The Wicked Webs
We Weave
In Japanese
literature, men are always dragging women down. Whether this means the general
perception of women or if it means womanly virtue, men are always trying to
find a way to pull women down. The idea of women being lesser is firmly rooted
inside of confucianism. The husband/wife relationship is one of one-way
respect, much like the ruler/subject relationship. Women are supposed to listen
to men, especially their husbands. Therefore, it is easy to drag women through
the moral dirt, when they are portrayed as not listening to their husbands.
This moral
fraying of women can be portrayed in several ways, either metaphorical or quite
literal. For example, Tajomaru from Rashomon is trying to pull down the
Samurai's wife, literally. Granted the entire story of Rashomon and the court
is about how different people have different self interest. Each of the four
characters, who tell their version of the story, tell the story from their
point of view. This makes it easy for them to bend logic and truth.
From the
Samurai's point of view, he doesn't care as much about Tajomaru’s actions, but
instead cares that his wife is willing to leave him. Her leaving is in direct
conflict with the confucian ideal of what makes a good husband/wife
relationship. A good wife would have stayed by her husband, even if it meant
death.
To be fair to the
wife, Tajomaru’s side of the story indicated that the Samurai didn’t care about
his wife either. He follows Tajomaru into the forest, despite feeling
suspicious of him, just so he can get discounted mirrors and swords. During
this time, the Samurai was willing to leave his wife unattended in the woods.
Interestingly, this aspect of the story does not appear in the Samurai’s point
of view.
In his version of the story, she even utters the
phrase, “kill him” to Tajomaru. Even the thief in that version of the story
seems a little put off by that. Whether or not she actually said it, is part of
how the story unfolds. This would be my version of literally pulling women down
through perception.
Another version
of pulling women down can be found in Tanizaki’s “The Tattooer.” This version
of pulling women down is highly symbolic. For one tattoos, though applied, and
eventually permanent. If someone were going to get a tattoo of their identity,
then it would represent them for a long period of time. Not much unlike a
tattoo of a skull and crossbones on an old man's shoulder.
Tattoos were
eventually banned from Japan because of what they represented. Enter Seikichi,
the tattoo artist in “The Tattooer.” He desires to permanently add a spider
onto a woman's back.
The tattoo is a
symbolic expression of how women are viewed as whores, sluts, predators, when they don't meet a certain criteria
in the eyes of men. In this way,the tattoo symbolizes that women will never be
viewed as equals even when they are strong individuals capable of murder.
Consider that
Seikichi only gave the women the tattoo because he found her beautiful. A
tattoo artist’s job is to ruin people's skin. Skin is an outside reflection of
who someone is. Whereas morals are inside reflection of who someone is. Sikichi cares very little about how his
actions change people’s lives. And he seems uninterested in the symbols he
inflicts on people, because his main purpose is create pain. Seikichi loved to
inflict pain on people, which was why he was obsessed with being a
tattooer.
In Japan, tattoos
were used as two different ways throughout history. One way that tattoos were
used was a form of spiritual expressing, sort of a mimicking of the inside
morals of someone. The other way that tattoos were used was as a method to
identify criminals. Certain tattoos would be given to individuals that had done
certain crimes. Even today, tattoos are a method used by the Japanese Mafia,
the Yakuza.
In this story,
the tattoo artist has all of the power. He desires to inflict pain on the
woman, because it will bring him joy. Seikichi ignores another aspect of
confucian ideals. As a person, he chose to not care how he treated everything.
In the story of the tattooer, it seems evident that Seikichi’s actions have
caused the woman to become a killer.
By giving her the
tattoo, he didn’t represent what her moral content was. Instead, the spider
tattoo changed her. Again in a Japanese medium, the man was in direct control
of how the woman was perceived.
This is not
unlike Rashomon either. The story is told from four different point of views,
each of them counter the other. The woodsman, the Samurai, the Thief, and the
wife, create their stories around a fundamental idea of being seen a certain
way. This is just like the tattooer. Each of the characters wants to put on a
front, much like the symbol of a tattoo, so that they can be perceived in a
particular way.
The Samurai does
not want to be perceived as a coward or as weak. We are to believe from
previous stories that Tajomaru was the one who killed him. In fact, several of
the stories indicate that Tajomaru killed the Samurai. Obviously, the samurai
does not want to be remembered as a man who was killed by thief, because that
is not honorable.
So, he finds a
way to drag his wife through the mud. He frays her morals in his story to the
point that she seems like a wicked person capable of unspeakable evil. The
Samurai even mentions that she was the one who put him in this dark place. She
forced him, because of honor, to take his own life.
Each of the women in these two
stories is perceived as weak and moldable by the male characters. Yet, each of
the women was the cause of death of the perspective male character. So, no
matter where woman go in Japan, they are viewed as being weak or as being
spiders, waiting to lure men. Either way, this strips women of their agency and
of their identity.
