... as I think of humidity

Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

... [Suspended] at the moment of disappearance, both visions and objects still linger in a world now suffused with the particular dreams of Japanese modernity. Those dreams move through the entwined temporalities of Japan and others, as they return, once again, to inscribe the uncertain fates of the vanishing. (247)

Very interesting, but not entirely successful - I found myself quite disappointed about half way through. While the theme of 'longing' (especially in regards to 'longing for something 'essential'' - i.e., pre-modern) runs strong throughout the book - be it in terms of domestic tourism, mourning the dead, creating a cultural space that resonates with classic works of folklore, or watching taishū engeki, sometimes referred to as 'third-rate kabuki,' even by the actors - I found the writing to be less than engaging and an unfortunate lack of cohesiveness on the whole. It's this sort of academic writing that drives me nuts - really engaging in parts, but then you get hit with paragraphs of esoteric bullshit. I strive to make my prose clear, readable, and elegant - and not loaded with a bunch of crap so you're forced to diagram sentences to establish their meaning.

This goes along with my general rant re: academia and our unfortunate tendency to participate in 'academic dick flashing'. In this case, I was going to scream if I read 'discursive' one more time. Slightly preferable to ontological, I guess, but still. I suspect in some cases 'elegant' gets conflated with this sort of stuff - and Ivy is very elegant at points, but I think there's just a bit too much going on to make the material truly accessible. I appreciate it when prose can mimic the 'action' of a particular topic - the ability to put your readers into a particular mood or state of mind is something that should be praised heavily. However, I think we need to be careful when treading on 'otherworldly' territory that our writing doesn't start verging on obtuse.

At the very least, she's reasonably successful in refuting the idea of a postmodern, homogenized Japan - the dichotomy between foreign/domestic, traditional/modern and so on is reasonably well fleshed out. I was rather uncomfortable with some of her assertions - not that I know anything about Osorezan, but her constant references to the unintelligible nature of the seers and the fact that they don't fit neatly into what could be described as a 'true' trance didn't sit right. Further, the anthropologist-as-outsider came through a bit too clear in some points - incredulity occasionally rolls off the page.

Interesting when taken piece by piece - could probably use the second and final chapters in a class - but not terribly well pulled together. The questions raised, on the other hand, work pretty well - I've been pondering this 'crisis of modernity' a lot recently, and I think in the United States, we are too used to the status quo and not bumping up against uncomfortable remnants of the past and thus manage to bypass a lot of the post-whatever problems we see cropping up elsewhere. It's not that I think they don't exist (they rather clearly do), but we are rarely forced to confront them - it does seem that in other areas, so clearly inscribed with post- and pre- and semi- and quasi-, it's unavoidable, even if the average person isn't clearly aware of the odd dichotomies of modern life.