Topographies of Intimacy: Sex and Shibuya in Hasegawa Junko’s Prisoner of Solitude

This essay begins at the end, with the question that brings Hasegawa Junko’s (b. 1966) novel Kodoku no ii nari (Prisoner of solitude) to a close: “Hey, wanna have some fun?”1 The novel’s protagonist, Mayuko, who is not yet adjusted to her life as a streetwalker, chooses an unlikely interlocutor. With a hunched back and bird-like face, he does not fit the profile of a typical john. But there on the street, she is inexplicably drawn to him. The man seems burdened by loneliness, the narrator explains, just like Mayuko. So she calls out to him. But the novel ends before he can respond, a fitting conclusion to a narrative concerned with the ways in which Mayuko has been betrayed by intimacy’s empty promises. This essay is concerned with Mayuko’s story, and the critique of gendered institutions of intimacy that is embedded in her descent from being a woman who aspires to love and affection to one who has settled for picking up men on the street. Rather than exploring the possibilities of streetwalking as a vehicle for female and feminist agency, Hasegawa uses Mayuko’s turn to the street to ask why some women feel worthless without men, why women’s bodies continue to be of critical social importance. Mayuko does not find streetwalking exhilarating or empowering. Instead, it is an expression of her powerlessness and invisibility: only by reducing herself to a body is she able to draw the attention of men who otherwise have no interest in her. Thus Hasegawa interrogates the instability of emotional intimacy and human connection in the face of sex with no strings attached.