The Excremental Imagination: Disgust, Compassion, and Laughter in Medieval Japan

The Excremental Imagination takes the reader on a journey into uncharted territory, tracking the presence of faecal matter in the diverse narratives of medieval Japan. Providing close textual readings of Buddhist canonical writings, popular tales, romance narratives, and pictorial scrolls, it boldly addresses a subject which, for the most part, has been excised from intellectual life―something deemed too disgusting or infantile to merit serious academic attention. Here we encounter a highborn lady who farts in her lover’s presence, an eccentric monk who defecates in the imperial precincts, and a noted calligrapher who uses an imperial anthology of poetry to mop up his diarrhea. These stories form only a portion of the large corpus of tales that Rajyashree Pandey brings together for the first time in this book.Pandey argues that the meanings assigned to excrement in these texts cannot be deciphered through the straightforward application of concepts such as “the grotesque body” and “carnival.” Despite their universalist claims, such terms are suffused with a Christian view of the world and thus inadequate for interpreting texts produced within the epistemic framework of Buddhism. Pandey contends that the humorous tales about shit and farts in medieval Japan constitute forms of parody, which are less about transgressing social norms and more in the nature of literary games. The body and excrement, she suggests, were neither maligned nor celebrated in medieval Japan, which was often the case in medieval Christian writings, but instead carried significations that are likely to strike us as surprising and unexpected. Excrement was used as a metaphor for the foul and evanescent nature of the body, while at the same time made to work as a positive force, as an instrument of compassion that ensured the salvation of humans, animals, and hungry ghosts who were associated with it.The Excremental Imagination treats shit with the seriousness it deserves without losing sight of the playful nature of the material with which it engages. It urges us to cast aside our contemporary prejudices to better understand and appreciate a place and time very different from our own. Read more