The Excremental Imagination - Rajyashree Pandey

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, whic
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