Japn 340 Reading Guide for Yoshimoto, Stray Dog

If the going gets tough in this reading, just try to pull out the stuff that seems to speak to you! Pick out sentences or clauses that stike you.

The following Hints or Guides are not an exhaustive list but they may help you plow your way through your section. Which sections have stuff that could really help us understand/read films better?...And which can help us with our own writing about/understanding of film?

 

Section by Section....

1. Speech /Writing/Image pp. 147-155

Opening shot of panting Dog/Verbal References/ Criminal as “stray dog” turning into “mad dog/How Stray Dog is a film about how filmic narration can work/Full of Rhetorical complexities/Film’s textuality as it represents letters and scripts/Thought v Action/Voice-overs as redundant?/Problematizing meaning/Relationship of language to interiority/Problematizing the centered, interiorized subject/Can the whole film be regarded as a form of writing v speech in the old Derrida idea of logocentrism we picked up from Burch in our first reading?

 

 

2. The Madness of Rhetoric pp. 155-158

How language/literal v figurative meanings confuse/”Stray Dog” as verbal metaphor/Anti-social behavior v Obsession/Limiting vision = Myopia/Distortion interferes with seeing larger picture/ Wordplay by Sato: hoshi (suspec) v. hoshi stars/Madness lies in language’s difference from itself/Sato-Murakami dialogue on train: it's coming? Who? What?/Sato-Murakami dialogue p. 157 - are we made complicit in madness? Wordplay and Speaking of “apres-guerre”/gaeru = to change...war transforms men into beasts (Murakami)

 

3. Rhetoric of Visuality, pp. 158-163 Excess of Visuality/How images are reflected/refracted/shaped and shaded/the 8-min black market montage/Image and Reality confusingly intertwined (161)/How pillars, trees, plants, stairways obstruct/Doubleness/Split images (See list p.162)/Ambiguity of identity/Significance of ”Mura Ki” （村並）clinic sign

 

4. Name and Textuality, pp. 163-165 (Some Japanese language will be helpful for this one) How written language visible in the film affects our reading of it.

Name Yusa (遊佐) Shinjirô (新二郎)　

新二郎 = literally, "New, Second Man," signifying Newness of Postwar? And Doubleness of Identities.

遊 = meant to "play" but 佐 means to "help." Are these two opposite possibilities for action? Choices on the road of life?

What about other language things like jinken-jurin (人権蹂躙) = "human rights violation!"? The Heiwa 平和 Taxi, the Sakura/Yayoi Hotel?

 

5. Fetishism as Intervention, pp. 165-171 Marxian notion of commodity fetishism/Pistol as Phallus/fractured conversation at shooting gallery/Murakami and Harumi?/Murakami and his alter Ego?/Money as a Sign/What does Marx say?/Murakami's Denial of interchangeability/ double forgetting and the possibility of real remembering/Where does Murakami's memory reside?/Thought v action

 

6. Dialectic of Memory, pp. 171-178 History/War/Sato's Certificates/ Signifcance of their dates?/Good cop?/Relativism v Universal Good v Evil/Mirror images/Discourse about environment v individual responsibility for actions/crimes/Two types of memory/Nostalgic longing and forgetting v Past as vividly alive in present/ Murakami's disguise not a disguise?/What is the past for Murakami?/How does Sato invoke past for Sei-san?/With what is film's textual surface inscribed?/Returned Soldiers as Stray Dogs (Noma Hiroshi)/What was the "official discourse" on Postwar Japan?/How were "stray dogs" alienated?/How does Yusa signify the return of the repressed?/How do we read Murakami’s hesitation in the final scene?

 

 

Instructions