Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan (University of Michigan Press, 2021)
PS alum Fusako Innami's (MA '08) Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan (University of Michigan Press, 2021) is now Open Access and can be read online for free on Fulcrum platform.
In Touching the Unreachable, Innami offers the first comprehensive study of touch and skinship—relationality with the other through the skin—in modern Japanese writing. The concept of the unreachable—that is, the lack of characters’ complete ability to touch what they try to reach for—provides a critical intervention on the issue of intimacy. Touch has been philosophically addressed, but literature is an effective—or possibly the most productive—venue for exploring touch in Japan, as literary texts depict what the characters may be concerned with but may not necessarily say out loud. Such a moment of capturing the gap between the felt and the said—the interaction between the body and language—can be effectively analyzed by paying attention to layers of verbalization, or indeed translation, by characters’ utterances, authors’ depictions, and readers’ interpretations. Each of the writers discussed in this book—starting with Nobel prize winner Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, and Matsuura Rieko—presents a particular obsession with objects or relationality to the other constructed via the desire for touch.
In Touching the Unreachable, phenomenological and psychoanalytical approaches are cross-culturally interrogated in engaging with literary touch to constantly challenge what may seem like the limit of transferability regarding concepts, words, and practices. Through close readings of the authors’ treatment of touch, Innami develops a theoretical model with which to examine intersensorial bodies interacting with objects and the environment through touch.