The Excremental Imagination: Disgust, Compassion, and Laughter in Medieval Japan
The Excremental Imagination: Disgust, Compassion, and Laughter in Medieval Japan
Speaker
Prof. em. Rajyashree Pandey
Date and Time
April 29, 2026, 4 pm - 5.30 pm
Venue
Zürichbergstrasse 4, 8032 Zürich, Room ZUB-416
Abstract
This lecture analyses the many meanings assigned to faecal matter in the diverse Buddhist and literary narratives of medieval Japan. It addresses a subject which, for the most part, has been excised from public and intellectual life because it is seen as too disgusting or infantile to merit serious academic attention.
Excrement, it argues, was a pliant and malleable signifier, used as a metaphor for the foul and evanescent nature of the body, while at the same time working as a positive force, as an instrument of compassion, that ensured the salvation of humans, animals, and hungry ghosts who were associated with it. It was even mobilised to trouble the binaries of purity and impurity and attachment and enlightenment, and to generate laughter. The humorous tales about shit and farts in medieval Japan, it suggests, were less about transgressing social norms and more in the nature of literary games.
Organization: Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies - Japanese Studies