Nakagami Kenji’s “The Dancer Imelda”：The Representation of Sex Workers in Late Cold War Japanese Culture

Recent research has increasingly highlighted Japan’s role in establishing the Cold War political order in Asia, and has interpreted postwar Japanese literature as a form of “Cold War culture” within the global context. This paper examines Nakagami Kenji’s short story “The Dancer Imelda” (1988) in order to investigate the underexplored late Cold War Japanese culture. This story uses allegory centered on the nation to depict the awakening of nationalism as a resistance to the emerging global capitalism in the late Cold War period. Simultaneously, it foregrounds the experience of a woman in the sex industry who is excluded from existing communities and therefore forced to subordinate herself to nationalist belonging. However, through an allegory that deviates from the dominant national allegory of the story, she articulates her condition in a globalized society, constructing a novel form of publicness that is distinct from more conventional spaces of belonging. In this representation of the woman, this paper identifies both a continuation of and a development from Nakagami’s previous works, which attempt to reconnect the discriminated-against Burakumin to the public sphere in a manner that is distinct to that of belonging. Ultimately, this paper evaluates “The Dancer Imelda” as a renewal of nationalism and national allegory in late Cold War Japanese culture.