attitudes. While Hilda clearly shows mixed subjective identifications – she thus becomes others in this subjective sense – she cannot become others in a social/political sense: she cannot become Japanese or Asian racially, and according to the Japanese in the novel, she will never be truly Japanese culturally either. This highlights the problem of cultural appropriation that plagues much intercultural theatre. There is, however, a

3 _{Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, 17.} 4 _{Walker and Sobocinska, Australia's Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century, 1.}

5 _{John O'Carroll and Bob Hodge, Borderwork in Multicultural Australia (Crows Nest, N.S.W: Allen & Unwin,} 2006), 157.

6 _{Asia-Link, The University of Melbourne, http://asialink.unimelb.edu.au/about_us/who_we_are.}

7 _{Wenche Ommundsen, 'Introduction to Transnational Imaginaries: Reading Asian Australian Writing,' JASAL} 12, no. 2 (2012): 2.

difference between a white person identifying racially as Japanese and being culturally Japanese; I think that this novel rightly shies away from Hilda identifying as Japanese (in a racial sense), but in the process it also symbolically shies away, in the finale, from the disruptive potential of identification with the cultural difference of Japanese culture. While Hilda clearly experiences cross-cultural exchange and identification, the novel cuts short the possibility of ongoing engagement. It does not bring the examination of identity, or the mixed subjectivities gained in Japan, to the space of Australia. In addition, the novel does not account for the potential that the mixed perspectives of Japanese Australians and mixed race Japanese Australians have for challenging the binarising sentiments of the novel’s separation of Australians and Japanese in its denouement.

In drawing attention to what I call the politics of possession in The Factory I highlight what I believe is the novel’s self-conscious engagement with Said’s ideas on Orientalism and specifically Orientalist possession. By exploring this investment in questions of Orientalism, I highlight one of the key barriers towards ethical cross-cultural engagement. Nationalising forces and racial ideologies still influence intercultural contact. Said writes of Flaubert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan:

He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was ‘typically Oriental’[my emphasis]’.9

Said’s qualification that this possession works ‘not only’ on a physical level alerts us to the varied ways in which Orientalist possession functions. Possession is indicative of Orientalist ways of knowing and representing that Said considers to be forms of ‘dominating,

restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.’10 _{Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s extensive}

work on white Australian possession highlights that ‘one of the ways in which this

possessive investment manifests itself is through a discourse of tolerance involving the right to exclude or include people within the nation thereby supporting the existence, protection

9 _{Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 6.} 10 _{Ibid., 3.}

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and maintenance of white space.’11 _{However in broadening my analysis to ontological and}

spiritual possession I focus on places where East/West binaries are crossed and mixed. O’Reilly signals forms of Orientalist thinking in order to subvert them. The novel thus

exhibits ways in which othering discourses are overcome through identification with others. One of the central ways in which this cross-cultural identification works in this novel is through the corporeal practice of noh theatre: Hilda learns to adopt Japanese movements, and therefore learns Japaneseness through the body. In focussing on becoming others through the body I also draw attention to how the spiritual possession of bodies in the novel reflects the process of becoming others.

Challenging Orientalism

The novel begins with Hilda in prison recalling the moment of her arrest and detailing the gritty and stifling nature of her prison life. The reasons for Hilda’s imprisonment, while not yet clear, present themselves in the process of the novel as the events leading up to her arrest are explored. She writes the novel between the lines of a textbook inside the prison. Hilda, a PhD student of what seems to be anthropology or sociology, studied the cultural commune Koba and its authoritarian leader Yasuda. Created in the ‘70s, the commune quickly disintegrated after the controversial death of one of its members, Tetsuo. Hilda travelled to Japan to interview Yasuda and various members in order to understand the group, and why exactly it broke up. The novel splices together interviews with members, Hilda’s memories, and scenes in the prison. When Yasuda claims in an interview that he intends to create a second Koba, he makes Hilda join the group and document it in exchange for information about the first Koba for her thesis. She and her vivacious

Australian friend Eloise, who comes along to Japan with Hilda after receiving a scholarship, join the group and learn various traditional cultural practices in an abandoned factory in a remote area of Japan. Possible inspirations for Koba might include the Yamagishi-kai

communes in Japan, or the Suzuki Company of Toga theatre company run by Tadashi Suzuki. This latter company appears concerned with ‘how globalization has standardized systems

11 _{Moreton-Robinson and Nicoll, 'We Shall Fight Them on the Beaches: Protesting Cultures of White} Possession,' 150.

and homogenized lifestyles the world over,’12 _{and hopes to cultivate an appreciation for not}

only cultural and national distinctiveness, but also pre-modern sensibilities.

During Hilda and Eloise’s time in the commune Yasuda proves not to be forthcoming about information about the first Koba, and Eloise helps Hilda steal Yasuda’s private diaries from that time. In addition, tensions within the group rise as former members return, some of whom have designs of revenge. Keiko, a former lover of Yasuda’s in the first Koba, steals the diaries off Hilda and discovers that Yasuda knew of an abortion she secretly undertook; he hadn’t said anything to her about it. She considers this, and the derisive way he wrote about her in the diary, a betrayal, and vows to destroy Koba from within. Meanwhile, Hilda

becomes further inculcated within the group, increasingly feeling as if she belongs there and can contribute to it. She sleeps with the Japanese male member Nao, and Yasuda seems to be making advances on her as well. The denouement of the novel takes place by a cliff where Keiko confronts Yasuda about the diaries. Keiko’s desire to exact revenge on Yasuda makes it clear that the second Koba cannot continue. Devastated by this, Hilda begs Keiko not to destroy the group, as she feels a sense of belonging. At this Keiko, recalling for the reader the accusatory statement quoted at the beginning of the novel, remarks ‘Go home Hilda…This is not your business. You don’t belong here. You never have, you never will’ (253). Hilda seems to enter a trance-like state that ends in the implication that she pushes Keiko off the cliff, thus explaining her subsequent imprisonment. At the end of the novel we learn that Hilda’s father has organised for her to carry out her sentence in Australia.

Hilda initially approaches the members of Koba as a researcher. She wishes to investigate the kinds of cultural and personal forms of investment within the group. When asked by Eloise what her thesis centres on she says,

‘Oh. Well it’s about narrative and identity. It’s about a group in a cultural field and its identity within that field. As in, can a narrative reinterpretation of their own group’s identity be dynamic enough for people to cope with…’

‘Excellent,’ [Eloise] interrupted. (13)

12 _{Tadashi Suzuki, 'Globalization and the Theatre's Mission,' http://www.scot-} suzukicompany.com/en/philosophy.php.

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We never really know what Hilda might have said, but this answer seems to suggest two possible readings. It could indicate Hilda’s interest in the way the group narrates its own identity, and whether that narration can accommodate both the human elements that exist in the group and the desire for profit that begins to change the identity of the community. We could also read this as questioning how Hilda’s own thesis represents a kind of narrative interpretation; can it in fact preserve the identity of the group, or will it become a distortion of sorts. Hilda’s Japanese interviewees often question Hilda’s motives. For example Yumi, a member of the first Koba, says,

‘I hope I am telling this story to the right person … You are a foreigner and a

stranger. It’s easy to speak to you. But how will it be twisted around when you hear all the different versions of the story from different people. Whose will you believe? Whose history will be recorded?’ (74)

The novel clearly alludes to the politics of representing a cultural Other within a Western academic and cultural framework. The postcolonial turn in literary and cultural criticism provided us with strong arguments highlighting the ways in which cultural others were incorrectly represented and understood within academic Western discourses.

As mentioned before, Hilda describes her work as about ‘narrative and identity. It’s about a group in a cultural field and its identity within that field.’ This highlights that desire to ascertain and document Japanese identity as well as notate and explain it within an

anthropological framework. We hear the supervisor’s voice in her emails to Hilda when she says ‘when you come to pulling all these stories together [interviews], I think that the act of refiguring the narrative will be a challenge – as a PhD should be!’ (99). We see a need to mould knowledge about Japan, and Japanese people’s opinions about themselves into a coherent anthropological claim or thesis. This in turn reflects Said’s words on Orientalist studies,

What bound the archive together was a family of ideas and a unifying set of values proven in various ways to be effective. These ideas explained the behaviour of Orientals; they supplied Orientals with a mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere;

most important, they allowed Europeans to deal with and even to see Orientals as a phenomenon possessing regular characteristics.13

However, Hilda’s gradual lack of objective distance from the group undoes her ability to truly create an appropriate anthropological inquiry. She not only cannot complete her studies because of her imprisonment, but she agrees with Eloise to steal Yasuda’s diaries rather than obtain this information by consent or through the ethical means expected of her ethnographic work. In addition, Hilda’s desire to be Japanese, or desire to possess

Japaneseness, highlights something very Orientalist about her attitude towards her studies. The suggestion that she killed Keiko indicates, even further, the clear lack of objective distance on Hilda’s part. Both of these characterisations serve to expose and subvert questionable and even insidious impulses of the Orientalist academic gaze.

Not only does the novel’s dismantling of the Western gaze on Japan critique Orientalist ways of knowing, but Koba’s own culturally hybrid positioning shows the lack of clear cut boundaries between East and West. Yasuda attempts to stabilise Koba’s identity by comparing Japanese values against Western ones:

‘What is it to be Japanese in these strange times? Our industries grow like

mushrooms and yet our students revolt and make bombs. We sit on chairs but we sleep on futon, we eat hamburgers yet we prize sashimi, we wear jeans every day but for important moments we pull out our best kimono. There is nothing wrong with taking what we need from other cultures – Japan has always made this practice. The difficulty arises when we allow our own traditions to lapse. When we lose faith in what grounds us in the Japanese soil: the dance, the song, the ritual.’ (21)

Alastair Bonnett writes that ‘the assertion of a fundamental difference between Japanese and Western approaches has been used to locate the unique nature of Japanese identity and Japanese modernity.’14 _{This highlights the co-dependent relationship of East/West}

binaries. However, Yasuda’s proclamations conceal the fact that Koba does not exist in a

13 _{Said, Orientalism, 41-2.}

14 _{Alastair Bonnett, 'A White World? Whiteness and the Meaning of Modernity in Latin American and}

Japan,'Cynthia Levine-Rasky, Working through Whiteness: International Perspectives (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 94.

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Japanese vacuum. The audience for the first Koba’s performances of noh, kabuki and Japanese music became increasingly international; Yasuda takes the group on tours in Asia where they enjoy much critical and popular success. As Keiko says, ‘And the foreigners too. They went crazy for us. All they had ever known of Japan was the high aesthetic. The Noh, the Zen garden, the tea ceremony. We made them jump from their seats and scream’ (172). The international audience of the group reflects that of the Suzuki Company of Toga

mentioned earlier. The company is based in the secluded village of Toga in Central-West Japan. Its founder Tadashi Suzuki seems to have a philosophical interest in national and global cultural interchange: he writes, ‘Nowadays, at first glance, it is hard to differentiate between Chinese, Korean or Japanese youth based on fashion or behavior. Similarly, when I taught in Russia and the United States, I had the impression that students there behaved in more or less the same way.’ And yet, Suzuki writes, people still desire and identify with local or national traditions. Thus, his company attempts to find the middle ground between local and global forces by staging cross-cultural, multilingual works all over the world: ‘Despite the growing appropriation of art for political purposes, the theatre and all other cultural activities still provide a way for people to collaborate while appreciating differences in nationality and ethnicity.’15 _{While Koba does not stage multilingual or intercultural texts,}

like the Suzuki Company of Toga, they did perform their works for international audiences thus globalising Japanese culture. In this sense they did exhibit some of the international ethic of the Suzuki Company. However, when Koba did enjoy increasing success some of the members started to ask questions about where all the money from the tours was going; they began to suspect that Yasuda kept the money for himself. They ask for wages instead of simply having their communal expenses paid for them. This question of money leads the reader to believe that Yasuda is motivated not simply by a desire to preserve Japanese culture but also by greed brought on by the allure of transnational capital.

The very fact that the group includes Hilda and Eloise shows the lack of preservation of racial or cultural homogeneity that Yasuda purports to be maintaining. Yasuda believes that Koba stands to gain from Hilda’s presence and her writing on the group. At one point he says as much to the members:

When [Yasuda] reached me he put a paternal hand on my shoulder, then called out to Kanno at his table, ‘Did I tell you that Hilda here is going to document the new Koba? She is our historian. We will become known worldwide.’

Around me in the queue people burst into spontaneous applause. (113) The anthropological dynamics between East and West do not represent a one sided dominator/dominated relationship; Yasuda attempts to use Hilda’s work as a springboard for the group’s fame.

That Hilda learns noh from the instructor also represents a clear digression from traditional protocol. Noh performers traditionally begin learning from Japanese masters (who are sometimes their fathers) from a young age, and foreigners who train later in life are