Lecture
The Excremental Imagination: Disgust, Compassion, and Laughter in Medieval Japan
- Date
- Wednesday 28 October 2026
- Time
- Series
- Leiden Lecture Series in Japanese Studies
- Location
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- 0.25
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 in Buddhist narratives, I argue, 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. The humorous tales about shit and farts in medieval Japan, I suggest, were less about transgressing social norms and more in the nature of literary games, designed to generate laughter.
About the speaker
Rajyashree Pandey is Professor Emerita in Asian Studies at the Politics department of Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Visiting Fellow at the Buddhist Centre, School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. She received her education in India, the United Kingdom, The United States, and Australia and has taught at many academic institutions across the world. She is the author of several articles and three monographs, The Excremental Imagination: Disgust, Compassion, and Laughter in Medieval Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2026), Perfumed Sleeves and Tangled Hair: Body, Woman, and Desire in Medieval Japanese Narratives (University of Hawaii Press, 2016) and Writing and Renunciation in Medieval Japan: The Works of the Poet-Priest Kamo no Chōmei (University of Michigan, Japanese Monograph Series, 1998).