Touching the Unreachable
Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan
How can one construct relationality with the other through the skin, when touch is inevitably mediated by memories of previous contact, accumulated sensations, and interstitial space?
Description
Finalist: 2025 British Comparative Literature Association First Book Prize | July 22, 2025
Fusako Innami offers the first comprehensive study of touch and skinship—relationality with the other through the skin—in modern Japanese writing. The concept of the unreachable—that is, the lack of characters’ complete ability to touch what they try to reach for—provides a critical intervention on the issue of intimacy. Touch has been philosophically addressed in France, but literature is an effective—or possibly the most productive—venue for exploring touch in Japan, as literary texts depict what the characters may be concerned with but may not necessarily say out loud. Such a moment of capturing the gap between the felt and the said—the interaction between the body and language—can be effectively analyzed by paying attention to layers of verbalization, or indeed translation, by characters’ utterances, authors’ depictions, and readers’ interpretations. Each of the writers discussed in this book—starting with Nobel prize winner Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, and Matsuura Rieko—presents a particular obsession with objects or relationality to the other constructed via the desire for touch.
In Touching the Unreachable, phenomenological and psychoanalytical approaches are cross-culturally interrogated in engaging with literary touch to constantly challenge what may seem like the limit of transferability regarding concepts, words, and practices. The book thereby not only bridges cultural gaps beyond geographic and linguistic constraints, but also aims to decentralize a Eurocentric hegemony in its production and use of theories and brings Japanese cultural and literary analyses into further productive and stimulating intellectual dialogues. Through close readings of the authors’ treatment of touch, Innami develops a theoretical framework with which to examine intersensorial bodies interacting with objects and the environment through touch.
Fusako Innami is Assistant Professor in Japanese and Performance Studies at Durham University.
Reviews
"Speaking of a culture where one bows instead of handshaking or giving kisses to greet, Fusako Innami finds an innovative angle to haptic touch and skinship between individuals as represented in the literature of Nobel Prize winner Kawataba Yasunari, Tanizaki Junichiro, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, and Matsuura Rieko, combining major with minor writers in a selection that covers the entirety of 20th century modern Japanese literature from the Meiji to the Showa-era."
- Japan Forum
“This is a provocative, well-researched book. It brings an exciting and new tool of analysis—skinship and the haptic imagination—to a range of important Japanese literary texts and offers new, in-depth readings to important writers. The scholarship is sound, impressive, and accessible.”
- Doug Slaymaker, University of Kentucky
Finalist: 2025 British Comparative Literature Association First Book Prize | July 22, 2025
- British Comparative Literature Association
"This book offers valuable insights into discourses of embodiment, and furthermore proposes a theory of translation in the sense of 'transferring' bodily experiences, perceptions, and feelings into text. The words, woven through the author’s finely-honed five senses, are poetic and rewarding to read, and I’d recommend the book as a source of inspiration for researchers and graduate students in Japanese studies as well as in fields like literature, philosophy, art, and other areas concerned with representations of 'touch' and 'contact.'" [Translated from Japanese]
- Nihon Kenkyu
News, Reviews, Interviews
Watch: Workshop recording with Dr Fusako Innami and Surface Area Dance Theatre (SADT) | June 2026