Conversation about the first experience of "underlay of a four-and-a-half-tatami-mat fusuma sliding door" - Nagai Kafu and his postwar adolescence

Conversation about the first experience of "underlay of a four-and-a-half-tatami-mat fusuma sliding door" - Nagai Kafu and his postwar adolescence

In the immediate postwar period, sexuality was rarely discussed in public education and was rarely discussed at home. For boys in junior high schools under the old school system, the opposite sex was shrouded in mystery, and the reality of sex was left to fantasies, rumors, and obscene books called "Harumoto.

A representative example is a novel by an unknown author, "Yonmahan fusuma no shimabari" ("Underneath the sliding doors of a four-and-a-half-tatami-mat room"). When Gozo, the son of an innkeeper in a hot spring resort town, brought in a worn paperback book, his fellow students turned the pages as if competing with each other in a classroom filled with the smell of cigarettes. While struggling with the literary style, they were shocked by the graphic descriptions that far exceeded the obscenities they had heard before.

For example, when they came across a sentence that read, "fiddling with your thumbs on the vital points," the boys earnestly debated, "How do you use your fingers?" and discuss it earnestly. When Gozo explained, "There is a small one attached to the finger," they all reacted with a mixture of surprise and laughter. The scene of these boys with little sexual knowledge trying to construct a reality from the printed word was both innocent and earnest.

Yonmajuhan fusuma no shimabari" is said to have been created between the late Taisho and early Showa eras, and was repeatedly banned as an obscene document from the time of its publication. It takes place in a cheap boarding house, a four-and-a-half-tatami-mat room, and presents a naked depiction of a life in which geisha, prostitutes, and students mingle. While conventional harumoto books were limited to metaphors and euphemisms, this novel is unique in that it clearly describes conversations and actions and does not conceal human desires. When it was circulated again after the war, a controversy over whether it was "literature or obscenity" arose, which eventually led to the "Yonmahan fusuma no shimabari" trial. This became a representative case that questioned the freedom of publication and speech in postwar Japan, and attracted widespread social attention.

Nagai Kafu (1879-1959) was a pioneer who continued to depict Edo's amorous literature and brothel culture and attempted to sublimate sex as a subject matter for literature, despite often being banned. During the trial, works by Kafu and Tanizaki Junichiro were taken up for comparison, and the line between sexual expression and literary quality was debated. Therefore, even though "Yonmajuhan fusuma no shimabari" was not directly by Kafu, it was read within the "Kafu-like genealogy" and was positioned as an entity that questioned the boundary between literature and obscenity.

In the 1960s, amid the student movement and a shift in social values, "sexual liberation" also became the subject of controversy. The scene of boys reading and deciphering "Yonmajuhan fusuma no shimabari" as a forbidden book and engaging in serious discussions about the meaning of its words was not just a memory of their youth, but symbolized the struggle between "sexual norms," "literariness," and "censorship" that Japan faced in the postwar era.