The crowning work of modern blind date literature, Junichiro Tanizaki's "Fine Snow", begins like this: Downstairs, Yukiko is practicing with Etsuko. Upstairs, Sachiko is dressing up and sees Myoko passing by, shouts at her and asks her to help with the powder. As soon as Myoko got started, the topic of the two quickly switched to gossip Yukiko's new blind date, followed by a series of soul-piercing, heart-pounding questions: What do you do? Is the unit good? How much is the salary? Where did you graduate? What family background? How much property is there? Why haven't you gotten married until now? - And most importantly, the photos are cut?
The issue of the marriage of the elderly young woman Yukiko was so nakedly put on the table, and more importantly, with these three questions and answers and comments, Tanizaki Junichiro deftly pointed out the concerns and calculations of the Igaki clan when marrying (mài) daughter. In a sense, the thick three-volume "Fine Snow" is precisely through the repeated trade-offs of these issues, showing how a declining Kansai Wangzu is constantly re-debugging and positioning itself in a turbulent society, and the conflicts, helplessness and compromises behind these positions.
However, the opening scene does not end there. Tanizaki's pen sharpened, bringing out a small detail that seemed dispensable. After Sachiko finished her makeup, she suddenly remembered something and instructed Myoko:
"Oh yes, I'm 'missing B' again, please go downstairs and give a command, who will disinfect the syringe."
Beriberi can be said to be a endemic disease in the Hanshin area, and perhaps for this reason, this family from the two sons in charge to the first grade of elementary school, every summer and autumn, there is beriberia, and vitamin B injections have become a habit. Lately, even the doctor has not been there, and there are often high-performance vitamin injections at home, and even when there is nothing wrong with each other, they also inject each other. As long as there is a little discomfort in the area, it is attributed to the lack of vitamin B. I don't know who said it first, but when I encounter this situation, it is called "lack of B".
The symptom of "lack of B" almost runs through the whole book, the family takes the injection of vitamins as a habit, there is nothing to do, take out the syringe barrel to beat each other, the action is quite skilled, first "use the grinding wheel to cut the bottleneck, suck the potion into the syringe", pull over the arm, "use the degreasing cotton dipped in alcohol" to wipe it, put the needle into it, and then "paste the tape, and then pat and rub at the needle to make the muscles relax" This is the completion of the full set. As for the cause of the injection, the treatment of beriberi is of course the most common cause, but "when there is nothing wrong" has not stopped, in the words of the narrator, "the sisters have almost become their daily class". Myoko is ill and needs to be injected with vitamins to help her recover. Etsuko couldn't sleep at night, so Sachiko gave her a shot. It was hot, and the three sisters had a bad appetite, so they injected each other. Yukiko wants to eliminate the brown spot on her eyelids, so she takes a vitamin injection every other day. The three sisters were about to go to the concert, and before going out, they discussed what to wear, almost missing the time, and at this moment, they had to squeeze out time to get an injection. For them, vitamins seem to be a panacea for all health problems. - The question is, why? What role do these vitamin details play in Junichiro Tanizaki's narrative? Where does its importance come from? What role did the Japanese people play in their daily lives at that time?
Junichiro Tanizaki "Fine Snow"
In The Secret Window, Anthony Chambers associates the vitamins in Junichiro Tanizaki's narrative with illness, which can be seen as a sign of family decline. Chambers writes, "Illness points to withering and decay, and suggests to the reader the physical fragility of the characters in the novel, while at the same time the illness also characterizes the anxiety that runs through the book." This anxiety about decay is by no means confined to the Okuoka family. Chambersted reminds us that the story of Fine Snow begins in November 1936 and ends in April 1941, when "there are less than eight months left before Pearl Harbor and less than a year before Tokyo was first bombed." In this sense, through the concept of decay, Chambers establishes a vague connection between the vitamin/disease in the novel and the historical and political context in which the novel is located.
However, the historical connection between vitamins and the Japanese colonial war is much more direct than Chambers's argument, which not only occupies an important place in the discourse of Japanese militarism and its body politics, but also the consumption of vitamins throughout the internal transformation and external conquest of the entire colonial period. In fact, with the development of modern nutrition science and its penetration into all aspects of social life, vitamins have long been not only a specific nutrition, but also a symbol of health itself in the mass media. Healthy citizens, on the other hand, were at the heart of the empire's colonial propaganda. In 1941, for example, the Green Flag Alliance, which had been a Buddhist research group and had since become an important collaborator in the colonial government's propagation of state ideology, published the Family Food Reader, aimed at ordinary housewives and intended to instruct them on how to build an ideal family. The Reader devotes a chapter to staple foods and strongly emphasizes the importance of vitamin B: it points out that since 1899, the mortality rate from beriberi due to b vitamin deficiency has been increasing year by year. To address this problem, the book advises housewives to mix polished rice with mixed grains. Especially for families whose staple food is foreign rice, that is, rice imported from Thailand and Vietnam, housewives should mix this rice with wheat or beans, because imported rice is considered to be deficient in vitamin B compared to "inland rice" (i.e., rice produced in mainland Japan).
The more crucial problem is that these proposals were not made from the perspective of improving the health of individuals, but in fact they were deeply embedded in the process of Japanese imperialist expansion at that time. The Reader goes on to write that as a country with a high level of military defense, Japan aspires to achieve self-sufficiency in food supply, "but today, we are working on building a greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere," and thus have to import rice and millet from abroad. Therefore, ordinary Japanese people should recognize the value of eating foreign rice, replenish its shortcomings, and put aside their complaints.
In response to the food shortages caused by the colonial wars, the Japanese government tried to revise the daily diet of ordinary Japanese families through propaganda means, and this new recipe was recognized as "national food" and promoted throughout the empire, with the purpose of nothing more than squeezing more food supplies for the troops on the front line at the expense of ordinary people's meals under the premise of food shortages. It was in this sense that vitamins, as alternatives to dietary nutrition, were incorporated into the grand narrative of the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and became an integral part of Japan's colonial expansion. In the words of Helen Lee, it "nourishes not only the human body, but also loyalty and dedication to the Empire."
Koichiro Tanizaki
The state's focus on the health of individuals continued throughout the war. Sabine Flustek once pointed out that the "body building" of children was considered a means and premise of "empire building" in the Meiji period, and was therefore included under the direct protection and guidance of the state. The system established in this principle was called "modern health regime" by Flucker. By the late 1930s and 1940s, the system was increasingly tightly controlled. In 1938, the Ministry of Health and Welfare was established in Tokyo, and since then, the control of national health and hygiene has been institutionalized by the government. The famous wartime "national uniform" made from the Japanese military uniform was introduced and promoted by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. It can be said that with the deepening of the war, the control of the health and hygiene of ordinary citizens has penetrated into all aspects of society, and has affected and transformed people's daily behavior logic. In The 24th chapter of Volume 1 of The Snow, Sachiko's husband, Sanosuke, notices the excessive attention paid by the Sisters of the Igoka family to hygiene issues, "such as chopsticks being disinfected with boiling water over and over again during meals, and refusing to eat things that fall on the tablecloth, all of which are the styles of Sachiko and Yukiko", and this style has spread to her daughter Etsuko:
Sadanosuke has always adopted laissez-faire, especially on the education of his daughters, and he has always been subordinate to the educational policies of the mothers of his children. In view of the recent development of the "Indochina Incident", it may one day be necessary to involve women in the logistical work of the war, and he fears that in the future, if women are not trained to be stronger, I am afraid that nothing will be done. Once, he inadvertently saw Etsuko playing "Over the House" with Ah Hana, and Etsuko took an old needle and stuck it into the arm of a doll made of straw cores. He wondered how unhealthy the game was, and felt that it was also a residual poison of that kind of health education, and that it must be corrected in the future.
The anxiety and practice of "health education" that came from the "China Incident" is the product of the effective operation of the "health regime". Interestingly, the training of able women capable of war logistics required them to acquire the skills of subcutaneous injection, and it was this acquisition of knowledge and skill that transformed the female body into part of the imperial cause and into the operation of the colonial war machine, including the "China Incident". In fact, throughout the late thirties and forties, women's bodies were always one of the focal points of the State's information campaigns on the responsibilities and duties of the nationals and the promulgation of policies. The image of the so-called ideal woman has been slowly revised from a "good wife and a good mother" in the Meiji period to a hygienic and healthy woman.
One of the most important signs of a healthy woman is that she is able to give birth to a healthy child. Due to the extreme scarcity of human resources caused by the colonial war, the women's womb became a precious resource of the state, and abortion was strictly controlled. In the third part of "Fine Snow", Myoko is pregnant before marriage, and Sachiko wants to persuade her to have an abortion, but quickly gives up the idea: "Two or three years ago, any doctor could easily undergo this kind of surgery." However, the recent social situation has become more and more strict about this kind of thing, so even if Myoko agrees to an abortion today, it is not easy to do it. In that case, the only other way to do this is to temporarily hide her in a place where she cannot meet an acquaintance, and let her give birth there. The "social situation" mentioned here is precisely the strict control of women's bodies during the colonial period mentioned above, where the healthy political system has been internalized into the thinking tendencies of the Okuoka family in making decisions and has become the invisible hand that drives the narrative forward.
In women's magazines such as New Woman, women's reproductive health and personal hygiene have become the basis of various political and commercial propaganda, from vitamin E supplements to prevent preterm birth and miscarriage, to various drugs to promote fetal development, covering almost the whole process of female fertility. Importantly, the language and rhetoric of such propaganda advertisements are extremely politicized and militarized. One of the ads encouraging women to give birth shouted: "Enemy planes have filled the vast sky!" / Our warriors fighting in the south sighed and said so. / How do we answer their voices? / We must send the Japanese flagged plane into the sky as soon as possible. / We must raise more children who can fly airplanes. / Do you still have steel that has not yet been donated? / Do you still live a lifestyle that hinders the development of military power? / Increase fertility! Go ahead with the army! / It's time to mobilize a million troops! The infant nutrition ad on the same page of the campaign declares that "a healthy nation and a strong army begin with virtuous mothers." If the steel used in making airplanes in the front and the womb used to make soldiers in the rear can be equally measured, then the vitamin potion that nourishes the female body can be converted into resources and weapons for colonial causes like the fuel needed to fly the plane.
Louis Young has pointed out that the war frenzy across Japan coincided with the rapidly expanding mass media market at that time. On the one hand, magazines like New Woman proved that the promotion and pursuit of a healthy, perfect female body was inextricably linked to the colonial discourse of the time. On the other hand, similar propaganda in the mass media has transformed the daily life of Japanese natives into a battlefield of ideological warfare. In "Fine Snow", the brown spots on Yukiko's eyelids have always bothered her and become a heart disease on her blind date. In order to remove this brown spot, Yukiko had to regularly inject female hormones and vitamin C injections. Interestingly, this is exactly what Myoko and Sachiko discovered in a "women's magazine". Of course, we can't be sure which "women's magazine" Myoko and Sachiko were reading, but at least we already know how enthusiastic women's magazines were at the time for repairing "unhealthy" women, and part of the source of this enthusiasm. In particular, women who are not yet married, they are like "a commodity waiting to be sold", they should have a perfect body, and this is not only due to the pressure of the marriage market, but also the requirements of a healthy political system.
If we place "Fine Snow" in the context of the colonial empire's promotion and management of women's physical health and family responsibilities, we will find that the daily behavior and thinking of the Ogoka family are almost seamless with the ideological teachings of the time: the family habit of injecting each other with vitamins, the hygiene education of Etsuko, Sachiko and Myoko's concerns about abortion, Yukiko's anxiety about her own health (taking X-rays to eliminate lung disease, following the advice of women's magazines to remove brown spots, habitually injecting vitamins, etc.), and so on. As Yukiko's blind date unfolds, she also seems to have transformed herself step by step into a qualified, healthy reserve wife and mother.
In 1943, "Fine Snow" had just been serialized in the "Central Public Commentary" for two issues, and it was banned because the "feminine, soft, and extremely individualistic women's life" described in it did not match the high-pitched, masculine militarist propaganda tone of the time. Militarism itself, however, has not for a moment brought women's lives out of its sights. These details of health, disease and the female body in the work "Missing B" in "Fine Snow" intentionally or unintentionally reveal the clues of colonial discourse and its healthy political system. At the end of the novel, Yukiko finally finalizes the marriage problem, but just a few days before the wedding, she suddenly began to have diarrhea for no reason, and no matter what medicine she took, it did not work, until she took the train to the wedding, and in the last sentence of the novel, Tanizaki wrote: "That day Yukiko's diarrhea was not good, and she was still pulling on the train." ”
In the context of healthy government, this ending of the story seems subtle and interesting. Is it calling for further treatment, or is it questioning the possibility of an ever-healthy and perfect female body itself? Does the disease constitute resistance to some kind of modern discipline, or at least a deviation? Is the harmony between the individual body and the imperial colonial cause fundamentally unattainable? These questions in no way mean that "Fine Snow" is regarded as a political novel. Or it should be said that it is precisely because "Fine Snow" is not a political novel that the trivial details mentioned above are even more meaningful. More importantly, even after all these arguments, Yukiko's blind date itself has left enough intriguing questions:
What does it do? Is the unit good? How much is the salary? Where did you graduate? What family background? How much property is there? Why haven't you gotten married until now? - And most importantly, the photos are cut? ......