(In)visible Voices, (In)audible Disability: The Narrated Other in Sakaguchi Ango’s “The Idiot”

Abstract

Published just after World War II, Sakaguchi Ango’s novella “The Idiot” (Hakuchi 1946) is set against the backdrop of the Bombing of Tokyo and unfolds with a close-up of an anarchic alley where animals and madmen reside. Among them lives Izawa, an apprentice director of wartime propaganda film, and a “feeble-minded” woman whose name is Osayo. Exempt from the responsibilities of a good wife, wise mother (ryōsai kenbo) due to her mental limitations, Osayo, whom the narrator consistently refers to as the “idiot,” is neither expected to be economically productive nor reproductively fertile. Cast as “feeble-minded,” Osayo’s gendered and disabled body is rendered a spectacle and an object of sexual desire both by Izawa and the narrator. As such, her sexuality, along with a perceived absence of interiority, undermines the occurrence of her voice and agency—she can be narrated and described, but she cannot narrate herself as the speaking subject (le sujet parlant). Despite being overshadowed by the protagonist-narrator both within the narrative and in critical discourse, Osayo’s imposed silence can be read as a site or resistance that grapples with the struggle for identity and agency. Throughout the text, Osayo disturbs the boundaries between sanity and madness, normal and abnormal, and rationality and irrationality, especially challenging what it means to be human. Contrary to Osayo who reified her will with embodied communication, Izawa’s dependence on contingency and the fear of death exposes his preexisting anxiety about an incoherent self and his reliance on degrading the “idiot” to affirm his own rational, independent, able-bodied identity. This paper seeks to recognize and restore the contagious silence of the narrated Other. It contributes to the larger theme of representations of disability in modern Japanese literature by examining how perception and depiction of disability are shaped by arbitrary acts such as name-calling and labeling, and by exploring how voices and disability can be made audible and visible through a reading strategy that recovers the rippling effect of silenced characters.