8 pages

Sample Abstract and Bibliography

High Economic Growth and Its Discontents: Murakami Ryū’s Topaz (1988)

Published in the heyday of Japan’s economic bubble, Murakami Ryū’s novella, Topaz (1988)

[aka. Tokyo Decadence, title for the film version], portrays a ubiquitous case of libidinal

economy the epoch witnessed through a dystopian urban scene of prostitution and

sadomasochism. Unlike during the poverty-stricken post-WWII war years, the act of prostitution

is no longer meant to be an economic survival but a division of labor willfully chosen by the

protagonists. In the prosperous city of Tokyo, the labor tinged with humiliation and physical toil

plays a twofold role – an anonymous reportage that attests to the thriving business based on the

body capital, and a trope that antithetically mirrors the emptiness immanent in the financial

euphoria. Through the transaction between money and pleasure, the novella unveils a dimension

of economic bubble as psycho-somatic squandering, a financial entropy that drove Japan to

plunge into animalistic investments and radical acquisition of the return. In this line of reading,

the paper locates the novella within the theoretical frame proposed by such thinkers as Sigmund

Freud and Herbert Marcuse, who keenly fathom the danger concealed within civilized society.

Paralyzing effects and sexual repression among social constituents, for example, erupt in the

form of agonistic modes of investment and gain in prostitution. Likewise, the novella wields a

counter narrative against the rational outlook of high growth, delving into the nature of economic

bubble as untamable excess at the limit not only of financial wager but also of humanity.

Tentative Bibliography

Primary Sources:

Murakami Ryū. Topāzu [Topaz]. Tokyo: Kadokawa, 1991.

Topazu [aka. Tokyo Decadence]. Dir. Tanaka Yasuo. DVD. JVD, 2008.

Secondary Sources:

Baba Yasuo. “Baburu shōhi bunka hensen no kōzō” [The Structure of Changing Culture of the

Economic Bubble]. Chōsa jōhō 5.6 (2012): 18-21.

Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Trans. Christ Turner. London: SAGE,

1998.

---. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

Chancellor, Edward. Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation. New York: Plume,

2000.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontent. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.

Galbraith, John K. A Short History of Financial Euphoria (New Japan Edition). Trans. Suzuki Tetsutarō.

Tokyo: Diamond, 2008.

Hara, Hiroyuki. Baburu bunkaron: ‘posto-sengo’ toshiteno 1980nendai [On Bubble Culture: the1980s as

the Post-Postwar Period]. Tokyo: Keio University Press, 2006.

Lyotard, Jean-François. Libidinal Economy. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1993.

MacKay, Charles. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Petersfield, Hampshire:

Harriman House. 2006.

Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon, 1974.

McCreery, John. Japanese Consumer Behavior: From Worker Bees to Wary Shoppers. Honolulu:

University of Hawaii Press, 2000.