Touching the Unreachable

Fusako Innami offers the first comprehensive study of touch and skinshiprelationality with the other through the skinof modern Japanese writing. The concept of the unreachablethat is, the lack of complete ability of characters to touch what they try to reach forprovides a critical intervention on the issue of intimacy. Touch has been philosophically addressed in France, 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 saidthe interaction between the body and languagecan 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 bookstarting with Nobel prize winner Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Junichiro, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, and Matsuura Riekopresents 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. The book thereby not only bridges cultural gaps beyond geographic and linguistic constraints, but also aims to decentralize a Eurocentric hegemony in its production and use of theories and brings Japanese cultural and literary analyses into further productive and stimulating intellectual dialogues. Through close readings of the authors treatment of touch, Innami develops a theoretical framework with which to examine intersensorial bodies interacting with objects and the environment through touch.