Ahhhh!
A good theme deserves a good teacher
My advisor P. is always a great lecturer, a real master of the engaging, conversational style that was common at Harvard but rarer here at U of M. I really have learned a lot from watching him. Today he was in particularly good form with a totally new lecture on yokai culture in Japan. The term yokai refers to monsters like ghoulish women or demons, but also fears, like the fear of being watched. P. becomes a sort of tour guide through this world, and I was really impressed that he was able to introduce contemporary scholarship (he acknowledges his debt to the new book Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yôkai by Michael Dylan Foster), cultural practices, art and artists from Edo, Meiji and modern Japan, and even concluding on the topic of urban legends. His lecture really worked because it showed that the theme of yokai shows up again and again in Japanese history for reasons that are uniquely Japanese, although not at all alien or difficult to understand once they are explained clearly. Most importantly, I really felt that P. gets across the important point that we are always constructing ourselves and our history at the same time.
The morass of culture
Take the "slit-mouth woman" (Kuchisake-onna 口裂け女), for example. Lots of people firmly believe that this is a yokai from ancient Japan, but it seems more likely to have been a uniquely modern urban legend, sort of like the Donkey Lady or the Candy Man. But the nostalgic and playful artist Shigeru Mizuki has rendered the story of the slit-mouth woman (she kills kids, basically) into his own manga and sculpture and so on, lending credibility to the idea that the creature really does come out of Japanese history. I just think this is the most sophisticated way of looking at culture through art and literature that we have today, and it's a real treat to see P. deliver the message to undergrads. Examine his powerpoint presentation (read-only; opens in Google docs) if you wish; I don't think he would mind.
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