Co-sleeping: engaging with the commodified dozing body in Kawabata, Yoshimoto, and Yamazaki

Innami Fusako ()
Additional contact information
Innami Fusako: University of East Anglia

Contemporary Japan, 2015, vol. 27, issue 1, 33-52

Abstract: This paper examines the shifting concept of the body in contemporary Japan through the phenomenon of “co-sleeping” (soine) services. It takes as examples Kawabata Yasunari’s 1961 novel House of the Sleeping Beauties (HSB), Yoshimoto Banana’s 1989 novel Asleep, and Yamazaki Sayaka’s 2008-2010 manga Shimashima. In HSB, the male protagonist sleeps together with girls who are unconscious, knocked out by sleeping pills, and touches them. He can only realize contact with sleeping girls without face-to-face encounters, posing the reader questions such as to what extent one can share one’s corporeality with another in sleeping, what kind of intimacy, desire, and love is involved in payable co-sleeping services, and what it means to engage with the sleeping otherness. Simon Williams and Eyal Ben-Ari have examined co-sleeping as a form of intimate communication. Yet, co-sleeping is a commercial service in HSB, Asleep, and in Shimashima, where the customer pays for sharing bodily warmth and touching another’s (almost unreachable) existence. Having witnessed the recent emergence of actual co-sleeping services in Tokyo and New York, this paper aims to advance literary research on the topic of co-sleeping services and explore the emerging concept of the commercialized sleeping body in contemporary Japanese society

Keywords: co-sleeping; intimacy; love; touch; absence of consciousness; alterity; 添い寝、親密さ、愛、タッチ、意識の不在、他者性 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/cj-2015-0003 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:conjap:v:27:y:2015:i:1:p:33-52:n:1003

DOI: 10.1515/cj-2015-0003

Access Statistics for this article

Contemporary Japan is currently edited by Florian Coulmas

More articles in Contemporary Japan from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().