“True Heart”:Reimagining Transnational Subjects through Sentimentality in Velina Hasu Houston’s Plays
The article examines the political viability of empathy when we imagine interracial intimacies in women’s theatre. Borrowing Lauren Berlant’s notions of “national sentimentality” and the “intimate public,” I argue that Velina Hasu Houston’s Tea (1981) and Kokoro (1994) complicate our usual understanding of theatrical empathy. These plays restage familiar spectacles of racial suffering through the sentimental rhetoric and conventions of melodrama in order to enable cross-racial identifications between Japanese women and presumably white, female audiences. Simultaneously, they challenge the universalizing impulse of such falsely imagined affective alliances by exposing racial stereotypes and highlighting the limits of the viewers’ empathic desires. By reading these plays as creating a female cultural space – one in which affective mutuality is believed to transcend material differences – I interrogate the contingencies and pseudo-political dimensions of theatre’s feeling work.
empathy, women’s community, sentimentality, melodrama, cross-racial, affect
The female complaint is a discourse of disappointment. But where love is concerned, disappointment is a partner of fulfillment, not an opposite.
– Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint
Near the end of Velina Hasu Houston’s Tea (1981), Chizuye, one of the four Japanese women gathered to perform a ritual for their deceased friend Himiko, takes a moment to ask why Himiko’s death has brought them together after so many years of indifference and separation. As she declares, “We’re not here because we have to be. Japanese manners don’t require us to pay homage to some loon of a woman, even if she was Japanese” (34; emphasis in the original). Rather than positing their shared national identity as a common ground for sympathy for Himiko, Chizuye suggests that what brings the [End Page 482] women together is a sense of urgency that calls for a kind of emotional awakening:
No, we’re here today because we hurt inside like we never have before. Because when the first of us goes so violently and it’s all over the papers, it wakes us up. For the first time in our lives, we gather together all the pieces of our used-up hearts and come running here hoping we’ll find some kind of miracle that will glue it all back together and send us into our old age with something to hold onto.
(34)
Chizuye suggests that Himiko’s tragedy has aroused certain feelings that were dormant and buried in these women’s hearts, feelings that beg to be enlivened and reassembled. She urges others to recognize the potential that inheres in such remnants of feeling – that they can be restored as a survival strategy, as “something to hold onto.” By making a statement that Himiko’s tragedy has touched the hearts of these Japanese women, the fragmented individuals who have suffered from the absence of community, this scene illustrates how affective solidarity, like a miracle, can change reality and offer a better future. What intrigues me is how this newly found sense of community purports to transcend various markers of identity beyond their shared nationality. By invoking the commonality of the women’s racialized victimhood, this moment in the play inaugurates an affective community for the characters and also asks us to relate to them and see them anew as feeling subjects.
The present article focuses on empathic communities in Houston’s Tea and Kokoro (1994) and investigates the political possibilities and limits of affective strategies that seek to transcend material barriers of race and nationality. These plays seem to employ theatrical empathy in a familiar way primarily, as a form of sentimental rhetoric expressing women’s universal experience. But they also present empathy as a subversive force for resisting structural racism and reconciling cultural difference as they locate a utopian vision in an intimate affective community. In both plays, a Japanese woman is ostracized in the community because of idiosyncratic behaviours that are distinctively cultural in nature, part of what one character calls “Japaneezy Japanese” (Tea 10). These traits immediately evoke feelings of estrangement from the rest of the community and lead to an impasse in cross-cultural dialogues. Such an impasse is negotiated in each play as we view the characters through the lens of universal sentiments: in Tea, the suffering of Japanese women under racism and patriarchal oppression speaks to the audience’s sympathy for other women; in Kokoro, maternal love traverses differences of culture and nationality. The sentimental rhetoric and conventions of melodrama in these plays articulate the basic hope that white spectators, through the process of witnessing suffering, will shift the dynamic of their relationship [End Page 483] with Asian American characters from one of racist objectification to one of empathic reciprocity.
At the same time, both Tea and Kokoro complicate this vision of sharing across racial lines and seamlessly effecting an unvexed formation of multiracial community. I argue that the yearning for cross-racial identification grounded in shared feelings is interlaced with a sense of discontent. The plays evince anxieties about the wholesale acceptance of an all-embracing sentimentality that erases and subsumes differences. Houston’s works make us question what, exactly, might serve as a foundation for an intimate public of women. As one critic briefly observes, Tea’s immediate success among mainstream audiences may illustrate what mainstream audiences expect of Asian American plays in general, of the particular stories and racial stereotypes associated with Asian American women (E.K. Lee 150). The longevity of the Madame Butterfly stereotype, for example, attests to the popularity of spectacles showcasing the pitiful femininity of Japanese women whose stories move white women to tears.1 Such expectations evidence the already existing desire of audiences to feel for Asian women; in other words, spectators enter the theatre space with preconceived emotional attachments that function as a prerequisite for the creation of an intimate viewing public.
On the one hand, Houston’s plays do espouse an optimistic belief in the social power of sentimentality that feminist scholars have increasingly scrutinized over the past few decades. While sentimentality has often been denigrated for its passivity in relation to radical social change within the male-centred American literary tradition, Jane Tompkins, Linda Williams, and Christine Gledhill find aesthetic and political value in literary and cultural forms such as melodrama. Emotional genres, including the nineteenthcentury domestic novel, the early-twentieth-century Hollywood film, and the soap opera, often evince the political potential of a sentimentality that may “reorganize culture from the woman’s point of view” and provide revolutionary ideas and visions (Tompkins 124). Far from being asocial and apolitical, this sentimental power may call forth the audience’s desire for moral justice, which will ultimately lead to transformations in the world outside. Spectacles of subaltern suffering – whether by racial minorities or women – will mobilize the viewers’ sympathy, and empathy thus heightened will presumably extend beyond the realm of fiction. Sentimentality makes us confront and challenge the dominant social mores of the time and envision a community that transcends the racism or patriarchy dictated by social reality.
On the other hand, sentimentality operates in more ambiguous and problematic ways. Lauren Berlant critiques the cultural power of sentimental politics, which she calls “national sentimentality”: “a rhetoric of promise that a nation can be built across fields of social difference through channels of [End Page 484] affective identification and empathy” (“Subject” 53). This fantasized sense of belonging displaces the inequalities of political reality onto the realm of aesthetics: it feeds its members optimistic and emotionally gratifying representations of mutuality and reciprocity while not fomenting real social change. It elicits the politically correct feelings of fragmented individuals faced with the pain of the other and locates “the ethical citizen less in his/her acts than in his/her proper feelings” (Berlant, “Uncle Sam” 26). Williams finds that melodramatic portrayals of racialized victims, such as the suffering Uncle Tom, also serve a palliative function, offering hope of innocence and virtue “in private individuals and individual heroic acts rather than . . . in revolutions and change” (Race Card 35).
Such a discourse of promise proliferates in women’s culture. This discourse purports to embrace women of differences in a category of an imagined “intimate public” who can share “a universal true feeling” (Berlant, “Subject” 53); this intimate public creates a fantasy that members of the affective community will share both common emotions and the desire to identify with each other. Such a universal true feeling or all-embracing sentimentality, however, disregards what Berlant calls the “nonuniversality of pain” (“Poor Eliza” 641); it reduces all women’s experiences to one representative experience: white, bourgeois, and liberal. Thus, affective affiliation built within such a fantasized cultural space could end up as subversion within “the selfcontained, performative modes of complaint” rather than posing a threat to the status quo (“Complaint” 253).
The theatre shares the function of women’s sentimental culture in that it mobilizes people’s feelings in the service of politically correct, “good” feelings. As many theorists concur, feelings are central to theatrical experience, and theatre’s cultural work is done through its “feeling-work” of displaying, soliciting, and managing feelings (Hurley 9). Aristotle’s concept of catharsis is helpful here: in his view, tragedy is to be seen as a dramatic form that purges negative feelings – of fear and pity – and transforms them into something sublime. In this sense, the feeling work of theatre is a form of containment because the “bad” feelings of characters and audiences are left in the space of ritual after being displayed and consumed. Melodrama performs a similar function when it provokes a sense of right and wrong in its viewers by generating an excess of feelings.2 My focus on the rhetoric of “universal true feelings” in Tea and Kokoro draws on these thoughts about what emotions do in the theatre and rethinks how emotions generate intimate female publics. I am not arguing that all theatrical experiences share the privatizing tendency and reductive identification that Berlant criticizes. But these plays allow us to consider how women’s emotions might be consumed as private, voyeuristic, pseudo-political desires within the economy of theatre. [End Page 485]
Philosophers were concerned with ideas of empathy as early as the eighteenth century, but it was only in the late nineteenth that the specific term emerged as an indispensable component of therapist–patient rapport.3 In this context, empathy refers to a transfer of self: putting oneself in another’s position through emotional attachment rather than cognitive engagement. For its potential to bridge disparate selves, this model of empathy has been taken up in discourses of multiculturalism that stress the cultivation of empathy as a way to stabilize conflicting interests and positions within a liberal society. These discourses ultimately aim to promote a sense of citizenship and social justice.4 Speaking of live theatre, David Krasner uses empathy as a comprehensive term that denotes “an affective response to a narrative, actor, or character, reflecting involvement, identification, understanding, or complicity of feelings” (257). My use of the term is largely indebted to these formulations; my aim is to complicate our understanding of the ways in which theatre promotes empathy and reproduces an ideal viewing public as a foundation for the communitas that a liberal society strives to build. I suggest that various theatrical apparatuses are used to this end: they arouse empathy through various routes of feeling.
Houston’s plays grapple with the ambivalence innate in the intimate public that women’s theatre generates and circulates, as her plays mobilize and disrupt cross-racial identifications between characters and audiences. While casting the sufferings of the “foreign” subjects in a familiar sentimental light, the plays present the subjects’ “emotional lives” as relevant to a predominantly white, bourgeois, female viewing public. But, as I will show, these plays also show a wariness about eliciting the sort of spectatorial identification and desire that might override difference and universalize emotional experiences. They do so by highlighting dimensions of the characters’ lived experiences that are distinct and therefore not reducible to the “types” audiences eagerly relate to. This is best illustrated when spectacles of Asian women’s suffering, which should be a driving force behind cross-racial empathy, exceed or even subvert the audiences’ expectations. These “post-sentimental” moments, to borrow Berlant’s term (“Poor Eliza”), underscore the non-transferable, embodied nature of the suffering, acknowledgement of which may be the only way that one can approximate the pain of the other. An intimate public reveals its ambivalence when it yearns for a utopic place, not only based on the imagined notion of affective mutuality, but also apathetic to culturally peculiar registers of feelings.
TEA
Set in 1968, Tea centres on five Japanese women who came to the United States as war brides and settled in Junction City, Kansas. As the story unfolds, [End Page 486] we learn that these women had been indifferent to and alienated from each other since their arrival in the United States until Himiko’s death brought them together. The play highlights the diverse life trajectories each individual has followed, in Japan and in America, as well as the hardships of assimilation that the women re-enact on stage, and it suggests that they finally come to rediscover their commonalities and regain a sense of community, despite their differing views on the idea of family, nation, and community. Through the characters’ physical and psychological immobility and their segregation from the mainstream white society, Houston offers a transnational perspective on the post–World War II racial landscape in the heart of America and lays bare the material impacts of the containment culture that served as an ideology to manage racial and cultural others.
In the opening scene, four Japanese women visit Himiko’s empty, abandoned house to perform the ritual of drinking tea in remembrance of their deceased friend. Himiko recently committed suicide shortly after losing her bi-racial daughter in a tragic hate crime, two years after she killed her own husband in an act of self-defence. The physical condition of the house reflects Himiko’s mindscape – deteriorating and therefore demanding recuperation. The play transforms Himiko’s house, a once-idyllic space infiltrated with racism and violence, into a feminine sphere that can be salvaged and reclaimed through the women’s collective efforts. The forlorn house is no longer in its original condition (“It didn’t smell here before, Atsuko-san!” [7]), but matches the image of Himiko herself, who appears onstage wearing “a white petticoat with shredded hems” and “a distorted kimono” (5). Himiko is present onstage as the spirit, invisible to the other characters but visible to the audience, and she provides comments to support or challenge the other women throughout the play. She is a haunting presence that will ultimately make the women remember the commonalities of their lived experience. The testimonials of the women reconstruct Himiko’s image, transforming her from the crazy murderer who shot her husband and showed no remorse into a victim of patriarchal and racist violence: once an innocent Japanese girl with few choices but to move to the United States, Himiko, whose lip was bitten off in one violent episode, would become a woman confined to her own house, often starved, and completely isolated from her community.
While the play exposes the sociopolitical forces that shape personal tragedies like Himiko’s, it does not propose ways to change the status quo. Instead, it focuses on the power of feeling to help the women recognize each other’s pain. More intriguing about this call for affective awakening is that being Japanese is not enough; only feeling the pain of being Japanese – or something akin to it – can bring these women and us closer together. When [End Page 487] the four first enter Himiko’s house, their immediate responses vary from sympathy to fear and curiosity. Himiko is remembered for her difference: for unconventional acts such as wearing wigs at her husband’s funeral or for her alleged promiscuity.
Houston’s project lies in transforming these unsympathetic onlookers, which presumably includes members of the audiences with little in common with the characters, into empathic subjects, through sentimental education and a process of reconciliation. The play strives to create an empathic community of women as feeling subjects who show differing degrees of empathic capacity, by evoking a commonality that might transcend markers of nationality or ethnicity. One of the women, Atsuko, is initially repulsed by Himiko’s idiosyncrasies and abhors being associated with her in any way (“Just because I’m Japanese doesn’t mean I have anything to do with her life” [9]). Although she accepts an invitation to drink tea at Himiko’s house and joins the healing ritual, the purpose of her visit lies more in her curiosity about one crazy woman’s unknown story than in a communal desire to appease her disturbed soul. She constantly differentiates herself from Himiko and other Japanese women, claiming that she alone is capable of leaving the contained space of Kansas (32). Atsuko’s penchant for individualism is conspicuous to the rest of the women, which causes conflict among them.
Atsuko’s conversion to empathy shifts our attention beyond the boundaries of material differences, such as ethnicity and race, to the realm of affect. Tea neither characterizes her bluntly as failing to conform to a sympathetic community nor shows her being forced to be part of that community. Rather, it stresses that Atsuko’s conversion to empathic subject is voluntary and spontaneous – features crucial for sustaining the affective community. Only when non-sympathizers like Atsuko – a surrogate for the audience – get a proper sentimental education can the marginalized be incorporated with the heartfelt consent of the community. When the confrontation between Atsuko and the other women is at its height, the spirit of Himiko intervenes and appeals, “Atsuko-san, stay. If you leave now, no one will rest” (35; emphasis added). Atsuko, guided by the unseen presence of Himiko, “fights with herself” and is finally reconciled with the other women and, thus, with Himiko. In at last demonstrating her wish to stay and mourn for Himiko, Atsuko proves her membership in this affective community.
While Tea endorses the potential power of an empathy community, it simultaneously betrays anxieties about its penchant for universalization. One of the ways the play heightens the sense of community for Japanese characters is through their bodily performances, when they follow synchronized movements such as drinking tea or re-enacting shared experiences from the past (22–23). On the one hand, these moments evoke commonalities of [End Page 488] cultural memory that the women can collectively inhabit – their shared experiences of migration and struggles of assimilation, which include Himiko’s as well as their own individual stories and thus reaffirm sisterhood. Josephine Lee reads these moments as “a choreographed expression of solidarity,” which evinces Tea’s emphasis on “a community based on ethnicity and gender as a defense against the loneliness of racism” (204). But these moments may threaten to present the women, when engaged in the same act, as interchangeable subjects, with familiar, stereotyped ethnic and gendered experiences. The play, therefore, makes efforts to present a broad spectrum of Japanese female experiences, not only through the diversity of individual stories, but also through doubling and cross-casting. The same actresses who play Japanese women assume other racial and gender roles as their American husbands of diverse racial backgrounds, from African American to Hispanic, and as their bi-racial daughters. In other words, the play evokes familiar images of Asian femininity only to destabilize their credibility. It trumps our desire to essentialize Asian American identities. As Karen Shimakawa observes, the play’s emphasis on the diversity among Japanese women, together with the doubling and cross-casting, cause audiences to see characters “in relation to each other rather than to dominant culture” (107; emphasis in the original).
I argue that the same anxiety about the universalizing force of empathetic spectatorship is manifested in an anti-climactic moment of the play, which comes right after Atsuko’s conversion. We see the bi-racial daughters of the Japanese women at a slumber party – played by the same actresses who play the mothers – complaining about their mothers’ cultural idiosyncrasies, with which they disidentify. For the girls, their mothers’ incorrigible Japanese accents, submission to their husbands, and obsession with a Japanese diet are objects of mockery and markers of foreignness. They reiterate negative stereotypes as they mimic accents derisively or exaggerate bodily gestures (35–36). In a way, the lack of intergenerational identification in this scene reinforces the significance of empathy. The daughters fail to understand their mothers, despite their cultural and ethnic ties; audiences better understand their mothers by this point. More importantly, this scene challenges our own empathic imagination and suggests its limits by presenting the illegibility of the pains of the other. It is significant, too, that, when Himiko’s daughter Mieko is introduced into the play, she is played by the same actress as Himiko; doubling, in other words, may reveal the fluidity of the Asian female body and highlight the diversity of roles that the body can assume. (Indeed, in versions of the play published by Alexander Street Press and in Houston’s anthology of Asian plays, But Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise, the stage directions and speech prefixes toggle between the two names, further destabilizing the [End Page 489] distinction between one character and another.) The doubling of Himiko and Mieko also has an uncanny effect. Unlike the other “daughters” who act differently from their “mothers,” Mieko’s eerie displays (and her tragic death) reinforce Himiko’s own image. In contrast to the girls’ playfulness about their mothers, Mieko’s response is filled with cynicism and wryness, “[w]ithout feeling, no sense of bitterness, with an eerie smile” (36). When asked about her mother, she enigmatically answers, “I hate the world.” She then continues:
HIMIKO:It isn’t about dating guys. It’s about being fucked by guys. (Their laughter is cut short by Himiko’s remark. Their motions grind to a halt [. . .] They are shocked at this language and eye one another uncomfortably. Himiko seems to enjoy this power.) By everybody: your mother, your father – and even yourself. (A pause as she looks away from the girls and then she hits the table with the palm of her hand, frightening the other girls.) Don’t ask me about my mother. Because then you’re asking me about myself . . . and I don’t know who the hell I am.
(36; emphasis in the original)
Houston leaves Mieko’s words unexplained – we only hear from Himiko’s spirit that her daughter went missing and was found brutally raped and killed. This lack of resolution leaves a sense of frustration and unease rather than reconciliation. Even as the play wrestles with articulating the racial and cultural dimensions of pain and suffering to the audience, this particular moment pushes us to reassess whether our empathic desire will ever let us comprehend the other’s suffering. Himiko-as-Mieko’s refusal to explain herself might suggest that the pain Himiko bears – that is, the material impact of racism-imbued perceptions of Japanese women and their bi-racial offspring – cannot be known through a spectator’s gaze, however sympathetic.
After this scene, the play hurries to its final scene where it presents Himiko “dressed in resplendent kimono” and “look[ing] happier” (38–39). Compared to her initial appearance as a fragmented self, in shattered garments, “torn between two worlds,” Himiko now embodies the recovery of an individual and the community of which she is part. Relieved of tensions and negative feelings, Chizuye confesses, “I am glad I came here today. Somehow, I feel at home with you women, you Japanese women. (Smiles.) Today” (38). Chizuye’s remark further reaffirms the transformation they have undergone in becoming a feeling community. Despite the feat of sentimental education the play celebrates, however, it is not entirely certain how these women’s newly awakened sense of community will manifest itself in their lives outside those confining and insulated spaces, where interracial and intercultural exchanges of feelings and the conflicts that result persist. The stage direction [End Page 490] also states that these women disperse “in different directions,” not as a community but as fragmented individuals (39). This dispersal echoes the audience’s own sense of departure from this “fantasized” space of imagined solidarity into the “real” world, where no radical social changes have actually taken place. The disparity between subversive performance and unchanging reality illustrates how politically correct feelings can be displayed, shared, and purged in such pseudo-political spaces as theatre.
The collective emotional purging that Tea offers ends up as a female complaint, I suggest, that is consumed among sympathetic female voyeurs. It generates “a porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that promises a certain experience of belonging” (Berlant, Preface viii), and implicitly redirects our blame toward unfeeling individuals and communities, from which we are exempted by our active participation in the affective scenes of identification. The ambiguity of the women’s empathic community is further pursued in Kokoro, where the political dimensions of collectively imagined sentimentality gain more prominence. The power of sentimentality Kokoro mobilizes is a more complex one, since it calls for political changes and brings about individual initiation into American citizenship.
KOKORO
If transnational experiences offer a common emotive language for Japanese women in Tea, motherhood mediates racial and cultural differences in Kokoro, which Houston wrote in 1994. Yasako Yamashita is a young Japanese woman who migrated to California after she married a Japanese husband, Hiro. Yasako is a traditional Japanese wife in that she mostly spends her time at home with her daughter, Kuniko. One day, she discovers Hiro’s extramarital affair with a Japanese American waitress, Shizuko, who reveals her own pregnancy by Hiro. Dejected, Yasako attempts oyako shinju, or a parent-child suicide, assuming that her daughter would suffer if left behind. But her attempt fails. She alone survives, convicted of first-degree murder. Based on a real-life chain of events in Santa Monica in 1985, Kokoro is Houston’s effort to do Yasako justice. Act One presents the emotional circumstances that shape her actions. Act Two then invites us to reconsider the legitimacy of her actions through the lens of our feelings for her, which may bridge two seemingly opposing cultural values, Japanese and American.
Kokoro encourages us to see Yasako as a victim of failed cultural assimilation and her seemingly heinous crime as an emotionally understandable one. At the same time, it poignantly suggests that the dominant culture imposes the ethics of emotions on culturally marginalized or alienated members of a community. As Houston describes in the author’s note: [End Page 491]
The amalgam of heart and mind brings a different dimension to that ethereal, inexplicable entity that we call love. It is one of discernment that transcends the veneer of language and the hasty fulfillment of love via institution and material objects. When culture – in the sense of behaviors and beliefs inherent to ethnicity, transmitted to succeeding generations – is brought to this kind of love, ethnic idiosyncrasies can have a shattering effect.
(47)
While endorsing maternal love as a universal language for women characters, the play shows that “ethnic idiosyncrasies” – markers of differing cultures – have “shattering effects” when they take unexpected modes of expression. By illustrating how even maternal love can assume a strange form, the play questions the notion that we can negotiate cultural specificities through empathy.
In her insightful study of the correlation between affect and happiness, Sara Ahmed has argued that feelings shared among people lead to a stronger social bond. But feelings associated with and promoted for the good of a community are essentially exclusive and come with normative demands. They necessarily leave out some members of the community, whose affect, marked with cultural and historical differences, does not conform. Accordingly, these members may be coerced to “feel in the right way” to prove that they belong. Therefore, a notion of happiness grounded in shared feeling often “redescribe[s] social norms as social goods” and serves to justify oppression of the marginalized (2). For example, there is an assumption that if an immigrant wants to achieve a better, happier life, she should learn to put behind her attachment to the old values/world and embrace the new one. This view implies that individuals should desire happiness for the sake of the entire community, not just for themselves.
This process of affective assimilation is prominent in the character of Yasako, who may be read as an unhappy immigrant made into a happy national subject by adopting new ways to “feel right and therefore be happy.” Yasako’s ideal love for her child is closely tied to their mutual happiness, which is framed within a Japanese understanding of maternal love. At the end of the play, Yasako has to unlearn the Japanese way of interacting with the world and embrace the American way. An empathic community of women plays a key role in this process of affective education. Women – regardless of their racial identity – feel for Yasako’s misery and are willing to assist her in finding her own source of happiness. Interestingly, Yasako’s problem is dealt with as a problem for the whole community of women and immigrants, which suggests that her reconciliation is connected to the welfare of an entire American society, one that putatively upholds the ideal of multiculturalism. The “reconciliation,” then, involves separating her own self from [End Page 492] that of her child and disconnecting her identity from its formerly governing frame of cultural reference.
As the play moves toward Yasako’s reconciliation with American society and a new community, it evinces ambivalence about the affective values endorsed as necessary to membership. Resistance to these demands to conform is most palpable in the interactions between Yasako and her mother’s ghost, Fuyo. Fuyo is a constant reminder of Japanese values; she validates Yasako’s un-American feelings and the decisions that result. The play initially highlights the strong bond between Fuyo and Yasako to show where Yasako’s emotional attachment lies. I argue that Yasako’s ultimate disavowal of affective ties with Fuyo suggests that she is best to renounce the affective culture that their bond represents in order to be successfully incorporated into another affective community, one marked by Americanness.
Reminiscent of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Kokoro imagines a sympathetic viewing public who will judge Yasako’s act beyond legal terms. Morrison’s equivocal representation of a black mother’s infanticide has produced a number of readings. Yung-Hsing Wu’s is particularly relevant here. Wu suggests that the point of reading Beloved lies in “its insolubility of ethical judgment” (795). “The act of reading,” she argues, “encounters the difficulty of making ethical decisions, leaving open the possibility, as well as the risk, that an ethical judgment of Sethe will always be up for negotiation” (796). Kokoro, too, presents varied reactions to Yasako’s act and thus engages us in a similarly provisional process of decision making. This process enables us to reconsider the prevailing perceptions, norms, and values critically, through a renewed understanding of culturally motivated acts that is made possible by means of collective, public witnessing.
For this purpose, the play conceives of the theatre as an intimate public space where women can express and exchange their emotions – especially emotions such as Yasako’s, which are incompatible with society’s dominant perceptions and values. Alison Jaggar uses the term “outlaw emotions” to describe feelings experienced by subordinated individuals who are “unable to experience the conventionally prescribed emotion” (160), owing to their deprivileged social situations. These feelings “bring to consciousness our ‘gutlevel’ awareness that we are in a situation of coercion, cruelty, injustice, or danger” (161). While such emotions are powerless and inarticulate when felt by isolated individuals, they gain subversive potential when they motivate a critical search for alternative modes of perception. Kokoro offers subversive possibilities by laying bare feelings in a way that moves us to question, contest, and validate them through collective acts of witnessing. We come to share the privately held, inarticulate outlaw emotions of a Japanese woman. The initial repulsion and feeling of alienation an audience may have toward [End Page 493] Yasako’s culturally motivated action demonstrate the material gap that exists between them. But these emotional estrangements provide opportunities to enhance and reaffirm an empathic ability that can overcome social barriers.
Throughout Kokoro, motherhood is constantly evoked as an affective currency that female characters can exchange in order to overcome cultural differences. Houston’s maternal melodrama explains and legitimates its female protagonist’s motivations and actions through a mother’s innocent love for her daughter – a love that any mother would feel. As a resilient aesthetic frame that can accommodate conflicting ideas and attitudes, melodrama presents various perspectives and produces “empathic, identifying female spectators” who will identify with characters on multiple levels (Williams, “Something” 18). Through female characters of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds – from a white female lawyer of Italian descent to Yasako’s bi-racial and bicultural neighbour, Evelyn, to a woman like Yasako – the play displays a wide spectrum of emotional responses. As the play progresses, women constitute an intimate public of sympathetic listeners who validate Yasako’s feelings in the name of the Mother.
The play initially presents Yasako’s isolation and the absence of an empathic community, which derive from a seemingly irreconcilable, cultureinflected emotional gap. Yasako is presented as a conventional Japanese woman, who resists Americanization by alienating herself from reality. She is a woman who “still wears kimono, [went to] women’s college, married down, refused to be naturalized, never leave[s] the house” (62). Far too assimilated to share his wife’s attachment to Japan, Hiro ridicules Yasako’s desire to celebrate Japanese culture and criticizes her overprotective attitude toward Kuniko. Dismissed as idiosyncrasies by her husband, Yasako’s beliefs in ancestral spirits and Japanese rituals suggest how her emotional world and human relationships are shaped by Japanese cosmology. She is contrasted with Shizuko, a modern Japanese woman who has successfully assimilated, “naturalized, married to an American before” (62). Shizuko resents and mocks Yasako’s submission to Hiro as a sign of quaint cultural habits, and she boasts how she cast away the role of “Madame Butterfly” (62). That they are rivals in a love triangle explains only part of the irreconcilable gap between the two women – there is, in addition, the gap that results from their differing degrees of assimilation. Yasako manages to reach out to Evelyn, her half-Japanese neighbour, only to retreat to her isolated state, not trusting that other women will understand her (75).
It is the ghost of Fuyo that serves as an imaginary sympathizer with Yasako as “the one person who can understand” in the absence of a community (75). Yasako’s tie to her dead mother had been temporarily severed when she married Hiro and moved to America: as the play opens, we watch Yasako bidding [End Page 494] her mother’s spirit farewell and Fuyo resisting a parting with her daughter. But the spirit revisits Yasako as she prepares to celebrate the O-bon Festival, and then it reappears at crucial moments to validate Yasako’s critical decisions as those of a “perfect” Japanese wife and mother. For example, Fuyo legitimates Yasako’s suicide (75). In her stage direction, Houston suggests that the understanding gazes between mother (a silent figure on stage) and daughter represent an emotional language, unspoken yet mutual. As in Tea, the fact that the audience can see the ghost of Fuyo suggests that we participate in Yasako’s imagined emotional world. These shared moments create an empathic bond between the audience and Yasako and facilitate our identification with her.
The play ultimately suggests that Yasako’s strong emotional tie with her mother should be replaced by the more desirable cross-racial and crossnational alliances forged in her evolving relationships with other women, such as Angela Rossetti, Yasako’s Italian-American attorney, who was raised as a Catholic. We see how Angela is converted from an unsympathetic, detached mediator to an empathizer: motherhood provides a common language for transcending the women’s differences. Their mutual recognition as mothers rebuilds a sense of affiliation whenever cross-cultural dialogue reaches an impasse. In their first meeting, Angela warns Yasako that the jury will hold a grudge against her because of unforgotten memories of World War II. The language she uses (“people killing children” and “the kind who eat steamed white rice with their meals”) expresses racist stereotyping, the lens through which it is assumed that the conservative white jury will see Yasako (77). But seeing Yasako stunned by this harsh, judgemental remark, Angela apologizes for her unprofessional attitude, where she reacted “like a mother first” (78). Yasako immediately says she “knows” how Angela must feel, and the bond between the two is forged instantly. Yasako explains to Angela that, in Japanese cosmology, the tie between mother and child is indissoluble, like a tree and a branch, which had led her to oyako shinju (81). Angela rejects this view and argues that mother and child are two separate, independent entities – a view that Yasako, in return, adamantly rejects. The tension rises between the women and silence ensues:
(The women stare at each other over a compounding impasse)
yasako:What is your daughter’s name?
angela:Samantha
yasako:That is a nice name.
angela:Thank you. [Beat] I’ll bring you some good tea next time.
(82)
This scene highlights the commonality – motherhood – that Yasako and Angela share rather than their cultural differences and thus recuperates the [End Page 495] emotional tie between them. The dialogue implicates anyone capable of understanding such maternal love as ideal listeners in this affective scene of identification, regardless of their knowledge of and access to the cultural specificity of the given crime.
A similar empathic turn takes place in Shizuko, too. Her own pregnancy and imminent motherhood awaken her understanding of maternal love and convert her into an empathic subject. This melodramatic turn not only shows the conversion of a wicked woman but also produces another scene of motherly suffering, as Shizuko becomes a single mother after Hiro drifts away from her following his daughter’s death. Indeed, Shizuko decides to leave the couple alone instead of revealing her pregnancy to Hiro – a decision that makes Yasako the sole witness to Shizuko’s own suffering, since Shizuko asks her to keep her pregnancy a secret between them. Rivalry between the two Japanese women wanes; motherhood serves as a medium through which Yasako and Shizuko can communicate. This transformation is exhibited through Shizuko’s identification with Yasako on a bodily level (83–84). Shizuko’s outspokenness – from the beginning, a marker of her being a contemporary Japanese American woman – changes to discreet and modest speech. She bows all the way to the floor to express gratitude, in a traditionally Japanese way. “Mrs. Yamashita” becomes “Yasako-san,” and her new diction contrasts strongly with the straightforward style of speech – almost a rant – she previously fired at Yasako. Now, her words are constantly interrupted by Hiro’s public speech, in an echo of how Hiro interrupted Yasako in Act One. Shizuko’s withdrawal from the world recalls Yasako’s initial isolation. Her drastically feminized speech and bodily gestures recall Yasako’s own, visually uniting and making the two women equivalent, as the gestural tea-drinking had in Houston’s earlier play. This overlap generates audience sympathy for Shizuko, so that they may now perceive both women as victims of patriarchy.
The play further indicates how empathy, when collectively mobilized, may bring about social change by touching public sentiments and political opinions. Now a remorseful husband, Hiro makes public speeches to gather petitions for Yasako. He appeals to the history of immigration that all Americans share and their struggles to “carve a place for themselves in America” (83). At the same time, he stresses the “trouble coming to terms with new cultural views of right and wrong” (83). He urges his unseen audiences to prove their Americanness by embracing cultural differences and putting themselves in the other’s shoes. Asking Americans to understand Yasako’s dilemma, Hiro attempts to influence the media and the court decision and, indeed, succeeds (92).
The play drags Yasako out of an isolated space into the sphere of collective intimacy among women. On the surface, this community is indifferent to discrimination based on biological and cultural differences because it only [End Page 496] asks its members to show a willingness to feel for each other. But it ultimately prioritizes one affective culture over the other and demands, in subtle ways, the latter’s assimilation into the former. Yasako must let go of emotional values peculiar to Japanese culture and conceive new forms of intimacy and happiness that are strictly defined by the American value of individualism. The individualism that Yasako embraces is not another form of isolation or a sense of emotional detachment, such as Atsuko showed in Tea. As a synonym for a sense of freedom, it now serves as the precondition for Yasako to make a transition from the past into the future, where true happiness lies. As Ahmed writes, to “identify with the nation as the bearer of the promise of happiness,” one has to first “acquire the body of an individual” so as to be able move forward, free from family and tradition (137). At the climactic moment of the play, Yasako is surrounded by multiple voices of women that point out Yasako’s duties to herself – “to love yourself, be yourself apart from husband and child” (93). This orchestra of women’s voices culminates in the imagined voice of Kuniko, which urges Yasako to “contemplate life over death” (93). Yasako should learn to let go of her own daughter and find her own happiness, and accordingly, she finally shows her will to live by singing along with an English song Kuniko taught her. By the same logic, the play suggests that the imaginary affective community that Yasako forms with Fuyo is a confined and undemocratic one unless it allows room for individuality. As Yasako decides to embrace a new life as an independent American woman and sever her tie with the Japanese past, Fuyo, the sole sharer of Yasako’s emotional life, “exits in defeat” (94). The “defeat,” however, does not lead to a triumphant or celebratory image of a new coalition of women. At the play’s end, Yasako is left alone onstage to receive the verdict as a solitary and even derelict figure.
By demanding from Yasako a radical reworking of her sense of herself and sense of belonging, the play ironically highlights the status of Japanese women as “minoritized publics” who not only resist but also “are denied universalist collective intimacy expectations” (Berlant, “Intimacy” 284). As a whole, the play bridges the gap between differing affective registers through motherhood, but Yasako’s unwavering resistance to sympathy also reveals a sense of frustration about a level of “affective assimilation” of Japanese women. Erin Hurley has described affect as an “immediate, uncontrollable, skin-level registration of a change to our environment” (13), which does not always translate into the same emotional language for every culture (see 13– 18). As a result, when certain affective experiences are transmitted from one culture to the other, they often do not fit into the pre-existing, conventional terms of expression in the new environment. Houston takes pains to convey to the audience the feelings of Japanese characters in such in-between spaces, beyond verbal expression. For instance, Yasako’s opening monologue reels off [End Page 497] abstract lyricism laden with culturally specific references, and the audience may not be able to catch the meaning immediately. To balance the lack of semantic clarity, Houston creates a queer ambience through dramatic lighting and sound effect and juxtaposes the image of Yasako, holding a billowing American flag, with Fuyo’s ghastly appearance, in a shredded kimono, with “snowy white” face (49). Coded with inarticulate, complex feelings, these moments bring out our “affective” reactions to the environment, regardless of cultural differences, and leave powerful and lingering resonances (Hurley 14). Fuyo’s exaggerated facial expressions and gestures also encapsulate feelings that cannot find an equivalent emotional language; nonetheless, they serve as more direct forms of affective expression. As the play progresses, however, these scenes dwindle and disappear, being subsumed into a more dominant, recognizable form of feelings that a larger intimate public can share. The play, therefore, grapples with the optimism signalled by Yasako’s revived will to live, which will be supported by an affective community of women that goes beyond an exclusive bond between mother and daughter, and a sense of frustration at the ambiguous and even exclusionary nature of such a community.
Affective readings of Tea and Kokoro can illustrate ways in which contemporary theatre fosters the imagination of a female cultural space, where affiliation and coalition exist across cultural and geographical spaces through shared emotion, desire, and identification. This is a powerful counterpart to the idea of a masculine political space, where the legal status of immigration and globalization is negotiated primarily through rational means. The onstage process through which women share intimate stories and emotions with each other also allows the audience to recognize themselves as a “temporary public” and to indulge in other women’s embodied stories. Thus understood, performance, despite its ephemerality, creates a utopian illusion of transcending differences such as nationality; it contends for the idea of homogenous spectatorship. As Jill Dolan would suggest, performance creates moments “in which audiences feel themselves allied with each other, and with a broader, more capacious sense of a public” through affectively sharing the vision of a better world (2).
However, even while showing the potential of empathy to bring people together, Tea and Kokoro constantly raise suspicions about the lasting power of such a coalition. Through subverting the dominant perception of Asian women and their suffering, these two plays both evoke and challenge our belief in empathetic identification, the authenticity of sympathetic gaze, and the possibilities of resistance to such a gaze. Through a sentimentalizing process, they attempt to reclaim the “affective citizenship” of transnational subjects by negotiating cultural differences through evoking “proper” feelings. For audiences, the Japanese women characters’ ability to empathize with each [End Page 498] other brings them closer to the ideal of intimacy, based on “true” feelings, that transcends notions of race and nationality. Furthermore, the characters’ victimhood awakens and reaffirms the audience’s own desire to feel for the suffering of Japanese women and thus participate in the collective sentimental imagination. Houston seems to suggest that we should be aware of the limits of such an empathic project. In fact, the cultural specificity and heterogeneity of Japanese women’s experiences often seem to betray anxieties about identificatory desires of an indiscriminate nature. Houston carefully portrays the lived experiences of Japanese women as emotionally legible to the audience, without undercutting the authenticity of such experiences. By doing so, she seems to propose that cross-cultural identification has a value of its own when one assumes a position of an engaged listener to the racial/cultural other’s lived experience while being still alert to differences.
eunha na is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Minnesota, where she is completing her dissertation on the role of empathy in negotiating racial politics in contemporary U.S. women’s theatre. Her research interests include twentieth-century drama, theories of affect and race, and feminism.
NOTES
1. In her book Embracing the East, Mari Yoshihara examines the role of white women in popularizing and disseminating American orientalism by actively consuming and circulating Asian objects. Although the major discourses of orientalism often posit binary oppositions between the masculine west and the feminine east, Yoshihara attends to the overlooked dynamics between Asian women and white women.
